As with optical illusions, sometimes life requires looking at something a different way

Date published: 9/4/2008

THERE'S A COMMON optical illusion where you see a picture of what looks like the corner of a room (with the point of the corner far away from you), but when you shift your perspective, it turns into a corner of a box, jutting out in front of you. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of hard to imagine that, I guess, but it's a good example of something I've been thinking a lot about lately.

Many problems in life can be solved by inverting your perspective in much the same way as you do when you see the corner of a room, then a box. Usually, what we need to invert are our ideas of being and non-being. For instance, take the problem of need. If you desire something really, really badly, you tend to see it as a lack of the desired thing--in other words, a non-being. But it is in doing this that we totally confuse the issue. Need is not a non-being of what you need, it's the being of needing it.

Imagining your person as a complete circle, usually you would think of needing something as taking a chunk out of the circle, making you incomplete in some way. But need really is more like a cancerous lump growing on top of your already-complete person--it continually demands that more and more needs be satisfied without really slowing down. You think what you want needs to be part of you, and you will not be wholly you without it. But this demand itself is the problem--it is a real presence in your life that masquerades as a created lack.

It is in this way that we think of desire as a non-being when it is really a being. We need to shift our perspective, though, to see it. Another example is the relationship between concepts and reality. After many paradigm shifts in civilization--writing, phonetic alphabets, technology, science--we have almost totally gotten ourselves "hooked on phonics," addicted to words and word-pictures of what is around us.

While hunter-gatherers were more in touch with their senses, not over-privileging conceptual thought, we have slowly made our way into using more and more of our rational, problem-solving apparatus and letting it permeate our consciousness. We definitely need an inversion here.

Date published: 9/4/2008