Pick and Choose Views

The other day I sat by the Hudson River in the late afternoon. The reflection of the sun made the water appear as molten silver with blue mountains in the background. And yet, I know that’s not what I ‘really’ saw. My mind automatically translated the poetic vision to a deep river of tidal water with the reflection of the sun on it and a haze changing the colour in the background. But it got me thinking about how culture and creature bound our view of the world is. We assume so often that what we see – or our interpretation of what we see – is the way things really are. And we are often so wrong.

Recently a study done on plants showed that they detect and react to the sound vibrations of caterpillars chewing on leaves by creating an insect repellent. If you later play a recording of the caterpillar chewing, the plants will also react accordingly —but not to the recording of ‘pleasant’ sounds like the wind. And so, we again must recalibrate our views of other living beings in this world. Another creature we saw as nothing but a backdrop to our humanity turns out to be a sentient being after all.

This happens so often! We keep setting up criteria that distinguish us from other animals only to find others share the same aspects after all. It used to be that what separated us humans from other living creatures was our ability to use language. And then we found that other creatures, such as dolphins and crows, use language. We thought our ability to use tools separated us as distinct. And then we found that other creatures – including birds – use tools. We thought our ability to mourn and recognize death made us unique. And then we found that elephants, crows, and apes all have mourning rituals for their dead loved ones.
Humans are trained by their cultures to see and not see in certain ways because of our assumptions and our limited views. Here are two examples: The people who live in African rainforests have a spectacular ability to see snakes and animals that are camouflaged by the forest. But if you put them on the veldt, wide open ranges with far vistas, they cannot see a giraffe that is in the distance. Their eyes have been trained to see objects close up, but not far away. A youtube video, “The Invisible Gorilla” asks people to watch carefully a group of young people passing a basketball and count how many times the ball is passed to the people wearing white. People concentrate so carefully on the ball and the count, they completely miss the person in a gorilla suit walking through the crowd beating his chest!

This culturally trained vision has been confirmed by neuroscientists in laboratory experiments as well. In her fascinating book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, science writer Sharon Begley describes the conversations a group of neuroscientists had with the Dalai Lama. One of the neuroscientists, Helen Neville, summarized her findings by saying: “Brain specialization is not a function of anatomy or dictated by the genes. It is a result of experience. Who we are and how we work comes from our perceptions and experiences. It is the outside world that determines the functional properties of the brain’s neurons.” (Begley, p. 108)

Sometimes we can or can’t see because of our innate vision limitations. In the window in our bedroom we have a hanging crystal from an old chandelier. Most of the time it just hangs there like a piece of glass – clear with nothing special emanating from it. But on summer mornings, as we lie in bed, we watch the sun through the crystal create multiple rainbows shimmering and dancing throughout the room. Those colours are always coming into the room. But we only see them through the help of the crystal and even then, some of the colours that are refracted through the crystal cannot be seen by the human eye.

In fact, it turns out that we humans (who knows what other creatures can/cannot see!), only see arpoximately 4% of the whole universe. Scientists acknowledge that “roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the Universe.” (science.nasa.gov/astrophysics) They don’t know what dark energy and dark matter are, they just know that they’re there.

Physicists are boggled by the idea of entangled particles, two atoms which had been connected at one point are then separated even miles apart. Yet, despite the distance, when one changes the direction it spins in, the other one does as well, immediately. There is nothing connecting them anymore that we can see, and yet, they are still connected, still ‘communicating.’ How does it happen? We don’t know yet.

How many other things do we think look like one thing, yet are really quite more complicated and deep than we have surmised? How many things do we not see or recognize because of our cultural biases? Ghosts, auras, vibrations emanating from all kinds of sentient beings we never ‘saw’ that way before may be just some of the manifestations of a world far more complicated, vital, and knowledgeable than our limitations – cultural and physical -- allow us to see.

As Dr. Frankenstein said in Mel Brook’s movie Young Frankenstein, “I do not know what I do not know!” Perhaps like Dr. Frankenstein we too need to recognize our limited knowledge. Perhaps, like the plant that picks up the vibrations from the caterpillar, we need to be willing to enlarge our attunement to include more vibrations. Perhaps that’s what meditation and prayer attempt to do. It wouldn’t hurt!