Mind games

 Everything we hear is an opinion,not a fact.Everything we see is a perspective,not the truth.--Marcus Aurelius

All our actions and thoughts are guided by what we perceive.But I ask you,what if our very perception is flawed? It's like having a system where the actuators are driven by the inputs of erroneous sensors. In a word,unstable.Sensors,however, can be calibrated to fix their errors.Tell me,what can we do to our own brains?

When we meet someone,all we see about the person is what they choose to present to us.What their actions tell us.That gives us a few meager data points in the vast n-dimensional universe that constitutes them.Yet,what do we do? We extrapolate those points with conjectures and guesses and probabilities because our brains cannot bear the thought of having an incomplete picture.We imagine and superimpose all those points onto the original till we have a satisfactory "complete" idea of who someone is.

And then,like the proverbial moronic creature that thought its own reflection was another creature staring right back at it,we mix up the two--reality and our version of it(reality superimposed with our imagination). As the sands of time fall through the hourglass of eternity,we surprisingly come across a few data points that do not fit into our scheme of things.We sometimes exult and more often agonize over these,blaming the other person for having "changed",when their only fault was to differ from whom we thought they were.

Maybe I'm wrong to use the collective pronoun here--maybe it's just me and not you,Dear Reader.But give it a moment's thought--it could be that you do this without even being aware of it.

If you asked me what my primary failing is,my answer would be this.Perspective.Every time I see someone/something and begin to form a picture in my mind,it's inevitably going to be flawed.I hear Sherlock in my head:
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories,instead of theories to suit facts.

It takes a lot of effort to avoid this.Forget that,it takes a lot of effort to even be aware that you're doing this.But as beings with consciousness,as creatures who have the ability to think about their thoughts,we owe it to ourselves to introspect.I wish we could send a sigsuspend to the appropriate pid and be done with it.Ah,our own creations are far simpler to handle than the brains that created them.

I tell myself a million times a day "See people for who they are,not who you think they are".Despite this,I don't really know how effectively I practise this.Like I said,there's no way to calibrate our thinking against biases.

P.S: This whole article isn't about judging people,in case you mistook it to be.I'm talking about just perception.What you see.Just that,not even what you think about it.Although,come to think of it,judgement is a product of what you see.