I was listening to a podcast yesterday and the fellow that Tim Ferriss  was talking to, Ed Cooke, was talking about perception.

He was talking about a memorable time when he was younger when he realized that his perception didn’t reach out to a tree that he was looking at….the tree came to him.

His eyes didn’t reach out to the tree….they received it.

I’m paraphrasing badly….and probably misunderstanding what he was saying completely….but it was pretty interesting.

We’re receptors….and then we color our experiences with our conception of what we think we’re seeing.

That was pretty interesting.

I guess that’s why two people can look at something or experience an event and come away with completely different feelings about what happened.

Maybe what he was saying was that we don’t really influence what we’re “receiving”….we just color it with our ideas and prejudices.

Maybe he was saying that perception isn’t an activity?

I couldn’t drink enough coffee to really understand what he was saying.

What do I know, anyway?

That’s the way I see it, at least.

It’s a big ego trip to suppose that we’re the hubs….the center of the universe…..that everything in the world circles us….and that all that we see comes somehow from us.

We don’t pull it in with our tractor beam eyes….(tractor beam? is that right?)….we only receive.

We don’t make the wind….we just feel it on our cheek.

And….how about Laird Hamilton….talking about his “most gifted” book…the one that he liked to share the most…. being the Bible!

That was pretty cool….pretty straightforward….not preachy or prosletyzing….just straight up.

I’m hearing a lot of interesting things on these podcasts.

It’s a lot more educational than listening to the “zoo crew”.

(I was pretty down on Itunes ….thought that it was an evil thing….some weird monopoly….yucky…but man….the podcasts are plentiful and a lot of fun and very edumacational. Talk about preconceptions?! I need to get over a few of mine.)

That tree is still coming to me.