Posts
Right now, sitting in my lovely backyard, there’s a gentle
breeze caressing my skin, shimmying through the grass, making the leaves fall
from the trees like golden petals from a flower. I can’t see it, the wind is invisible. But it touches our live in many ways. Sometimes it may be as it is today, a
calming, pleasant experience. But in a
hurricane or a tsunami it is able to push things with extreme and destructive
force. And yet, we never see the wind,
only its results.
The words that we speak to each other in a conversation
cannot be seen. But they also have a
very powerful effect. Words of love and
encouragement help to nurture the growth of children, the relationship between
spouses, communities of education, faith, civic or nations. Words of hate and anger do the opposite. They engender more hate and anger, separate
people and make them feel poorly about themselves and their communities. The childhood ditty I learned when I was
young: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me”, I
think has it all wrong. In my mind it
should be “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can hurt forever.” The power of words said to us is part of the
baggage we carry with us into adulthood.
And yet, we never see the words coming out of people’s mouths, we only
experience the results.
I breathe in the air around me, which sustains my life but
which I can’t see. The air goes into my
lungs, feeds and nurtures every cell in my body. When I breathe out it is transformed into
something else: carbon dioxide, which feeds and nurtures plants. We have a symbiotic relationship going on,
vital to both the plants and the humans, and we can’t even see it. But we see the results.
And music. I don’t
see it. But it resonates in my ears, in
my body and in my spirit. It speaks to
me in a different language than words and touches me deeply. A classical guitar, a voice, a symphony, all
use notes, vibrations, and sound waves to communicate with an audience. But we don’t see what is being
transmitted. We only feel the results
when they touch our ears, our bodies, our souls.
I turn on my cell phone and get messages from around the
world, or watch a hockey game which is playing in another city. I can call or skype or watch a movie on this
tiny little rectangle. And yet there are
no wires though which the information passes.
They all come – invisibly – through the atmosphere to my phone.
Sometimes the visible is invisible! An experiment psychologists Christopher Chabris
and Daniel Simons show in a video (available on line) includes a group of
people throwing ball which you are told to keep an eye on. Because your eye is ‘on the ball’ you don’t
see the very large gorilla cross the room!
But when they play the video back, it’s clearly there. Our eyes were just focused on something else
and thus the visible was invisible. How
often does that happen in our daily lives?
We’re thinking about something that happened that morning, he said-she
said; or we’re focused on the car that’s pulling ahead of us in the other lane,
or what we’re going to say to so-and-so when we get home. So we miss the sun dappled light shining
through the copse of trees by the side of the road. Or the glimmer of a bird flying past. We don’t see our child accomplish his/her
first bowling strike – without bumpers! – because we’re looking down at our
phone. We miss a genuine moment of
communication with another because we’re rushing off to do something.
And then there are the things we cannot see because our eyes
are not capable of seeing them. Such as
colours! According to a story on NPR Radiolab, We only see about 98 of the more
than a million colours that exist because of the limited number of eye receptor
cones that we have. A sparrow would see
more than us. Butterflies see far more
colours – “colours we don’t even have names for!” And mantis shrimp – which look beautifully
coloured themselves -- have 16 receptors allowing them to see more colours than
any other creature in the word that we know about. What would our world look like if we were
able to see those colours invisible to us?
Religious traditions recognize the value – and mystery -- of
the invisibles. In the Christian Bible it says:
“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the
things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the
things which are not seen are eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18)
In the Quran, talking about G-d and the Prophet Muhammed, it
says of G-d:
“He is the One who knows the unseen, and He reveals His unseen
to no one except to the messenger He is pleased with… (72.28)
In Hinduism, the Infinite Spirt of all Existence, Brahman,
can never be seen. It temporarily dwells
in each one of us as it temporarily dwells in each statue of a deity. It can be expressed in the sound of “Om”, a
sound that is heard, temporarily, but never seen.
Buddhism often represents the Invisible by the idea of emptiness,
sunyata. There is no is-ness, no self,
no thing that one can say exists.
Therefore, some forms of Buddhism show an empty circle instead of a
statue of the Buddha.
The shamans of indigenous cultures are always in touch with
invisible spirits. They say it is those
spirits that provide them with the knowledge of medicinal plants and provide
them with the powers to heal.
What else do we not see?
Are there spirits of the dead around us, helping or watching us, we
don’t see? Is there a G-d – or
bodhisattvas that are around and guiding us that we don’t see?
We walk – and run – through the tangible world as if it’s
the whole story. As if we know what we
need to know because we see it, touch it, smell it, hear it. But there’s so much more. So many invisibles around and in us that we
take for granted. Perhaps if we focused
on them a bit more, we would have greater appreciation for the unknown that is
knowable and that which is not.
