What You See Is All There Is.

Really?

Some say. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Reality is more weighted towards you seeing something when you believe it.

Check out Carol Dweck’s Mindset and you’ll find four sets of portrait drawings.  You could be forgiven for thinking four had been drawn by children and the other four by adults.  In fact they’re by four people on a five day art course: four before-and-after sets of drawing.  The course was really about helping people to see, the art improvement simply followed.  How much more are we missing because we can’t see very well?

Our worldviews, paradigms, philosophies and prejudices filter what we see. And these are the things we’re most aware of.  Beneath these are the ways Humans prefer to make judgements quickly – we’re told this dates back to when our ancestors had to decide quickly whether to run or fight the eponymous sabre-tooth tiger.  But the world is bigger and decisions more complex today than back then.*

Seth Godin recommends a course on seeing as being one of the most important ones we’ll ever take, enabling to see what others cannot.

It begins with seeing yourself; there’s more to you than meets the eye.  When you see this, you also realise there’s more than meets the eye to every person you meet.  And there’s more to the world in which we live than meets the eye, opened to us by others.

But don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself.**

(* It takes a lot of energy to be what Nassim Taleb names a sceptical empiricist, suspending judgement of people, things, and phenomena for as long as possible.)

(**I had an eye-opening experience several years ago which I’ve referred to in earlier posts; that was just the beginning, each day bringing new things to see.  I’ve just got to keep my eyes open – which isn’t easy.)