The Wonders Right In Front of Our Noses

When you see it...

There’s a well-known maxim that goes, “If you can conceive it, you can achieve it.” This stands to reason as if you can’t even imagine what it is that you want to do, then obviously, you are unlikely to do it. Seeing with the mind's eye is the conceptual font of most of humanity’s discoveries and achievements and a crucial vehicle to use when we are trying to grasp the nature of the universe. 

We all love those stories where the cynical naysayers laugh at the dreamer who imagines a better way of doing things and pulls off the “impossible.” We know that once the cognitive ice has been broken—when we see that our assumptions were false—that we begin to reframe the impossible as retrospectively obvious. That’s how the four-minute mile was broken, how personal computing became ubiquitous, and how the atom was split.

I love to watch old videos of the basketball teams that were big in my day. To me, guys like Dr. J, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson still seem like the pinnacle of sporting excellence (and in some ways they are), but basketball as manifested today just seems to have been conceived on a wholly different plane. Where jostling under the basket for a bank shot or gentle layup was the norm, we now delight to uber-humans of extreme strength, speed, and uncanny spacial awareness nailing shots from all over the court and slamming the hoop like organic pile-drivers. Why wasn’t it always like that? The belief in what was possible had to be repeatedly shattered. 

Image: artincontext.org

The beliefs that we hold color our world—not only in what we can imagine as possible but also in how the eye beholds material reality itself. About six centuries ago, at the time of the Renaissance, humanity began to see differently—they discovered three-dimensional perspective—as was reflected in the dramatic shift in their artwork. The earlier way of seeing prioritized what was considered significant by making it central and large and faded all else into the background. The new version reflected their newfound awareness of three-dimensionality. As explained by Bernardo Kastrup:

Some authors refer to this development as the ‘discovery’ of perspective. Well, obviously, every sight-capable human being has been seeing perspective since the dawn of our species, so it couldn’t have been discovered in the 15th century. One just needs to look at the world around to see it everywhere. What did happen is that, at that time, European artists first became aware that they were conscious of perspective. Three-dimensional perspective wasn’t new in consciousness but new in the field of self-reflection. After it entered this field, it was immediately recognized as something people had always known yet didn’t know that they knew it. 

This amazes me. So many things that seem so natural and so glaringly obvious apparently are anything but. In an even earlier shift in Western consciousness, the Italian poet Petrarch climbed a mountain just for the view—and that’s it. The wild thing is that no one he was aware of had considered doing this. It was a radical notion, and there were many who urgently cautioned him against what they considered an act of lunacy. Nonetheless, on April 26th, 1336, Petrarch ascended Mt Ventoux in Provance “only…to see what so great a height had to offer.” 

What we now think of as “nature,” with all of its manifest beauty and worthiness, is a relatively recent development. As explained by philosopher Owen Barfield, “It was not until the Romantics of the 18th Century that the idea of contemplating nature as something beautiful in itself—and not as one of God’s ‘manifest theophanies’ or for utilitarian purposes—became popular.”

Image: Petrarch, laphamsquarterly.org

What else in our reality is currently staring us straight in the face but is as of now unrecognizable due to the paucity of our vision? Is there any doubt that vistas even more wondrous than the conceptual leap from two dimensions to three or the recognition that the natural world is a delight worth striving to behold are at this moment arrayed before us—waiting for our minds to develop the tools with which to grasp them?

In the end, Petrarch was conflicted over his discovery. He began with an intent to alter his perception of the material world as he had always known it, but ended with a rededicated desire to look inward:

I closed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again. ... [W]e look about us for what is to be found only within. ... How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of human contemplation.

Which is superior, the “summit of the mountain” or the “range of human contemplation?” Like most things, it depends on how you look at it. 

Recommended Reading:

Materialism is Baloney: Bernardo Kastrup

The Secret Teachers of the Western World: Gary Lachman