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One of the most fascinating questions John C. Lilly ever asked wasn’t about dolphins, sensory deprivation, or psychedelics.

It was much simpler than that.

Are you seeing reality, or your interpretation of it?

At first, it almost feels like a trick question.

Of course I’m seeing reality.

Right?

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized I don’t think any of us experience reality as objectively as we’d like to believe.

We experience it through ourselves.

Through our memories.

Our fears. Our beliefs. Our expectations. Our upbringing. Our relationships. Our heartbreaks. Our joys.

Two people can walk into the exact same room and leave with completely different stories about what happened.

Neither of them is necessarily lying.

They’re simply paying attention to different things.

Psychologists sometimes talk about confirmation bias—the tendency to notice information that reinforces what we already believe while overlooking information that challenges it.

If you believe people can’t be trusted, you’ll probably notice every broken promise.

If you believe you’re unlovable, you’ll remember every rejection more vividly than every act of kindness.

If you believe the world is dangerous, your brain becomes remarkably good at finding evidence that you’re right.

It’s almost as if our minds are constantly editing reality into a story that feels familiar. That thought is both comforting and unsettling. It means many of the things we feel most certain about might not actually be reality.

They might simply be the lens we’ve learned to see through.

Think about anxiety.

Two people receive the exact same text message. One reads it and thinks, They’re probably just busy. The other immediately assumes, They’re upset with me.

The message didn’t change. The interpretation did.

Or think about failure.

One person loses a job and concludes, I’m not good enough. Another loses the same job and thinks, Maybe there’s something better waiting.

Same circumstance. Different reality. Or at least, a different experience of it.

That doesn’t mean reality isn’t real. It means our relationship to reality is incredibly personal. I think that’s one of the reasons growth feels so disorienting.

Sometimes nothing around us changes.

We do and suddenly the world looks different.

The people we once admired no longer inspire us. The things we once chased no longer satisfy us. The places that once felt like home begin to feel unfamiliar.

Or maybe…

We finally begin seeing them for what they were all along.

I think about this a lot in my own life.

There have been seasons where I interpreted silence as rejection. Waiting as punishment. Slowness as failure.

I assumed God wasn’t moving because I couldn’t see movement. Looking back, I don’t think reality changed.

I think my interpretation did. Maybe faith is, in part, allowing God to reshape the lens through which we see the world. Not changing the facts, changing our understanding of them.

The circumstances of our past don’t disappear, but their authority over us can.

Maybe that’s why forgiveness feels so impossible until, one day, it doesn’t. Maybe that’s why peace can exist in the middle of hardship. Maybe that’s why two people can experience the same storm and come away with entirely different stories.

John C. Lilly spent much of his life asking questions about consciousness and perception.

Whether or not you agree with all of the conclusions he eventually reached, I think this question deserves to stay with us.

Are you seeing reality… or your interpretation of it?

Because if the answer is “my interpretation,” then maybe we have more room to grow than we realize. Maybe we can question the stories we’ve been telling ourselves. Maybe we can challenge the assumptions we’ve mistaken for truth. Maybe we can learn that not every thought deserves to become a belief.

And maybe the most life-changing moments don’t happen when the world changes around us. Maybe they happen when the lens we’ve been looking through finally begins to change.