Edward’s Diary Entry 79: The Five Senses: 1. “Seeing” is a Mystery

He thought he saw an Albatross
That fluttered round the lamp:
He looked again, and found it was
A Penny-Postage-Stamp.
'You'd best be getting home,' he said,
'The nights are very damp!'

 - from The Mad Gardener's Song, Lewis Carroll, 1889

WYSIWYG? No, what you see is what you think you see, that’s all.

1. In sleep, we have seeing in dreams. The eyes “see” things in dreams. You remember a dream and you know you have “seen” things, but this seeing is just in the mind. You may be in REM sleep and open or flutter your eyes, but they are just reacting to impressions floating through the mind during sleep. The pictures may be incredible – mine sometimes are. If I had the techniques of a great painter, I would paint intricate pictures of worlds that no one else has ever seen! Poor eyes! They have never been open and seen things like this. We are so identified with our eyes that this is what dreams are made of – visions and pictures. Who remembers smells or tastes in dreams? It’s mostly sights and sometimes sounds…

2. In the normal “waking state”, we have seeing with eyes closed. We close our eyes and sit still, maybe in meditation or just relaxing. We “see” colours, shapes, lights, invented or actual things, pictures and scenes, sometimes with photographic clarity. Often, in deep relaxation, we may fall into a dream or semi-dream state. That means we are back at No. 1 above. But if we don’t, in that darkness of the closed eyelid, we often find lights and shapes that accompany us and keep our mind's eye quite busy.

3. In the normal “waking state” we sometimes “see” nothing… The eyes are open, but our attention is on something else, perhaps our thoughts or feelings, our anxiety or stress, or maybe a sensation, but we don’t notice what is right in front of our faces. Appearing to look, we don’t see – our minds are elsewhere, attention is lacking.

4. Then there are “seeing” variations, because we have two eyes and the power to focus or de-focus. We can make ourselves see double, by crossing our eyes or de-focusing. A uniform, single-colour mosaic wall can appear to be closer or farther away depending on eye focus. When we see it as closer or farther away, only touching re-establishes the normal “real” wall at the right distance. A flower can appear as two flowers in two vases, and by gently focusing again, you can make the two meet into the one “real” flower. We also have either left-hand eye focus or right-hand eye focus and mostly don’t realise that one eye (like one hand) is the dominant one. A chiropractor taught me this and it’s true.

5. And now finally comes what we call “real seeing” – which is recognising the outside world in representations that others would also agree with to a large extent: that so-and-so appears to be tall or good-looking, a sunset looks red, a traffic signal presents a definite colour to everyone, except the Daltonic, etc.

But this so-called “real seeing” is only just another input – put in from outside – like seeing in a dream is an input put in from the inside. We can read about how science interprets seeing: a supposed “object” is reflected through the lens onto the retina, with its sensitive layer of rods and cones connected to the optic nerve that sends electrical impulses to the brain. Here, the messages from the optic nerve and waystations are “processed”. In other words, the physiological (the measurable) gives way to the psychological (the immeasurable) – “you” realise you have seen “something”... uh, whatever that means.

What it really means is that a “stimulus”, a flash of light, has been interpreted as a “thing”, i.e., something previously known by the mind. But the two mysteries are: what the thing is in itself, since only light waves have been emitted from it, and what the mind interprets it to be, which is based on previous experiences of seeing the same thing or a similar thing, i.e., a product of the brain’s functioning. If you have looked at a flower, that flower does not enter your eye, upside down, and is then turned right side up in your brain, in a smaller version, as the eye diagrams seem to tell us. No. No flower goes into your head. Light signals or vibrations are emitted from the flower, and these are captured and processed in the cerebral cortex, they say. What the flower really is, and how the “you” actually experiences it are the TWO BIG MYSTERIES.

And this is why we posit the existence – quite apart from man and the animals with their specific “seeing” abilities – of a REAL WORLD or a REALITY that we do not “see” or perceive with our senses, but only interpret by means of our senses. And interpretations, as everyone knows, are always subjective. We are little transistors capturing data of a limited nature and transmuting it for purposes we know little of. Since we do not see REALITY as it is, we are constantly wrong about what we are seeing, and hence mankind’s eternal conflicts. Can’t we agree about ideas and concepts? How could we possibly? We can’t even come to any basic agreement about what our eyes are actually perceiving! It’s all in the mind.

So when practising “Self-Awareness”, we are careful not to judge too quickly using such interpretations about what we see and what we don't, what a thing is or what it isn't, and by extension, what anything means or doesn't mean, what is good or bad, right or wrong, useful or absurd, and so on and so forth. Looking and seeing are only raw ingredients that we can use if we have a sutiable recipe for making something of our own volition. Seeing may be believing, but believing is seeing as well. Do you see that?