Looking and Seeing

In yoga we make the distinction between looking (active, consumptive) and seeing (passive, receiving). In physical asana practice when you stare really hard at something it is an equivalent of grasping, grabbing, clutching. If you can let your gaze rest on something in an even, broad way so that you take in the wider scene, your mind is more still, yet still fluid and adaptable. As in asana, as in life. Rigidity and intractablness create tension which clouds the ability to think and act clearly. Maintaining a certain firmness (discipline without a sense of punitiveness or over-control) creates a spaciousness that allows you to perceive a whole scene or scenario and respond likewise, in a calm, focused and decisive manner.

I enjoyed this article from this weekend's Guardian about looking, hope you do too . . .

How to ... look

Guy Browning
Saturday August 12, 2006
The Guardian

Everyone sees but few look. For most people ,"having a good look" happens only when something interests them. For the small minority who are in permanent "have a good look" mode, everything is interesting. In general, the more you look at something, the more interesting it becomes.

On average we see a thousand advertising messages a day. When we go to bed we might remember one of them. This tells us two things: 1) most advertising is wasted;, and 2) just because we've got our eyes open doesn't mean we're looking.

The song says that you can look but you better not touch. But looking is a way of touching, which is why you can often sense when you're being looked at. Similarly, when you look into some individuals' eyes, it give you a physical jolt, as if you'd been kicked by a small horse.

Many people don't look much because what's happening inside their head is far more interesting. The less they look at the real world, the more unreal their internal world becomes. The level of people's eyes is a good indicator of where their minds are: eyes up, daydreamer; eyes ahead, well-adjusted person; eyes down, introvert or bingo player.

Love is blind but has a great sense of touch. More interesting than love at first sight is love at 74th sight, when someone who was part of your comfortable visual furniture suddenly becomes a thing of incredible beauty. The world would be a much better place if we could see everyone as incredibly beautiful, but that would make falling in love a less intense experience.

Looking at something carefully doesn't mean you can see it properly. That's because everyone wears the distorting glasses of their personality: paranoid people see everything as a conspiracy, greedy people see everything as a potential snack. The rule is, you don't see the world as it is, but as you are.

People see only what they want to see. Being something or someone that no one wants to see is therefore the closest we're likely to get to being invisible. Advanced physicists and philosophers will tell you that things exist only when you look at them. It would therefore be a great experiment if everyone agreed not to look at advanced physicists and philosophers for a while.