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Ways of Seeing

A way of seeing is an orientation or a pattern of relating (whether to a physical object, a person, a symbol, etc.), which gives rise to some cluster of emotions and perceptions. This is one of the basic concepts in how Rob Burbea taught and explained meditation, which is where I get it from.

That definition is quite abstract, so I'll try to make it more concrete.

Reading a math textbook, one might notice any of these, or any of these might be salient at one time:

  • Mathematical arguments
  • Relationship to other mathematical theories
  • Typography and design
  • Physical presence as an object
  • Context within the author's life

These are all pretty mundane, but any of them define a pattern of salience and attention, as well as emotional and subtler perceptual qualities.

Religious and sacred objects, for those steeped in a given tradition, will arouse various emotional, perceptual, and behavioral qualities. These might be static or dynamic: here I'm thinking of the way the Torah scroll is taken out of the ark and held in the air, and presented to the congregation who sing for it. Other traditions have many different patterns of embodied, dynamic relations of sacredness with particular objects, or with the architecture of a temple, etc., which again embody and arouse a way of seeing which is practiced with respect to that object.

Sometimes ways of seeing can be aroused with respect to inert symbols:

  • The swastika
  • Pop culture icons
  • Sexual/taboo symbols, eg. the Ring of O

Ways of seeing might be embodied in personal relationships:

  • How a parent sees their child
  • How someone views a loved one's grave
  • Relationship with an enemy or abuser

Often ways of seeing reflect an experience or perception about one's place in the universe, or one's felt sense of status and power. The phrases below each express a relational quality between self and world, particularly the social world:

  • "I'm on top of the world"
  • "I'm at rock bottom"
  • "The world is against me"
  • "I'm on another level"

Even plainness or emotional neutrality is a way of seeing, at least of a sort.

Note, though we might describe a way of seeing by a phrase in English, ways of seeing are generally non-propositional, and they're not necessarily about specific thoughts one might have. In fact, a way of seeing often has nothing to do with words at all.

A way of seeing is a particular perspective, stance, or position in relationship which brings out or arouses some shape of meaning with respect to an object, situation, person, etc. Ways of seeing often work by amplifying the salience or emotional resonance of certain parts of experience over others. In any of the above examples, there's a detail and richness of meaning which is more or less the manifestation of the way of seeing at play. Phenomenologically, this might include feelings in the body, images, perception of situational awareness, or felt qualities of affordance for movement or body positioning, to name a few qualities.

I claim that perception and "belief" or "ideation" are much more contiguous than people usually imagine

This is hard to argue for definitively, though I expect my meditator friends are mostly nodding their heads at this section. You can believe me or not, but here's at least some gesture at what I mean by this:

Taking visual perception in particular, I think there's something much more subtle going on than we usually think. I claim that "what something looks like" is often ~"mostly" determined by what we believe about it, than its actual physical structure. We have of course the adage, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," etc.

My impression from my own meditation practice, and reports from some meditation teachers, is that "mental imagery" is often more subtle than we usually notice, and more like contiguous with ordinary visual perception. There's a spectrum here. Near one end might be purposefully overlaying perceptions onto "external" visual perception, eg. "seeing" how a chair would look in a room that one is decoarting, while looking around with the eyes still open. Perhaps in the middle would be something like a rock climber "seeing" routes. On the far end, I've heard claims from meditation teachers to the effect that, with the eyes closed, if one doesn't construe one's body as a body-shape, that body sensations will be experienced by default as occurring on the surface of a sphere. (The interpretation here being that proprioception is more like visual than somatic, despite being so apparently somatic.)

Visual perception here is just one example. Most of what I want to say here is that I think in every domain of perception there's a much more dynamic relationship between perspective or stance, and apparent perception, than we usually notice or think possible. I'll claim that there's quite a lot of "give" in perception in general, and that this is exactly where ways of seeing function and are manifest.

There will be more discussion about this in the section on practice, but I'll touch on it briefly here. There is a huge swath of practices which involve giving rise to particular emotions and and perceptions. Among these:

  • "Prayer"
    • (This evokes some Hollywood image but in my mind is much more general)
  • Deity Yoga
    • Briefly, this is a cluster of practices which involve visualizing a deity, sometimes in front of oneself, or sometimes with oneself as the deity
  • Many meditation practices
    • Many feature cultivating "equanimity," or sometimes cultivating a perception of un-reality or weakened importance for objects, emotions, etc.
  • A large swath of western "therapy" practices
    • This can range from eg. analyzing beliefs and feelings and practicing new ones (a la CBT), to perhaps on the other end, visualizing perfect parents and "taking on" their care as a new emotional basis (IPF)