Reality is often a matter of personal perception, as much as objective fact. The way two people respond to the same incident reveals this almost every time. Imagine the following scene. Two friends are having dinner at a restaurant. They overhear the couple at the next table talking excitedly. Neither speaks of the situation until later. Then one woman says, “Could you believe the nerve of that man! Telling her what to eat? Why, he treated her like a child!”
“Well, the menu was in French and I think he was simply helping her decide what to order,” her companion responds.
Here is one event with two entirely different interpretations. Each interpretation is based on the perspective of the individual. The great teacher Seneca said, “Eyes will not see when the heart wishes them to be blind.” Does not this wisdom request that we open our inner eyes and begin to see with the “eyes of Spirit”? How can this be accomplished? By lifting our vision. By choosing to look for the good in all situations. By deciding to place our attention on workable solutions to problems rather than focusing on what we perceive as wrong.
If the outlook of a situation isn’t bright, we may have been looking out too much, giving ourselves too much to external appearances. Possibly, we may be discouraged and looking down to earthly things, looking away from the spiritual perspective. The solution lies in looking within, not out; in looking up, not down; in looking for the good, not the so‑called evil. In looking up, we direct our vision away from the limited beliefs of the world. We no longer see ourselves or our circumstances according to the limited viewpoint of the world.
“Life is like the movie you see through your own unique eyes,” Denis Waitley writes in his book The Winner’s Edge. “It makes little difference what’s happening out there. It’s how you take it that counts.” Do you know that many people lack health, happiness, prosperity, joy, and love because their outlook is not what it could be? Can you remember a time when you felt most bound to the power of people and things of the external world, and realize this as being a time when you were the least conscious of your inner strength and power? Do you remember that when you looked away from the outer attractions and focused on the light of truth you increased the power of your own might, which is the might of God within you?
Ask any professional athlete what is the attitude that allows one person to win and another to lose; what separates those who try and fail from those who try and succeed. The answer is likely to be belief. Belief is the vision of what can be accomplished. Belief is the athlete’s own internal vision of himself as a winner. Belief is part of our personal perspective!
“Men are disturbed not by things that happen but by their opinion of the things that happen,” Epictetus said over two thousand years ago. How many times have we overreacted in a situation because we misinterpreted what we thought was happening? “I know I’m not seeing things as they are, I’m seeing things as I am,” said the singer Laurel Lee. And truly, our interpretations of events tell as much about ourselves as about those we are describing. If we find ourself feeling jealous in a relationship, it could be because we haven’t learned to trust ourselves. Perspectives! What a difference how we view our world makes in our life. Ken Keyes writes in Handbook to Higher Consciousness, “A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world.”
Each morning when we awaken, we outline the day’s events by our attitude. A speaker once posed the question, “When you get up in the morning, do you greet the day with ‘Good morning, God!’ or ‘Good God, morning!’?” Can you grasp the simple philosophy of the upward vision? Doesn’t the very act of looking up fill you with renewed hope and flood your being with the glory and sunshine of possibilities?
“Thoughts are like boomerangs,” Eileen Caddy writes in The Dawn of Change. They come back to us. If we believe in a positive unfolding good, then that is what we will see in the events around us. We can search for silver linings in the darkest of clouds because we are committed to a way of thinking that involves growth. Negativity and pessimism are blocks to embracing the part of ourselves that already knows the answers. With our eyes centered upon the truth of our inner being, the outside world is unlikely to rise against us or defeat us. We can tap into the inner knowing that we have the ability to turn away from any appearances of disease, defeat, or failure and behold the heavenly vision of radiant health, overcoming strength and success because your perspective is the high vision!
