Reality

Several years ago somebody told me "perception is reality". I did a search on that phrase tonight and found a bunch of contradictory uses for it. What the person saying it meant by it was that it didn't matter what the reality of the situation was, it only mattered what people perceived it as being. So if people saw you as a good person you were a good person, if they saw you as evil then you were evil. What the real situation was or what you felt didn't matter.

To me that is a lot of garbage. Reality is reality. Now I know that in one sense we never experience true reality since everything is filtered through our senses and our past experiences and I won't argue with that. What I argue with is that what people think is more important than the truth. At on time everybody on the earth knew the world was flat. That didn't make the world flat. Reality is still reality.

My opinion on perception is that people need to hold off judgement until they have more facts. People who make snap judgments based on superficial evidence are just being stupid. You should have real facts to base your opinions on.

What brought this quote to mind is something I read in a book, "to him intent is reality". The person intended to be somewhere so to them they were already there. I have met a few people like this. They intended to show up at work on time so to them they did, regardless of what the clock said. They intended to spell check their work so to them they did, the errors appeared by magic. Again, reality is reality. Planning to do something isn't the same as doing it.