On Seeing

On Seeing

To Elliott Gish, for all the conversations about life and death, and everything in between. A dreamweaver in the flesh.

In memory of Bobby. We don’t actually lose the people we love, we just stop seeing them with our eyes one day. Your memory will live on forever.

I

Do you know what you look like?

Consider it honestly. You have stood before a mirror; you have seen yourself in photographs and on video. But you know your own face only in the way an astronaut knows the Earth: from the outside, at a remove, beautiful and flattened to two dimensions.

I know how that sounds: like a flat-earth argument warming up in the wings. It isn’t. The Earth is unambiguously round, at least to anyone who understands how light behaves. It is simply a fact I want you holding before we go on.

You could sculpt a wax model of your own face (the most faithful likeness imaginable), and even if you managed it in ten minutes flat, that likeness would already be ten minutes out of date the moment you set down the tools.

Are we on the same page? No? No matter. You are on this page regardless, so we may as well continue.

Now then. Where was I. Oh yes. On seeing.

II

Let us consider what it must have been to be a human being whose Jays were aligned. A Jay, in the language I use, is one felt moment, made where a perceiver meets the world: who feels, what is felt, how heavily it weighs, and which way the moment leans, toward coherence or away from it. Picture them all leaning one way. Someone wholly aware of their own standing in time, and able to become timeless through a single sustained intent: the understanding that humanity was one.

We could name any number of prophets here, as I do in the second of my journals, and find in each of them a different account of the same occurrence: the same constellation of events gathered around a single human life, refracted through a different language each time.¹ Most of them, one way or another, told people to get still, and stay still long enough to feel what the day’s racket had been drowning out. So let us set aside the ego of naming any one of these figures, whose lives have already closed, and dream instead of what it would be to be an egoless thought moving through time as a whole.²

Dream, then, about what the world looks like to such a person.

First, I imagine very little sleep, almost none at all. An inner balance so fine that the person seems to know, to the ounce, how much it takes to carry a day to its close. And then sleep arrives in brief, deep installments that let the body recover, while a lucid, half-waking mind keeps its own counsel. To those nearby, such a person would seem almost self-powered. Almost alien, which is the word our own age keeps reaching for.

This, I would guess, is what alignment looks like from the outside: a presence so complete in the moment that it reads as divine, the mind receiving all of its signals at once, time itself among them.³

Do they see the future? Certainly not. The future is a boundless, churning field of possibility, and no one reads it. But do they understand how to move through the present so that it becomes timeless, through plain kindness, through doing unto others, until a name outlasts them by centuries? That much I find difficult to argue against.

Do they see the past? In a sense we all do. We hold the history that delivered us here and the forces that shaped us. But do we truly grasp how radically different it might all have gone, given the smallest alteration at any fork along the way (the butterfly effect, if you like)? What endures, in the end, is the intent. I call what a life sets moving and leaves behind a Trace, and a Trace carries the harm along with the good. The harm does not vanish. But once that life has become timeless, the harm reaches those who come after as a lesson.

III

And what are the senses enduring through all of this? Total overload: a load heavy enough to drive an ordinary person to madness, or, as the histories more often have it, to make him appear mad to everyone watching. For any number of reasons, such people align and then, almost at once, unalign, buckling under the sheer weight of it, or else turning to prove it to others, which is only the ego asserting itself by another route. That second motion, the compulsion to prove, I think of as my own kind of observer effect: being watched changes the one being watched.⁴

Take the Transfiguration, on the small scale. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain, and there he is changed before them. They see it (Moses and Elijah talking with him, the bright cloud, the voice) and do not understand what they see. In Luke’s account, Peter begins offering to build shelters, “not knowing what he said.” The account reached us copied by hand for centuries, with variants scholars still weigh. But what actually occurred on that summit? No one but Jesus could ever have known it whole.⁵

IV

Now let us widen the lens. The Miracle of the Sun: Fátima, Portugal, October 1917.

A crowd of tens of thousands (fifty to seventy thousand are the figures most often given) assembled in a single field, having been promised, months in advance, that a miracle would come. And then they watched the sun appear to perform: to dance, to spin in place, to plunge toward the earth and pull back, throwing off colors as it went, each witness rendering it a little differently from the next. The easy dismissal is mass hysteria, or the tricks the eye plays after staring too long at the sun. What gives even a skeptic pause is who told it. The devout who had come to look told it, and so did secular journalists and officials, some of whom had come expecting a fiasco: people with no wish to see anything at all, who saw something regardless. Some in the same field saw nothing.⁶

And here someone always raises the photographs, or rather the absence of them: the press was there in numbers, and not one plate shows the sun at all, only the crowd, looking up. I find that less damaging than it is meant to be. Humans have spent a long while now building machines to capture reality, and one thing has not changed across the whole history of the attempt: no matter how good the camera gets, a picture simply does not see the way an eye does.⁷ Which is closer to my point than to the objection. Put seventy thousand instruments in one field and you get seventy thousand readings. Put one lens there and you get one.

Tens of thousands of perspectives upon a single event. Tens of thousands of descriptions, no two alike.

Now draw all the way back in, to the one.

V

What would a single person experience in a single moment, drifting egoless through space and gathering in sensory data? Complete overload. Every sense at full capacity at once. Sight taking in the full circle, as if there were eyes at the back of the head. Smell parsing a dozen sources at a time. Taste heightened too, and since so little food is needed for fuel, the little that is eaten would taste extraordinary. Hearing pitched to an animal’s, every sound wave in the vicinity held apart from every other. And touch, reporting everything at once: the pull of gravity at the spot where the body stands, the weight of clothing, wind on the skin, the small contents of a pocket, the shoes on the feet.

But what of the “sixth sense” of time, the one the old accounts describe, and the one my own theory pictures as Jays aligned: the capacity to remain timeless? Picture the person at the sink, pouring a glass of water because thirst has arrived. In the same instant, they apprehend past, present, and future together, with the mirror of positive and negative threading through every part of it.

This grows tangled the moment we widen our view, so let us fix on the single instant in which the glass is filling. Every sense works in concert to carry out the task, leaving the mind free to think the moment even as it unfolds.

The mind holds every position in time at once. There is the proactive instant that precedes the act (got up to get the drink). There is the optimistic instant that follows it (thought of how good the drink would be), already building toward a future reality of thirst satisfied. Now turn the same vantage toward its negative face. Got thirsty: the adverse reality, arriving before there is any chance to amend it. Decided not to get up: the reactive refusal that skips straight to the ending. Judged that one glass would never be enough: the pessimistic afterthought that lands, inevitably, at thirst not satisfied.

But a truly balanced perspective holds one further option we have not yet named, the positive reality lodged in the past, prior to any decision to rise and pour at all: I was never thirsty to begin with. The Design, my word for life and everything in it, would grant such a person the thought-power to author that reality for themselves, perhaps in the very instant the thirst first stirred, and so to dissolve the entire positive-and-negative procession before it can begin, and with it the need for the water at all.⁸

This is a thought experiment about perception, not an experiment an average person should attempt.

And they would know that everyone around them is made of the same consciousness (catching sight of itself in every face, as you catch yourself in a shop window) and would treat each of them exactly as they would wish to be treated in turn. This is not divine intervention. It is divine intelligence in action, inexplicable across the whole length of history, yet worth considering in an age like our own.

Such a person would simply drift through time, needing little of this or that to go on living. Wondering, all the while, what their own face looked like, for they had never seen it, only heard it described an endless number of ways.

So — do you know what you look like?

Not alone. The mirror gives you one reading, already out of date. Everyone who has ever looked at you carries another. Hold theirs against yours and you come about as close as anyone does.

The human mind is a far more powerful instrument than we have ever given it credit for being.

Notes

1. Johnson, The Resonating Hymn of Divinity, sets the founders and sacred events of several traditions side by side and reads them as convergent reports, each in its own idiom, of the same few features of conscious life.

2. The image of an egoless awareness moving through time has a close analogue in the Dzogchen notion of rigpa, as Tenzin Wangyal presents it from the Bön tradition: a recognition in which the ordinary split between subject and object is seen as a construction rather than a given. What looks like superhuman autonomy from the outside may simply be the absence of the ego that normally stands between a person and the moment. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Wonders of the Natural Mind.

3. To perceive past, present, and future together without that perception being prediction is close to what Boethius means by eternity: interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, the complete and simultaneous possession of a life without end. Boethius, Consolation 5, prose 6. The idea is often named by the shorthand totum simul, the whole, possessed all at once. On Boethius’s account a timeless vantage does not foresee the future; it sees every moment in one undivided present, which is why the answer to “do they see the future?” is no. For Boethius that vantage belongs to God; lending a glimpse of it to a human life is this essay’s thought experiment. Spinoza comes at it from the other side: to grasp things sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, is to see them as they stand within the whole rather than as they pass in sequence. Spinoza, Ethics, part 5. Boethius reaches that seeing through the divine, Spinoza through reason; both hold time entire instead of walking through it.

4. What physicists call the observer effect is the change that measuring a system makes to it, through a physical interaction between the system and an apparatus or its environment. It needs no mind, and it has nothing to do with being seen by other people. The use here is a figure for something psychological; the physics carries none of its weight.

5. Matthew 17:1–9; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36. In all three accounts Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with him; they see Moses and Elijah, are overshadowed by the cloud, and hear the voice. Matthew and Mark place the scene on an unnamed “high mountain”; Luke says only “a mountain.” Mount Tabor is a later tradition, and some scholars prefer Mount Hermon on geographical grounds. In Luke 9:33 Peter offers to build three shelters, “not knowing what he said” (King James Version). Modern translations are made from critical editions of the Greek, assembled from manuscripts that reach back to the second through fourth centuries. That only Jesus knew the whole of what happened is my reading, not the text’s.

6. These are crowd estimates rather than a count. Figures for October 13, 1917, run from about thirty thousand to a hundred thousand, and fifty to seventy thousand is the range most often given; the day had been announced at the apparition of July 13. Avelino de Almeida, writing in the secular Lisbon daily O Século on October 15, reported what the crowd described without mockery. The testimony varied from witness to witness, and some present saw nothing unusual. Naturalistic readings, among them retinal after-effects of looking at the sun, atmospheric conditions, and collective expectation, remain in circulation beside the religious one, and nothing here settles between them. De Marchi, Immaculate Heart, gives the devotional account; Bennett, When the Sun Danced, gives the historian’s.

7. Press photographers were present, and the surviving photographs show the crowd, not the sun; the point is usually offered as decisive. A camera gathers light through a fixed aperture onto one film stock, from one position, for one exposure. An eye is a live instrument wired to a nervous system that is already interpreting. They answer different questions about the same sun.

8. That fourth option steps outside the positive/negative pairing instead of choosing a pole within it. It is akin to what Jung called the transcendent function: the psyche meeting the tension between two opposed contents by producing a third thing, a uniting symbol, that holds both. Jung, “Transcendent Function.” Jung wrote the essay in 1916 and published it in 1957. It is a psychological cousin of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of opposites that Nicholas of Cusa set out in 1440 and Jung took up in his late work on alchemy. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis. “I was never thirsty to begin with” undoes the binary.

Bibliography

Bennett, Jeffrey S. When the Sun Danced: Myth, Miracles, and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Portugal. University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by P. G. Walsh. Clarendon Press, 1999.

De Marchi, John. The Immaculate Heart: The True Story of Our Lady of Fatima. Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. The Resonating Hymn of Divinity: On the Universal Architecture of Faith. Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal Two. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20512320.

Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 14. Princeton University Press, 1970.

Jung, C. G. “The Transcendent Function.” In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 8. Princeton University Press, 1969.

Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton University Press, 1985.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of Dzogchen in the Native Bon Tradition of Tibet. Snow Lion, 2000.

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