SEEING


Human beings need to see and be seen. 

Vision is one of the important ways we gather and process information. Such 
information can literally save our lives. It can show us danger. It can reveal 
food. It can instruct us in how to find resources and comfort and healing.

Such information is also needed for social cohesion. There are agreed upon 
visual signals—like a smile, a frown, a shrug, a hand extended with the palm 
up—that guide us in human relations. More than by touch or taste or smell 
or hearing, we live by seeing the world we inhabit.

If we are visually impaired, we develop a greater reliance on these other 
senses. But sighted or blind, we need to know what the world "looks like", 
that is, where things are, in order to move around in it safely and happily.

Visual images are an essential part of what we are. A picture really can be 
worth a thousand words: the picture of our blue-green planet taken from the 
moon, for example; the picture of airplanes flying into twin towers; the 
picture of our first grandchild.

We are visual creatures who need to see, who are moved by what we see to 
awe, rage or joy, which survive and prosper because we see.

We also need to be seen.

When others see us, it is a validation of our existence. We want to be greeted 
by friends on the street, when we come to church, at a party. We do not want 
to be invisible people, there, as Ralph Ellison showed so powerfully in his 
novel, INVISIBLE MAN, as black people were very much there in the 
middle years of the last century and before, but not seen, not important 
enough to be recognized as human.

Sister Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun, has written about her experience of 
being tortured by Guatemalan security forces. (THE BLINDFOLD'S EYES: 
MY JOURNEY FROM TORTURE TO TRUTH) Blindfolded often, when 
the blindfold was removed, she dared "to see in the eyes of the enemy the 
humanity that would link us." She looked at her torturer and saw a human 
being and called silently to him by this means of communication to see her 
and not further harm her because, seeing her, he recognizes her humanity.

To be seen by another is to affirm our own existence, to tell us that we 
matter, to say that in somebody's life we are worthy of attention. 

In Thornton Wilder's enduring play, OUR TOWN, Emily, dead in 
childbirth, is given the chance to come back to the day of her 12th birthday. 
Coming downstairs full of happiness, she is greeted by her mother telling her 
that there are presents in the kitchen. Her mother turns immediately away 
from her to the stove and tells her that she must eat a good breakfast, 
birthday or no birthday. Then she tells Emily to chew her bacon so she will 
stay warm. 

This distancing by her mother goes on till Emily bursts out, "Oh, Mama, 14 
years have gone by. I'm dead. But just for a moment now we're all together 
again. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's look at each other. Oh, 
Mama, just look at me for one minute as though you saw me."

We need to be seen or we feel that we are not there, that we are dead.

We need to be seen and we need to see.

That is not always easy to do so. We are easily deceived.

We are deceived in part because we really do not understand how we see. 
We have a lot of data and we can do a lot to manipulate and improve vision. 
But, as one student of vision has explained, "by the standards of the exact 
sciences…we do not yet know, even in outline, how our brains produce the 
vivid visual awareness that we take so much for granted…We lack both the 
detailed information and the ideas to answer the most simple questions: How 
do I see color? What is happening when I recall the image of a familiar face? 
And so on."

Our ignorance of the physical processes of seeing is matched by our 
ignorance of the spiritual ones. We do not know how and why various 
spiritual paths work and why such different and competing visions of reality 
are imagined and expressed. Uncertainty characterizes all our efforts to see 
the Truth of Existence, God, Reality. Or it should if we are honest.

Ignorance is always occasion for deception

We can also be deceived by the fact that we do not possess the Eye of God. 
The Psalmist describes what this must be like: "O lord, thou hast searched 
me and known me! Thou knowest when I sit down and when I rise 
up…Thou searchest out my path and my lying down, and art acquainted 
with all my ways…If I ascend to heaven, thou art there…If I make my bed 
in Sheol, thou art there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the 
uttermost parts of the seas…my frame is not hidden from thee." (Psalm 139)

That is certainly not our vision! We have trouble seeing ourselves, much less 
anyone or anything else with that breadth or depth or comprehension. Our 
vision is limited, relative, frail. Our eyes deceive us. 

We watch a woman being sawed in half, but only a few minutes later we see 
her standing there whole and not in two pieces. 

We look at the Parthenon in Athens and think we are seeing straight lines 
when actually they are curved. We think we see pillars of equal thickness 
when actually the four corner pillars are thicker than the rest.

As a small child we see God in the guise of Santa Claus or the Wizard of Oz 
or a heroic movie star. We grow up to see Santa Claus in the mirror with our 
white hair and belly. The Wizard of Oz has turned into the Wizard of Id. 
Heroic movie stars become ordinary folks when we see them without make-
up, special effects, stunt men, and a script.

We wonder what on earth we really saw in the first place!

Our ignorance and our limited vision make us prey to the whimsicality, the 
enormity, the complexity of life. We can also be deceived by the deliberate 
efforts of commercial, political and religious hucksters.

We live in an age of the image, primarily but not exclusively the 
photographic, the televised, and the advertising image. Such images are 
easily manipulated and we are easily fooled if we are not on our guard.

We need to remember that photographs are not neutral reproductions of 
reality. They are the photographer's version of reality. She can add or 
subtract people and parts of the body, change the condition of the skin, the 
color of the clothes, and many other features, thereby creating a doctored 
image of what was really photographed. 

Playboy magazine and the House Un-American Activities Committee were 
masters of this kind of deception a half century ago, and the technology has 
grown vastly more sophisticated.

Or consider the carefully wrought televised images of a clean, technological 
war fought against the Iraqis in 1991. Civilians were spared because of the 
pinpoint accuracy of our weapons, and carefully contrived pictures showed 
us how this was done. Later estimates by the Pentagon and the General 
Accounting Office, given little publicity, determined that most of the time 
most of the weapons were inaccurate and that civilian casualties were very 
high because of that inaccuracy.

Advertising images of products and politicians fill our eyes with utopian 
promises that reality always tempers. It is important to ask if a beer really 
will give us more gusto in life or just make us more bilious. It is important to 
ask if a man or a woman really will be a better legislator because they wear 
color coordinated clothes and know how to coin clever phrases, or if the 
attention given to these details will distract them from honest labor.

Advertising images are not a repository of truth.

Religiously, the ease with which we can be deceived is suggested by the 
phrase, "blind faith." A blind faith is one that cannot or does not see. It is a 
faith that shuts out all but a tiny portion of reality. It is a faith not confused 
by facts, by observation, or even by experience. 

It is the faith of those who buy—and I mean buy literally—the miracles of 
the televangelists, whose hand is always out for money and whose tongues 
are quick to produce wonders for people whose lives are full of suffering.

It is also the faith of those who live by dogma, like the Roman Catholic 
Church that took more than 300 years to admit they were wrong about 
Galileo. Finally they saw the error of their ways, but for more than three 
centuries they could not see because of their blind faith in the doctrines of 
the church.

The ease with which we are deceived by our ignorance, our limited vision, 
and the deliberate efforts of others or of our own selves to fool us, is an 
obstacle to seeing and being seen. 

It is possible for us to see clearly or we would not have survived as long as 
we have.

In simple ways we can see what is there. We can see a tree directly in our 
path that we must walk around. We can see a lovely brook from which we 
can drink to relieve our thirst. We can see a friend coming towards us whom 
we can greet with affection.

We can see at a simple level, and we can see at a more complicated level as 
well. Scientific study is a more complicated way of trying to see clearly, to 
enlarge and sharpen our vision. So, for example, we see the tree and the 
brook and the human being as part of a single ecological system, 
understanding better how each of these forms of life actually functions and 
how they relate to one another. 

At this more complicated level of seeing, we enhance our knowledge of the 
world and our ability to move around in it. Even a modest knowledge of the 
achievements of the past several hundred years can teach us the value of this 
kind of knowledge. Think of antibiotics and central heating, pasteurization 
and permanent press clothes, electric lights and electric wheelchairs.

In some measure we can see clearly and truly, but to do so we must look. 
Much of what there is to see in life is as Annie Dillard described it, "a now-
you-see-it, now-you-don't affair."  Most of life we are not going to see. The 
earth—the universe!—is too vast and our time is short and passes quickly. 
Therefore we must do the best we can to look in this moment at what is 
before us. Often what we see is full of wonder.

A sunrise or a sunset is a momentary experience, changing infinitesimally 
second by second until full daylight or darkness has come. But what a sight 
it is when we behold it with attentive eyes: colors, shapes, evocations that 
can often send a thrill running up and down our spines!

When my children were little, and now I do this with my grandchildren, I 
loved to simply look at them: asleep with such trust and loveliness, at play 
with such enthusiasm and abandon, eating with such careful study of every 
bite until they had had enough, working with a puzzle or a game with intense 
concentration to get it right.

This is the human animal engaged in life with a sense of innocence and 
dedication and wonder that we somehow lose or mute as we grow older. To 
see it is to instruct us in what will always be a good way of meeting the 
world and living in it. 

But we must look if we are to see and we must not wait. Children grow up 
overnight, sunrises and sunsets are over in minute
 
It is not always easy to see. We can be fooled. But when we are not fooled, 
when we really do see, we learn at least two lessons.

The first of these is that believing is seeing.

Seeing leads us in one direction or another, teaches us new and larger truths 
about what is real and what matters. What we see guides us to what we 
believe.

When the Buddhists instruct us to pay attention, it is an instruction designed 
to help us to see. If we pay attention, then we look at people and things with 
awareness. We will see them. If we do not pay attention, then we can miss 
seeing remarkable sights.

Oggie Rand took a picture of his store every morning at 8:00 o'clock. He 
collected these pictures in scrapbooks. Once he showed one to a friend, who 
exclaimed, "But these pictures are all of the same thing!"

To which Oggie replied, "The pictures are all of the same spot, but each one 
is different from every other one. The differences are in the detail. In the 
way people's clothes change according to season and weather. In the way 
the light hits the street. Some days the corner is almost empty. Other times it 
is filled with people, bikes, cars, and trucks. It's just one little part of the 
world but things take place there."

Oggie's friend was not paying attention and so he missed seeing the 
uniqueness of every day at the same time in the same place. When we pay 
attention, what we see can fill us with awe. 

In the great Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna says to the Lord, "I wish 
I could see you…just as you are." The Lord responds to Arjuna simply: 
"Open your eyes and see." When he does this, what he sees are "countless 
marvels," heavens and earths and gods and beings beyond Arjuna's 
comprehension. He is filled with awe.

Like Job, who similarly is shown the incomprehensible vastness and 
strangeness of the world and who has not one more word to say to the Lord, 
Arjuna responds to what he has seen with humility. Now he sees himself in 
relation to the enormity of reality and realizes the smallness of his own life. 

A modern humanist contemplating the knowledge we now have of the 
tremendous distances and complicatedness of the universe in space-time is 
very likely to arrive at a similar feeling of humility in the face of what she 
has seen.

To see in this way is the first step in developing a spiritual understanding, in 
coming to some kind of belief about life and its meaning.

The experience of Justin Martyr, an early Christian leader, was more earth-
bound but equally important in leading him to know wherein lay his faith. 
He had come to Rome in the middle years of the second century to study 
philosophy. Some friends took him to the amphitheater.  His life was turned 
around by what he saw there that day.

A group of despised people—followers of a man named Christos—faced 
horrifying death in the jaws and claws of hungry wild beasts with complete 
equanimity. Justin was astounded. He had been taught that calm in the face 
of extinction is the highest virtue. He had also been taught that such calm 
was attained only with education, study, and learning. Yet here were these 
simple folk—illiterate, unsophisticated, atheistic with regard to the gods of 
Rome-- demonstrating the very quality he sought without the aid of 
philosophers. 

He wanted to know what they had found and how they had found it. He 
became a Christian. Twenty five years later he was himself martyred, like 
those he saw in Rome, with a calm acceptance of his fate.

His belief was shaped by what he saw. 

We may not initially or ever be able to articulate what we have seen. As Iris 
Murdoch has noted, "We look out into the abyss, into the mystery, intuiting 
what is not ourselves…At the border-lines of thought and language we can 
often 'see' what we cannot say."

The vision, the experience of seeing, leads us to form conceptions, however 
inchoate they may be. Insight comes from sight. Believing begins with 
seeing. That is the first lesson.

The second lesson is that seeing is believing.

We see according to some interpretative mode which we have previously 
devised by which to observe and understand the world. As Stephen Jay 
Gould put it, "we observe according to preset categories and often cannot 
'see' what stares us in the face." We see what we expect to see. We see 
things where they are supposed to be and do not see them when they are out 
of place.

I am a person who tends to have a place for everything and I like to put 
everything in its proper place. I once had a roommate who was more of a 
free spirit about the placement of things. Once he borrowed my desk 
calculator. Later, when I wanted to use it, I could not find it. He came, 
searched a bit, and found it in the front section of the top right hand drawer 
of my desk.

I had previously opened that drawer to take out my checkbook from the back 
part of it. I had looked in it several times more. Since the calculator 
ordinarily sits on top of my desk in a small tray, at the back right center of 
that surface, and it was not there, my eyes did not—could not?—see the  
calculator in the drawer, even though it was in plain sight as I rummaged for 
my checkbook. 

Part of what we see or do not see is what we think we are going to see or not 
see. Our sight is guided by our beliefs about the world. Francis Crick puts it 
this way, "What you see is not what is really there, it is what your brain 
believes is there."

We see according to what we believe, how we think the world works, what 
our experience has taught us is true. Seeing, in Crick's terms, is "an active, 
constructive process."

This fact accounts for much of the disagreement and confusion in the world.

There is a wonderful story told by a West African tribe that illustrates this 
point. It is the legend of the Sky Maiden. 

The tribe noticed that their cows were giving less milk than before. A young 
man volunteered to stay up all night and watch to see if he could learn why 
this was so. On the first night he saw a beautiful woman ride a moonbeam to 
earth, milk the cows, and then leave on the same moonbeam.

The next night he set a trap and captured her. He asked her why she took the 
milk. She explained that she belonged to a tribe that lived in the sky. She 
said her tribe had no food. Her job was to come to earth each night and get 
food for her hungry people. 

She begged to be allowed to go, but he agreed only on condition that she 
would marry him. She said she would, but asked for three days to prepare. 
He granted her request.

When she returned to him she was carrying a large box. She insisted that he 
never open it and look inside. He said he would not.

They were married and for several weeks they lived happily. Then curiosity 
got the better of him and he opened the box. He saw nothing in it. 

When she came home, she could tell from his strange look that he had 
opened the box. He told her that he had but that it was empty. She sighed, 
and then told him she could no longer live with him. 

"But why?" asked the man. "What's so terrible about my peeking into an 
empty box?"

"I'm not leaving you because you opened the box. I thought you probably 
would. I'm leaving you because you said it was empty. It wasn't empty. It 
was full of sky. It contained the light and the air and the smells of my home 
in the sky. When I went home for the last time, I filled that box with 
everything that was most precious to me to remind me of where I came 
from. How can I be your wife if what is most precious to me is emptiness to 
you?" 

How to live with others who are different from us is one of the most 
important questions that should be asked by the world's religions and 
political systems and ethnic cultures and by all groups who are different 
from other groups.

When the Unitarian Universalists have asked that question, and we have 
done so many times, the answer that we have given is this: we have to 
imagine, better we have to see, that which is precious to another. That is the 
only way we can learn to respect and to love one another.

The man saw what he expected to see. The woman saw what she knew was 
there.

Believing is the framework within which we see, the spectacles we wear in 
order to be able to see at all. That is the second lesson, that seeing is 
believing, as the first is that believing is seeing.

We see best when the two lessons come together in a dynamic interaction of 
believing and seeing, seeing and believing. One is not prior to the other. 
Each is part of the complex reality that is the human being. 

We need to see and be seen.  Because of our limitations, we can never see 
everything and we can often be deceived.

But we can see many things if we will look: an astonishing world, 
connections between people and all forms of life, beauty, and often 
goodness.

To see is to learn how to be physically and spiritually in the world.

What we see will help us to understand and to name the world.

What we understand and how we name the world will help us to see.

May what we see and how we see be large and far-reaching and always 
prompt us to loving feelings and rightful deeds.

Copyright 2003, Kenneth Phifer

All rights reserved.









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