Close Your Eyes

So, I was thinking, and have been thinking for some time, that the eyes are the true tyrants of our minds and really of our worldly conceptions.

I thought, the blind cannot see color and so there is no difference but that which we discover by other senses.

Are the other senses more liberal?

I thought then of that parable of the blind man and the elephant and realized that blindness is primarily a pejorative figural state. You do not perceive the whole if you only are aware of the parts.

However, this a truth that our mind under the tyranny of our very eyes wishes to subvert. "Seeing is believing" after all.

Greater and greater resources are spent on new ways to see--what is the large Hadron collider but another way to see; or the Hubble telescope; or the mass spectrometer.

We believe ever more desperately that we will FIND the truth in a new vision.

I think this is a deep error.

The elephant is not only a trunk, not only a tail, not only a massive back, not only a "pillared" leg. Melville makes this point of the whale as well...we cut it up, we divide it, we suck out its oil. We make use of it and do not know it; cannot know it.

The "Blind" man and the elephant is NOT a tale about actual blindness but rather about the easy reliance on perceptual frames that limit understanding.

I come more and more to believe that a literal blindness might actually be a kind of salvation.

Close your eyes to truly see.