Is Seeing = Believing?

My dear Os.me Parivar… Here I am again.. bringing you some of the musings of this rambling mind. The writing bug has bitten me badly. So please put up with me 🤓🤓

Let me start this post with a sweet little story. ☺️ Had read this story long back, am not sure where… So here it goes…

Long ago, far far away, there was a little village tucked away somewhere. It was inhabited by some very innocent people, who had never seen a mirror!!! Now our hero, let’s call him Raju🕺, he decides to visit his friend who lives in another far away village. And when he returns home, his friend gives him lots of gifts 🎁, including a mirror🪞. Raju looks into the mirror, and seeing his reflection, he thinks, “He has gifted me a lifelike picture of my father.” He profusely thanks his friend for the gifts. After coming home, he gives all the gifts to his wife Lakshmi 💃, but keeps this mirror to himself as his treasured possession. Everyday he spends time in the morning, gazing at the mirror, believing that he is looking at his father. Now Lakshmi sees this and her curiosity is aroused. She wonders what is this thing that her husband has kept secret from her. So, when Raju goes to work, Lakshmi decides to find out herself what the secret is. She searches Raju’s possessions and discovers the mirror. When she looks into it, she sees the face of a beautiful woman looking at her. She feels sad and angry at Raju, for she believes that he is in love with another woman and carrying around her picture 🥺.When Raju comes back home in the evening, he finds Lakshmi sitting and crying😭. She has not cooked anything that day. He is alarmed, and asks her what happened. Crying loudly she tells him that she doesn’t want to live with him because he doesn’t love her anymore and is seeing another woman. Now Raju is perplexed. He doesn’t understand what Lakshmi is talking about. Lakshmi tells him that she has seen the picture of the woman, and starts crying even louder. Raju cannot make out head or tail of what Lakshmi is saying. Then Lakshmi takes out the mirror and declares that she is going to destroy the picture 😡. Raju gets angry and tells her not to destroy his father’s picture. Suddenly they realise something is amiss. They both look into the mirror and burst out laughing. 😅 Raju tells her, “This is you silly.”  And Lakshmi tells him, “This is you, not your father. And I never knew I was so beautiful!!” And they hug each other ❤️❤️ and conclude,”This is a magical thing which shows us our own face!”

Isn’t it a lovely story ☺️? If you had never looked at your own reflection in a mirror, would you have ever known what your face looked like? Here we have Raju and Lakshmi looking at themselves and not realising it, because they didn’t really know what their face looked like! Their  brains 🧠 processed it differently. Raju thought it as a picture of his father. Lakshmi thought it as a picture of another woman. So this is the conclusion I derive 🤓….Our eyes see what our mind / brain thinks of. This is what helps a mechanic repair a car, a plumber repair your pipe, a doctor diagnose your illness… because their minds are trained so that the eyes know what to look for. 

When I was a little girl I would look at the big white clouds ☁️ floating in the sky, they would look like candy floss and I would imagine that one day when I flew up high I could sleep on the soft bed of clouds and eat a little bit of them. Then they would melt like candy in my mouth. But one day as we went up a mountain🏔️, I realised that clouds are not what they seem to be like. Neither can they be touched or tasted. They just disappear into mist when you are inside them… So things are not really what they seem to be!!! The earth🌍 looks flat to us, we know that earth is round because we have been taught it that way. Had it not been taught to you with scientific evidence, wouldn’t you have still believed that the earth is flat? You would have laughed your head off 😂😂 and called them mad 🤯 if they told you that earth is round. History is the evidence…

Another thing I’ve noticed at times, especially while driving. The road seems all clear, and suddenly a motorist 🚴 or a pedestrian pops up scaring the life out of you 😱 and them as well. You…because you didn’t see them, and they because you most narrowly missed hitting them. There is something called a “Blind spot”, where your field of vision is blocked. The object is there and appears in your field of vision only when it crosses the blind spot and when it suddenly whizzes into appearance, you are startled. 

Some things just can’t be seen. Like the wind 🌬️. You feel the wind, when is caresses your face. You see it making the leaves dance. That how you know it is there, because of the effects it is making… 

And you know what the biggest problem with our vision is? It’s called Tunnel Vision. Seeing only what we are tuned into seeing!! It has its plusses and minuses. When you are driving, you have to focus on the road. If you start noticing everything else, the chances are more likely that you will crash into the vehicle ahead of you. So a driver can never really enjoy the scenery outside while driving… Only the passenger can afford to drink in the beauty of the sky, trees and the scenery around. But this Tunnel vision sometimes makes us so narrow visioned that we see only what we focus on. The bigger picture is missed out. You are so focussed on your object of interest that you are blind to everything else! What is there so obviously all along isn’t seen, because despite you seeing it, you don’t see it. 

So not everything you see is there. Some things you see are not there. You don’t see some things the way they are. And some times you dont see things even when they are obviously there. 🙈🙈🙈