SEEING IS BELIEVING?

Last night, I was walking with my wife and our dog Max in our neighborhood when I pointed something out to her. She looked—and said, “I don’t see anything.” I smiled and thought: Does that mean it wasn’t there? Of course not. I saw it. She didn’t.

And that made me think about how often this happens in our lives. We see something, but we don’t recognize what it is. Or we don’t see something at all because our minds are not prepared to perceive it.

There is a famous story about Christopher Columbus arriving in America and supposedly being able to see ships that the local people could not see because they had never encountered anything like them. The story is almost certainly a myth, but the lesson behind it is fascinating: sometimes we cannot see something because we cannot imagine it.

Think about what happens when we look at a drop of water with our eyes. It looks perfectly clear. Put it under a powerful microscope, and suddenly we discover a world we never knew existed.

And now science takes us even further—to the quantum world, where reality behaves in ways that are almost impossible for our everyday minds to comprehend.

So perhaps “seeing is believing” is not always true. Maybe the better question is: If I don’t see it, does it mean it doesn’t exist—or does it mean I haven’t learned how to see?

2500 years ago, Chinese philosopher Confucius observed “Everything has Beaty, but not everyone sees it.” When I walked in our neighborhood I noticed a beautiful bush of Dahlias. Some will notice them. Others will photograph a flower. For me this a beautiful object. You can see many amazing  Dahlias in the Golden Gate Park, near Academy of Flowers.

If you want to see beautiful roses every day, get my book “Reflections. The Healing Images.” on Amazon.