Perceptions are my reality

It is easy to see things in a detached manner if you’re not concerned or if you have the necessary distance.

It is more easy for the hermit on the hill to practice detachment than for the consultant. It is easier for the consultant to have the necessary distance because he is less concerned.

One colleague of mine almost broke out in tears at a training session when he said what he appreciated most about his present life and his job was that he didn’t carry that immense burden of result anymore.

Even if you’re a stable person, in harmony with yourself, arriving at the office Monday morning smiling and happy, 5 minutes later this smile will be non existent and the demon of reality will take over when you learn of the incredible mess lets say a production has made contrary to your detailed instructions.

Reality is what matters around us in our lives, what we feel has an impact. It can be the acts of others ( in positive or negative sense) it can be the weather ( when you forgot to take an umbrella), it can be your own body ( that lump in your stomach).
The most important element is that we believe it to be real and what we believe to have an impact on our life and thinking.

A fool often is just somebody whose reality seems unbelievable to others. ( in the movie North Northwest by Hitchcock even the mother of the hero doesn’t believe his story- this is an important element in a lot of psycho thrillers)

Observation is checked by our own mind according to probability and own experience. Real for us is what we believe to be real. Reality is what we know out of our own experience to be important and relevant for us.
A social worker probably has trouble understanding the importance of flexibility of working hours, which for any production manager is an important reality. A production manager on the contrary will have somehow trouble understanding the importance of a worker being present at a school meeting of his child. ( Unless, being a father, he relates to the problem out of his own experience) A common problem in between husband and wife is the difference of realities of their worlds. The more their realities differ, the less they will be able to understand each others concerns.

In a schizophrenic’s or paranoid’s reality persecution will often play a huge role. For such an individual there is plenty of evidence of this fact in the act and the deeds of the people around him.
While I was shopping in a big department store I once had the lady who was walking in front of me swirling around and yelling at me to stop persecuting her. My defence that I just happened to be there on my own errand didn’t make the ‘persecution’ she had observed ( I had accidentally taken the same staircase and moved to the same floor as she) less real. She just had a different interpretation of my intentions in her reality.
The same way we tend to interpret what is happening in the world around us according to our reality. Most of the time, we manage to understand the reality of the other sufficiently to act coherently and in accordance of what the society around us expects. The more the reality of the other resembles our own, the better we will be at this. .

Reality ultimately is what we trust to be true. How can I trust what somebody tells me? In evaluating the probability that his words are true according to my own experience and what I have heard from reliable sources. During the Nazi regime there were lots of rumours of what happened to the Jews but most Germans ( including a lot of German Jews ) wouldn’t believe the tales as they seemed too horrid to be real. When our imagination and capacity to relate to our own reality fails, even the ‘proof’ leaves us strangely aloof.
A massacre in Rwanda left Westerners less touched than the attack on the twin towers.

If a fact comes to our notice of which we cannot evaluate the validity for our reality we will rely on information surrounding the fact: is the source relevant for my reality in my experience? Is an authority that I consider important in my reality giving me the assurance that this fact is important in my reality?
Would you rather believe these ideas to be a valid approach if, lets say, Steven Covey expressed a positive opinion on it? Then your reality reflects that Steven Covey’s ideas are valid for yourself and mine might be equally valid for your reality.

Those inner procedures of our mind don’t validate the absolute truth of reality. They just validate the relative truth for us.
A fact we too readily tend to forget.