by Jason Lusk

Created on: April 13, 2008

One individual sees a great white shark as a man-eating monster. Another individual sees it as an ancient, beautiful animal that deserves respect. While the former opinion is hardly fact, it is true from certain points of view.

Much of what we hold to be true is biased toward certain points of view, which is one's perception. There are essentially three sides to everything: fact, opinion, and lie. And we often see something as fact when it is really opinion, as in the case of the Great White being a man-eating monster.

In the Middle Ages, almost all common sense died in Europe. Paranoia ruled the land, primarily in the guise of fear of so-called witches. Black cats and other familiars were evil, and the Church saw this as fact, going so far as to publish legal documents pertaining to witches, Satan and animal spirits.

Thousands upon thousands died because of a common perception . . . or misconception, as the case may be.

It was once thought that mountain gorillas were savage, man-eating beasts. The poaching that has taken place has happened out of greed, but fear is what powers that greed. Trophy hunters saw this as a way to test their bravery; bringing back a hide was a macho testament.

We now know that the mountain gorillas are peaceful creatures. Studies show that fights between males are rare, and they almost never injure each other. They are herbivores; they even wash their food.

If someone compiled a list of every reality we humans have lived with, I imagine it would be a gigantic book that would read like a series of disjointed dreams.

There are people today who don't believe in outer space. They claim that all the satellite imagery and photos of space are fakes, work produced by talented artists. (I'm kin to some of these people.) While they are wrong, that is their true perception, and it's part of their reality.

There are some who view the world as a dangerous, unpredictable place that's just waiting for the next world war. Others believe it will all die down eventually, and that the world is a place full of new opportunities all the time.

For someone who is basically non-imaginative, every day is pretty much the same. He or she goes about their routine while thinking mundane things, such as how warm it is outside. This is the type of person who calls a cloud in the sky a cloud in the sky. This person operates by the five senses.

An imaginative person, such as a fiction writer, sees different things almost daily. He (or she) perceives the world not in how it appears at that moment, but on levels that deny any simple, two-dimensional constitution. For this type of person, the world is all five senses plus many more.

And then, look at a telepath. This is a person who, if he or she is a true telepath, hears what others cannot. Having this extra sense on top of the five basic senses and human intuition can bring a sort of double-vision experience. Suddenly, the grass outside exists in more than one dimension.

For those three examples, there are three unique kinds of perception, which I described. And since we tend to believe what our senses tell us (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly), we see in those examples three different kinds of reality.

No two people can see the world with the same eyes or from the same point of view. But each version is real. Perhaps not fact, but real and true because someone believes it.

That's the essence of perception. And perception is the core of one's reality.

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