How emotions influence our perception of reality

I have learnt this from Vipassana practice- Whatever we feel in our mind and body on a daily basis like anger, greed, hatred, sadness, fear – simply gets accumulated in us if we are attached to these emotions, as in if think these are my emotions, my thoughts, and we believe in the stories they tell us. Every emotion is simply a vibration or a string of vibrations and clings to our “self” if we think it is “mine”. If we are not attached however, these emotions or vibrations simply pass away. Like a sinusoidal or sound wave would eventually. So, the key is in not getting attached.

How to not get attached you may ask? Again the practice is very simple but I won’t go into that in this post except that it is just a practice of self observation and self acceptance. The technique is Vipassana which is just an objective observation practice of these thoughts and feelings.

Our feelings affect our perception. Not just current feelings, even old ones.

For example for some reason we got angry yesterday at someone. Someone made a remark and that made us angry. Now angry feelings are running in us. They don’t go away until we let them go. Until then we are seeing the world with angry eyes. Now when anyone says anything we judge or get even more angry at them. This may have nothing to do with what happened with that particular person. Same for fear. If we feel fearful due to exams or some interview, we are generating that feeling inside us. Now if we come to know about something, we may simply feel more fearful. If we had not generated fear inside us due to the exams or interview, we would not feel as fearful otherwise.

So basically, our feelings determine our perception. And hence, all perception is based on bias because feelings are just a sensory reaction to the stimulus we receive from the world. Due to our ignorance we form a judgment based on good and bad and see through that lens only. It is not the situation or the other person that is responsible for our reaction. It is our own perception biased due to feelings that is responsible. And hence, since we always have some unwholesome feelings inside us like anger, hatred, jealousy, fear, sadness etc what we see is colored. If we don’t, we evidently have better experiences, don’t we? If we are in a good mood for example, don’t we mind things less, feel bad less, judge others less?

It’s like our perception is like glasses through which we see the world and the feelings color it with different colors blocking us from seeing the real reality.

These feelings give a colored view of the world. And so the only way out of this is to find a way to see reality as it is without the biased perceptions. And that is only possible if we can have objective view of things.

Feelings can be worked on by objectively observing them without any attachment. It means we dont believe in the story of feelings anymore and just think of feelings as a vibration that is arising and passing away in us. Giving more importance to it can make us delusional or too attached to them, causing us a lot of suffering and others can also be affected negatively by transferring our mental state to others.

Objectivity can only be possible if we have good concentration. To build good concentration which is known as Samadhi in Hindi, or Jhana in Pali or Zen or Dhyaan- we need to practice Anapana meditation which helps us focus on our incoming and outgoing breath while being nonjudgmental of our thoughts. Similarly, the practice of Vipassana which needs the foundation of good concentration, is observing our feelings with objectivity possible because of good concentration.

Thus, we think we may have feelings for one thing or fear or hatred or anger for someone or something particular, but in fact these feelings are easily transferable to another person or thing. And so we need to be cautious about them. Meaning, we don’t feel anger or resentment for someone, we simply feel anger and resentment which may be for someone today but will be for someone else tomorrow if we dont let go of it. Because it comes from the same feelings we have accumulated inside us.

More importantly, all feelings affect our perception and hence our view of reality and we need to be very objective to be free from any biases which are mainly the cause of our suffering.