Tuesday, June 2, 2009

On Perception

I see the world differently through both of my eyes. My left eye sees the world and a greenish blue, and my right eye sees the world as a sandy red. It has always been like this for as long as I can remember, and it is in the back of my eyes, so it will continue to be like this for the rest of my life, like a perpetual battle between dusk and dawn in my skull. No matter what, I will always see the world as a blend of these two different perspectives, like technicolor gone ever so slightly wrong. 

Or is it? Perhaps my left eye sees the world as it truly is, and my right makes things too intense a red. I will never be able to see with these eyes how the world truly is, only how I percieve it now. That is the weird thing about perception, it is so inherently unstable. Describe the orange to me without using other colours to describe it. Your orange could be my purple. Every sunrise you have ever seen could look look like grapes to me. Interestingly, colour does not even exist. It is only how our brains percieve differing wavelengths of light. If it travels with a slightly different wavelength, we percieve it differently. There is no colour, only our perception that it even exists. It is as if I could describe 2 metres as a beautiful sunset and 1 metre as a verdant field of grass. This is just crazy to me. I think emotions work like that as well. Emotions are our way of interpreting and dealing with a situation, but they are merely perception. I'm learning not to lean on emotion too much, because like colour, it is inherently unstable. If I had a perfect mind, perhaps this would not be the case, but trying to understand some things based on emotion alone seems silly to me, my mind and soul are innacurate measuring apparatus. Sometimes I fear that which does not exist, sometimes I feel things which are not there. We can be tricked so easily, amputees can still feel ghost limbs, and beleive it or not your brain can trick you into having you feel like a rubber hand is your own. 

But, emotion is a key part of the human experience, and of course it would be ridding ourselves of so much of life if we shut up our emotions. I suppose I'm merely thinking in text that perhaps emotions should be ridden and enjoyed as best they can, whether they're going up or down, but not see the world through your heart, or believe that all that you see as glittering is indeed gold.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I seem to see things like that too, just one eye is slightly brighter and the other darker.

People(and things) are weird and wonderful :)