Seeing

"The whole secret of the study of Nature lies in learning to use one's eyes." - George Sand

There is something about the eyes are mirrors of the soul. When I think about what it means to see, I find myself comparing seeing with seeing much like there is hearing and listening. As I was growing up, my parents would sometimes say, "you aren't listening to me." Interestingly, this wasn't a statement that I somehow magically closed my ears (though in my case this is possible; I just turn off my hearing aids). This was a statement that even though I had heard the message, I wasn't tuned into it. I wasn't listening to it. It is a subtle shift. I am not aware of a word in the english language for "seeing" that reflects this same subtlety that is express by contrasting hearing with listening.

Both hearing a listening are active words, you do them at the time that the event is occurring. Seeing is also active. Perhaps this is what drove Sand to choose use the phrase "learning to use one's eyes" where the word "learning to see" would never suffice. The power of comprehension of visual input is all at once survival, entertainment, and meditation. It is the ability to see chaos but to comprehend beauty and organization. Looking at the shape of a cloud we can see that there is huge levels of randomness, chaos, and unstructured disorganization. When we comprehend the shape of the cloud we see incredible tiny actions of turbulence, expansion, contraction, condensation, evaporation, and see the harmony of the whole system.

When I read the book "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Geick, I was struck by the beauty of what once was completely random and chaotic results from certain mathematical formulae once there was an opportunity to really see what kinds of shapes these things created. They became known as fractals. Mandelbrot and others ushered in the realization that for countless years scientists, engineers and mathemiticians had written these formulae off as "nonsensical equations."

Just because we have trouble comprehending something, doesn't give us the right to shrug it off, rule it out or dismiss it. The same goes for our intuition. Sometimes we have ideas, thoughts, or inspirations that we can't explain. We can't comprehend where these ideas come from. Every single person has them. Some act on them. Others dismiss them as folly. Still others treat them as "holy" or "thoughts put in your mind from the Devil." I place these two last groups together because the interpretation of "holy" or "evil" is really dependent on the perspective. Case in point is St. Joan d'Arc. This is a person whose inspirations were hailed as both "holy" and "evil!" She ultimately died for an ability to comprehend her world on a level that many others could not.

Intuition is a gathering place of the senses. As human beings we are genetically wired to take in all the input from all our senses in order to comprehend our environment. Somehow we are able to go beyond that and move into the realm of intuition. An example is a doctor who is able to comprehend a patients symptoms and is able to offer a diagnosis that is not necessarily a direct result of analyzing the data set resulting from various reports and tests. There are many examples where a doctor has managed to solve a problem through an intuitive sense of what all the data means. Sometimes this gets reported as "well it just didn't feel right" or "I had a gut feeling" or "something was tingling in my mind." I am interested in learning more about the nature of intuition.

Heinlein in "A Stranger in a Strange Land" coined the word "grok." This word means the ability to comprehend something at a level akin to synergy. I have found that I apply "grokking" to an ability to comprehend something even though the data available is imcomplete. We as human beings are also wired to fill in the gaps. "Seeing" sometimes invlolves filling in the gaps or reorganizing the information in order to comprehend it. This can sometimes be very useful and sometimes can lead to unfortunate dismissive behaviour. "This is nonsensical. Discard it," is our brain's way of saying that the observation or input is outside this pattern matching wiring we have. Einstein had trouble comprehending Quantum Mechanics and for many years dismissed it. The theoretical scientist who calculated that 10 neutrinos from the Sun would impact with Chlorine atoms causing them to decay, was unable to have his calculations proven by experimental data for 30 years. He spent most of his scientific career defending what he knew to be true. It wasn't until more sophisticated instruments and new revelations of the characteristics of neutrinos proved that he was right. Just because we have trouble comprehending the Truth doesn't mean it isn't in fact true.

OB