Creativity and Health   |   Stress and Illness

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  & Perception   |
  &  Self    |
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Creative Perception


There's more than meets the eye to our faculty of sight and sense - or "perception". In fact, our perception can take two forms:
- free and creative (as explained below), or

We're all familiar with how fear exaggerates our sense of danger, even to the point of making us irrational, and how anger makes us "see red".

Compulsive desire, meanwhile, fits us with a pair of "rose-tinted spectacles" - in overemphasising the wonderfulness of some "object" it makes us desire. Equally, the same compulsive desire can flip our perception on its head at times we fail to secure whatever "desire object" it is making us chase. Now, this "stress force" deserts us, and leaves us in a state of despair. Effectively, we now lose all the drive and optimism given us by compulsive desire. Now, we become governed, instead, by what can be viewed as a "stress force" all of its own, namely gloom.

In this way, we have a complement of four "stress forces".

The way that these interfere with our perception is represented below:



Here's the problem: not only do these "stress forces" warp our perception moment to moment, they also alter our perception more permanently... even about our own self.

To give a few examples....
- When compulsive desire applies too much "sugar coating" onto our own self - and onto the image we have of ourselves - we can end up artificially "good" in our eyes, to the point of making us insufferably smug about our worth and about our abilities.
- When the opposite occurs, and our self-image becomes framed by gloom, we can end up ashamed of ourselves.

The trouble, here, is that we end up with a warped perception of ourselves - even to the point our whole personality gets altered.



Here's another problem: down the ages, those in positions of authority can often fall for the seduction of power - and of the inflated self-image, as per the head icon above that is wearing the crown.

Unfortunately, this has had grave knock-on consequences for all of us. History is full of stories that attest to this fact, as with the story of Ignaz Semmelweis.
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Indeed, it's inevitable that truth gets met by fierce opposition - as an everyday occurence - just because the likes of fear, anger and compulsive desire can exercise such power over us. And as part of that, these "stress forces" warp our perception - and our sense of reality.

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So what's the solution?

Clearly, we need to de-stress ourselves, but not just superficially.

We need to reverse whatever power "stress forces" have accumulated over the years within us.

Any assumptions we have made, or conclusions we have jumped to, while under the influence of something like anger... these need to be rooted out and released from our mind.

This, of course, entails the ability to forgive. For let's face it, anger does a great job of setting up artificial divides based on the pigeonholing by which it separates "good" people from "bad". The end product is that tragic tradition of nations going to war against one another, with each side regarding itself as "good" and "the enemy" as "bad".

Of course, anger is just as effective at directing its ire inward, and heaping all the blame onto our own self - especially if our personality gets pushed more towards the gloomy end of the spectrum (see the dunce cap-wearing icon above). Now, any deep de-stressing of our mind requires usto appreciate that anger has corrupted us into being unfairly hard on ourselves.

In this case, our forgiveness needs to be directed towards our own self.

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To quote Harvard Professor, Matthew Desmond, “There’s two ways to dehumanise people; one is to cleanse them of all virtue, and the other is to scrub them of all sin.”

Being conscious of this, we all do well to beware of overzealous praise or condemnation - whether directed at ourselves or someone else.

The way forward is to reclaim our mind from "stress forces", and to keep our mind free to do its job: free, creative perception, so as to allow us a window on a truth free from all meddling and interference.