Seeing is NOT-believing.
There are two meanings to that
- Seeing and Believing are two very different activities; and
- Once something is Seen, the existence of, and need for Belief evaporate.
Once something is seen, it is known;
Once something is known, there is no need any longer to believe in it:
Both Belief and Disbelief are the lowest form of Not-Knowing.
We believe and/or disbelieve in what we do not yet know.
Once something is known, believing is no longer necessary.
The problem for us humans,
And the reason I bring this up right off the top
Is that we do not often distinguish
Between what we truly see and know, and what we believe,
And
Our minds and bodies don't distinguish between the two.
We broadcast and react to our beliefs as if they are fact.
Believing is not Seeing.
Seeing is a fresh experience of the Is-ness of a matter:
Belief is a stale bunch of second-hand ideas and opinions about what might- or might not be.
Now that that is out of the way....
Let's look at these possibilities around Seeing ---
In an un-aware state --
- We see what we expect to see; and
- We see what our past experience and dodgy pattern matchings allow us to see.
There is a story that the native American medicine men did not see the three ships that Christopher Columbus arrived in, simply because "ship" did not compute with their life experience. They'd never seen one or even heard about a ship. There wasn't even a word for it in their language. An idea of "Ship", in their reality did not exist. So when three of them turned up unexpectedly, they were simply in-visible. The educated medicine men were blind to what was there because they weren't expecting it, and what was there did not fit with their known learning and experience. Had a child come down to the beach, however, it probably would have pointed to the horizon and asked "What's that?"
I have no way of knowing how true that story is, but I do know how the principles of unconscious, selective blindness apply in my experience.
As toddlers, we saw just about everything, and we saw it, at least at first, unjudgmentally in curiosity. Then we began some sifting and sorting of what we saw in order to make some "sense" of all that was coming at us. It's a natural process that prevents us from going into intellectual, perceptory and emotional overload: we do it to survive.
Additionally, some of the things that came at us in the past were accompanied by experiences that varied on a scale from Pleasurable to Painful. Those we related with pleasurable responses we labelled as "Good for us"; those that were accompanied by any measure of discomfort or pain got labelled as "Bad for us". Things falling in the middle between "good" and "bad" were dismissed as "irrelevant". From soap-suds makers to politicians, anyone who wants to sell you something will try to make themselves relevant to you by either promising you pleasure or relief from pain. Hadn't you noticed?
At the "Bad" end of the scale, filters and blinkers ensure that we no longer have to look at certain things. ("If I don't see it, it's not there.") Try telling that to a bus bearing down on you as you cross North Terrace. But in the eons-old jungle strategy we still "freeze" in an attempt to shield ourselves from possible harm.
Unfortunately, in early childhood, we also got distracted from creatively supervising this selection process. We left the board room and left the office mailboy to run the process and empowered him make the choices and decisions about what is "good" or "bad" for us. Consequently, the mailboy (our ego) makes decisions about what he'll allow us to see and what we won't see. The pity of it is that our ego is spectacularly unqualified and incapable of effectively running our lives anywhere except off into the largest ditch. But our ego doesn't care. Neither your ego nor mine gives two hoots about how well or badly it does the job of running our lives, but it is obsessed with keeping its position. Ego will do anything to make sure that it, and all its rules and values and opinions and anything else it considers itself to be, remains in charge. It will even allow you to die, as long as It gets to be Right about its concepts, its beliefs, its opinions and its decisions. Egos are designed for Survival; but not the survival of us -- the survival of their Selves.
Tied in with our ability to screen out what we will and won't get to see, is our Imagination -- our human ability to predict likely outcomes of possible events. Not too many other sentient beings share this unique capacity. Unfortunately, we left that gift also in the hands of our ego. So we got stuck with the human experience of Expectations. We allow possible scenarios to develop in our minds. They fester away until they've developed the same emotional wallop as something that's real and actual, and we create expectations on the basis of these dodgy scenarios.
We see what we EXPECT to see. When our expectations are met, we get to be right. When our expectations are not met, we start carrying on like our home is in a tree.
So, to sum up. Until we step in and take our lives back, we will see what we expect to see (and we'll be right about that), and we'll only see what our past experiences allow us to see (and as far as we are concerned, that is all there is).
Period.
We rarely see unadulterated reality, and even if we did, we can't tell the difference between fiction and fact.
Do you know what sages are? They are seers. They are people who know about their egos, but exercise their author-ity to choose to reclaim the CEO's chair, and the humility to stay open to possibilities they haven't seen yet. They consciously and actively open up to "other" possibility. They see everything.
You, too can become a seer. Become aware of how unaware and undercooked you are, and tell the truth about that. Start consciously Noticing -- noticing things that you haven't noticed in the last few minutes. It doesn't matter what they are, as long as they are happening somewhere in your field of awareness right now. Just notice them. No need to do anything about it. Just notice this, then that, then something else. Wake up. Every time you remember to, flick your awareness around to what's going on around you. A really useful exercise is to start a habit of regularly noticing what's going on in your peripheral vision.
Over our lives we have been narrowing down and focussing more and more on less and less until we now see everything about nothing. It's just a habit. We change restrictive habits by replacing them with healthier, more open ones. Start noticing what's going on around you.
If you want to see more, start looking.
You'll be amazed what shows up.
And at what you've been missing out on.
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