OUR PROCESS: Taking the Perspective of Eternity
I am neither academically nor clinically trained in psychology, but I am a student of people. In this blog, I would like to address the role that perspective plays in how we explain and experience life.
I submit that one’s perspective is key to living a purposeful and fulfilling journey on this celestial ball. To get you thinking and “seeing” the idea of perspective allow me to proffer a few examples.
- Hurricane Otis is a category 5 storm currently hitting Mexico. How is this storm perceived by a father of three small children in Acapulco Mexico differently from the father of three in Keystone South Dakota?
- How will your perspective of the news tonight be different from the parents of the American tourists trapped in the Middle East right now?
- After two strong Quarters of positive performance this year, the stock market has gone down nearly every day for the past three months. How may your perspective of the future be different depending on how much of your wealth is invested in the stock market?
These examples only begin to touch how perspective plays a role in how we experience life and hopefully work to steer your mind and thoughts in the direction I intend as you read this blog. But I’m not done. Let’s proceed a little deeper. How is the perspective different from the captain of the Titanic soon after striking an iceberg from the couple relaxing and even napping in their cabin a few decks below? In this example, it would seem that the biggest factor in why these two subjects have differing perspectives is knowledge. If the couple had the same information as the captain, one would reason that their perspectives would be more similar. But even then, unless the couple also had years of maritime experience, it is unlikely that their perspective of the situation would be exactly like the captain’s.
More data or information is often, but not always the solution to altering perspective. Remember my earlier disclosure of not being trained in psychology? Well, that fact notwithstanding, I can read and learn. Come to find out the human brain is wired to see or find patterns. “The best thing we have going for us is our intelligence, especially pattern recognition…" (Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2015). Pattern recognition according to IQ test designers is a key determinant of a person’s potential to think logically, verbally, numerically, and spatially. Compared to all mental abilities, pattern recognition is said to have the highest correlation with the so-called general intelligence factor (Kurzweil, 2012). The ability to spot existing or emerging patterns is one of the most if not the most critical skill in decision-making, though we’re mostly unaware that we do it all the time (Miemis, 2010).
But for all its benefits, the ability – or let’s say the desire- to recognize patterns often causes us to see patterns when none actually exist. One of my favorites reads of all time is Nassim Taleb’s classic book entitled “Fooled by Randomness”. The title refers to our tendency to mistake luck for skills and to our misguided conviction that access to more information means a chance for a higher success ratio. When we don’t have all the pieces to the puzzle, we tend to imagine that the missing ones are going to turn the tides in our favor while in reality, we’re simply fooling ourselves. Or in other words, the author is saying that a lot of things in life happen by chance.
Well, regardless of whether we try to find meaning in something by looking for a pattern or whether a lot of the things that happen to us are simply acts of randomness, our experience changes with perspective; These factors alter and shape our perspective which in turn determines how we experience life.
I have been building and protecting wealth successfully for nearly four decades. With a few exceptions, people live their lives out in a limited dimensional perspective. By that I mean, they live primarily in a physical world that can be experienced by their 5 senses and are mostly concerned with what is just going on around them in their “personal” universe. Even by this metric, we know that what may seem extremely important / awesome / disastrous today, will be viewed from a different perspective next week, next month, and next year. Perspectives change.
Stay with me. What if we go beyond the confines of time and space and view things from a more elevated perspective? Have you considered your life from the perspective of Eternity? Will what you treasure or value matter to you or anyone else a million years from now? A strong argument can be made that unless something still exists, let’s say just 10,000 years from now, it doesn’t matter and is not even real. So, what did we just say? Essentially - If it doesn’t exist- it’s not real. And since only God Himself exists eternally, only God is real. The other side of the coin therefore would be that everything else is not real. How’s that for a shift in perspective?
The world system is a cosmos of commodities. Daily the planet buzzes with the activity of trading materials of worth. Nations shore up the value of their economies with stockpiles of gold; individuals amass wealth by their clever manipulation of things. But given our conclusion above, all this is in vain. Regardless of how many commodities we possess, how much wealth we amass, ultimately our lives fail and we pass away. We are limited by the supply of what is most precious and valuable – LIFE. Life is what is most in demand on this earth, but there is no market for it and no amount of wealth can acquire and keep it despite man’s constant attempts to do so. Sadly, the supply of life diminishes for each of us and each of us on a certain day will die. When that eventuality happens for all of us, will your time on earth have had any real meaning or purpose?
God alone gives life. All creation testifies that He is a God of life and that He freely gives life to His creation. However, all forms of life are transitory; everything ultimately succumbs to death. Only God Himself is eternally living i.e., God’s life is eternal. Ultimately, what we need most is the eternal life. No greater gift can there be to man than the eternal life of God. All our wealth, all our possessions, pale in value when we are presented with God’s eternal life.
Perspective People!