Perception is Reality

Perception is Reality. During one of the practice sessions for group discussions that I took for my b-school admissions, we were split into two groups and each group was to give the other a topic to discuss and debate. While my group was given the vague and oddly ambiguous topic – White, I chose to be a bit more adventurous and shot off “Perception is Reality” with a smirk and twinkle in my eyes – beat that you white warriors! I don’t remember the names of any of the fellow candidates from that day, but I won’t ever forget the expressions on their faces. Icy daggers plunged into mental effigies of me.

But while listening to them, I realized it isn’t something that can be debated at all is it? Reality, i.e. what we believe to be real is “what we believe to be real”. If you’ve read the hugely popular self help book written by Rhonda Bryne, tuning our perceptions is The Secret to turning them into reality. She takes it to another extreme and spends 200 odd pages saying the same thing – believe something to be true and it will actually become a reality.

But actually understanding the meaning of the word perception also makes the topic quite redundant. Perception is basically the process of understanding what we see or hear or feel. It gets defined as or is itself synonymous to cognition. So the reality we live in is in fact a combination of our perceptions of and reactions to things and beings around us.

So, sadistic pleasures of giving a weird debate topic aside, if I were in the shoes of the group that had to discuss “Perception is Reality”, my contribution to the proceedings would be a short and sweet “Yes it is, isn’t it!” followed by a discussion of the Matrix movies, or of the Indian mythological concept of moh-maya. But then, I was instead laden with the not so interesting concept of “White is the presence of all colors, is the color of Simi Grewal, and of Jitender” and blah. Which, in my perception, was the really irritating topic that day.