Perception from Experience

Perception from Experience

My hometown is mostly populated by the ancestors of people who immigrated from North Europe, meaning the skin tones were all very light. I didn’t really have interactions with people that had darker skin growing up, but I did see how they were treated. In a small midwest USA town you know most of the people in town, you learn to trust the ones you don’t because even if you don’t know them someone you trust knows them. You start to see everyone as part of your community so you don’t really question their motivations. When I saw people treating people with dark skin with suspicion it made me feel like there was a well thought out reason for that mistrust.

Our experience directs how our soul changes us. As we put effort towards living our subconscious grabs on to experiences that we struggle with, our perception passes on information on how we are changed by that struggle. No one shares our every experience, we all have different perspectives and our bodies and minds are changed differently by experience.

There came a time that I remember very well. I was sitting in the car, being driven to church when I saw a person with dark skin walking down the sidewalk. They looked like normal people doing normal things.  I am not sure if my mom said something or if it was simply my curiosity but I asked my mom why we shouldn’t trust black people. Her response was that they are raised with different values than us, many of them don’t have a good father figure in their lives. My mom wasn’t actively racist, people raised in a different value system are hard to trust until you learn that value system. Seeing someone that very obviously didn’t have generations of history in the town did make you question what were the values where they were raised. Our religion also taught that any and all activities that could lead to children have to be authorized by an official religious ceremony and follow the established rules of approved intimacy or they were evil people capable of anything up to and including murder. Never seeing people with dark skin in our religion made it easier to believe they didn’t have a sense of right and wrong at all and couldn’t be trusted. Of course, smokers, drinkers, dancers and all other kinds of suspicious types fell into this group.

Curiosity is a well within our subconscious, the more curiosity we have the more are driven to new experiences in the search for information. As a well to hold energy, the more we process subconsciously the more curious we will be. The more energy that flows between effort and thought, the more we connect our physical and mental worlds the more our subconscious grows.

It wasn’t until a friend from our religion was exposed as having intimate feelings for the same sex that I started to ask real questions. Up to that point, people with no sense of right and wrong would be swayed by the evil forces that our religion was fighting and would give themselves up to evil. The unfaithful would choose to give up all that is good and purposely do things that went against the intimacy rules of our religion as a direct act of spite and evil. The religion would have no choice but to cut the evil from their number, to kick them out of family, home and community. In my experience, my friend was not evil and I could not see them choosing to lose every connection and community they had, to the point they almost ended their own life. Who would choose that? If the opposite was true, and these urges were inside all of us, then why hadn’t more people in my life shared times they had chosen NOT to be intimately attracted to the same sex.

After this experience, I took the time to interact more with different people. I learned that people do not choose how their hormones act. They do not decide what body parts they are born with. They do not choose their skin color. Evil does not drive you to anything, it is you and only you. You can spend time with attractive people that you are attracted to and choose not to be intimate just as much as you can’t choose who you are attracted to. My curiosity about how the world really affected me drove me to new experiences, giving me a new perspective and the information I gained along the way, changed me for the better.

Perspective is how we gain knowledge from our experiences. We could all go through the same struggle but gain different information based on past experiences, making our perspective unique. When perspectives align with constant shared experience, minds can resonate. No matter who we are, our perspective will always have flaws, it is only through new and challenging experiences that we can grow as people and cultivate a perspective that is more complete, that is closer to the truth.

I wish that was the end of it. That my perspective on skin color is flawless, but it is not. Even now there are times that I see someone with dark skin in unusual places and my subconscious informs my mind that I may need to do something about it. I know enough that  I don’t let that information change me, I ignore my subconscious because I know it’s a flawed perspective. It’s only through new experiences that my subconscious perspective will shift away from the old and into the better.