The Unseen Sea – 5: Now you see me…

Part Five of The Unseen Sea

The square in the town is bathed in the kind of mellow light that you get only at the end of summer. Jessica is playing, walking toe to heel, following the lines on the old stone, flags, which were rescued and restored from an historic water mill by the local authority as part of its millennium celebrations.

Grandad Lucca sips his coffee; bought, by his daughter, Alexandra, from the Costa nearby after they elected to stay outdoors to take the last of the glowing gold in the rare pure-blue sky.

“She’s really enjoyed being here,” says Alex. “We should come up more often..”

“You know you should,” says Grandad Lucca, sipping his coffee, “and you know you’re more than welcome, anytime.”

Father and daughter say nothing, each enjoying their coffee as the sun overhead fills their exposed skin with warmth and life. Father closes his eyes for a few moments, enjoying the tap, tap, tap of his granddaughter’s footsteps on the stone. Eventually, he looks up to find out where she has got to.

“I can’t see her,” he says to Alex, his voice rising with concern; realising that there is another little girl in the square and he has been following her sounds, not Jessica’s.

His daughter, also caught napping in the perfect afternoon, flickers into consciousness at her father’s words and stands up, scanning, in the way that mothers do so well. “Oh thank God,” she says, “She’s stepping in parallel with that other girl over there–” she points to where her father, with less acute eyesight, can now make out the two dancing figures, mirroring each other’s movements.

All is well…

Consider the two images above.

We would say that they are different; that we are looking at TWO things, not one thing replicated. Yet, were I to show you the ‘wire frame’ original in the programme used to create it, you would see that they are, at that level, identical.

The difference arises because the second circle has a child in it, a child-circle that has a white interior instead of a black one. The black one is there, separate in its existence, within the top circle, but we don’t see black on black, because there’s no difference; just as we wouldn’t see white on white or any other, similar, overlay of colour.

We could make a differently coloured border, as in both bigger circles, which live within an orange boundary set on a white background – the WordPress page.

The orange boundary, in both cases, defines a ‘field’, something the mind uses all the time to screen out what it doesn’t want to concentrate on. Human civilisation has become adept at making such ‘fields’ useful. An example would be a book, whose field is the set of things contained within its turnable pages. On the screen with which you are reading this, the field is a white bordered column of text and images whose pages you can’t flick, but can scroll. They are made different to stand out. Often they are made complementary, such as black and white, for maximum contrast.

Within your chosen sensory field, there have to be differences or you won’t be aware of anything…

How we see the world is the same. As children we have to learn to see the differences. Parents and teachers have to show us. It’s not that we don’t actually see that white on black circle, but we don’t have cognition in the brain/mind as to its separated meaning – until we’re taught. What we then see, is what we are taught to see.

Really, there’s all sorts of stuff ‘out there’. What we ‘re-cognise’ is what we’re told exists…

Billions of years ago, LUCA couldn’t see, hear, smell or taste, but she did have a primitive form of awareness. Most importantly, she also knew what was within her and what was outside. That awareness of outside was the start of an incredibly long journey of consciousness which resulted in Human Be-in-gs having the five senses we have, today.

But we’re still learning to see what’s out-there; and what relationship it bears to us… After all, ‘we’ all came from the same ‘soup’ in the first place.

So, if none of this is an ‘accident’, like that famous room full of monkeys typing Hamlet, what’s really going on…?

End Part Five.

Read the previous parts of this series:

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four,

©Copyright Stephen Tanham, 2016 images and text. All rights reserved.