Your Perspective Changes Everything

You don’t go around challenging the Law of Gravity much, do you? Most of us know exactly what will happen if we step out of a ninth-story window. But at the same time, we are unwittingly courting trouble through our lack of knowledge about many other natural laws that govern our planet. In her book, Believe and Receive, Melissa Alvarez explores 40 such laws.

The Laws of Nature

I’m beginning an occasional series that examines several of these Laws of Nature. When most people talk about the Law of Attraction, for example, they are really speaking of an interrelated set of laws that can help individuals to manifest what they want. The Law of Attraction is one (like attracts like), but we also work with the Law of Abundance, the Law of Divine Oneness, the Law of Thought, the Law of Clarity, the Law of Allowing, just to name some.

The Law of Perspective

Today, we will consider the Law of Perspective. It’s a simple concept that says that what we perceive to be true comes from a particular perspective. When that perspective shifts, what we see (and believe) will shift, too. Our perspective comes from our beliefs and, at the same time, our beliefs shape our perspectives.

Now, those of you who know this film know there’s a heavy dose of woo. Chasse, a Hollywood producer, was a firm materialist when she started on the project. I mean ‘materialist’ in both senses of the word: 1) she liked to buy things, and 2) she embraced materialism, a doctrine that holds that “matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all things, including mental states and consciousness, are results of material interactions” (Google).

The way Chasse described it, she was immersed in ‘shoe consciousness.’ I love that phrase. I’m not absolutely certain what that means, but for me, it conjures up a person who views the world from the perspective of shoes. Of course, she would own an Imelda Marcos-size closet of shoes. She would also be checking out everyone’s feet, judging the entire person by how they were shod. When she spaced out in a meeting, her thoughts would turn to the next pairs of heels that she was going to acquire. Surreptitiously, she’d glance under the table, scanning the feet for inspiration. Her sense of worth would be measured in shoes. Those not in shoe consciousness would elude her understanding.

Working on the film What the Bleep Do We Know? was a total head trip for Chasse. What the Bleep firmly embraced an Idealist viewpoint that says that reality is fundamentally based on mental entities. This is the movie that popularized a study by Masuro Emoto that showed that water changes its molecular structure in response to external stimuli.

The movie challenged the way Chasse saw the world. It popped the bubble on her ‘shoe consciousness.’ It helped her become aware of the lens through which she was experiencing life. It opened her up to a brand new way of perceiving that was life-altering.

The Priming Effect

Countless studies illustrate similar effects. For example, in one, study participants were shown one of two images of a car. In one image, the headlight is broken. Then experimenters asked participants either if they saw “A broken headlight” or “The broken headlight.” That little preposition made all the difference. When given the subtle suggestion that there was a broken headlight, “the broken headlight,” more participants reported that they had seen one. This included those who had not, in fact, been shown a broken headlight.

Think about this study for a moment. It’s not filtering out what they saw. That didn’t change. It is changing how they remembered what they saw. How we remember events has a profound effect on our experience of reality.

That’s how strong the Law of Perspective is.

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