Looking

On Seeing and the Promise of Somewhere Else

When I was growing up, spiritual authority was synonymous with Seeing.

Not ordinary seeing. The kind that seemed to have access to something somewhere else.

The big questions had been answered. God is. He made all this. Heaven and hell are. There is one way to live, and doing so correctly is the sole purpose of existence. I could not fathom what had been Seen in order to know these things.

I thought authority had access to something I didn’t. What I had was belief in things I couldn’t see.

When I left that world in my twenties, I came across a different instruction.

Test everything against your own experience.

Something about this drew me. It felt like a dare.

It also seemed to bring Seeing within reach: See for yourself.

Which terrified me.

What if I looked and saw something I wasn’t supposed to see?

Worse yet, what if I looked and couldn’t see what was supposed to be Seen?

Test everything could have simply meant look.

I read it as See.

The new got absorbed right into the old.

—

Not long ago I was having a day.

I could not settle. It seemed there was somewhere to go, something to find. Thought swirled and my body kept trying to move with it. Toward what wasn’t clear.

Something is unresolved.

This didn’t register like a thought. It felt like how things were.

I believed I couldn’t see something I was supposed to.

But I also knew this move well.

Tired, I sat down on the couch and dared to look instead.

—

Later that day I was reading Kant’s An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?

Kant argues against depending on others to supply one’s understanding. Sapere aude: have the courage to use your own understanding.

I recognized the arrangement being argued against.

They See. I believe.

And sapere aude sounded a lot like test everything against your own experience.

I was reading the essay on the couch—exactly where I’d sat a few hours earlier to look—when it struck me.

As a child I listened to the church say this is how it is.

But a few hours earlier, thought had been saying this is how it is too.

—

When I sat down to look, this is what I saw.

There was the TV. The small shelf of books. Hydrangeas in a vase on the table. Legs stretched out ahead. The living room.

The feeling of unresolvedness. Thought.

Here’s what I couldn’t see.

The missing thing that made life unresolved.

Eventually I noticed I was hungry and found myself getting off the couch to get a snack.

_—

I’ve been relying on something most of my life. I’m beginning to see what that reliance has been asking of what’s here.

Yet that doesn’t mean it easily sets down.

Seeing operated like a promise: there is something somewhere else that can be Seen.

Seek and you shall find Something.

Unable to tell me what existence meant, looking had first seemed too small.

Almost offensive beside what Seeing had promised.

Looking only looks.

Hydrangeas.

Thought.

Unresolvedness.

I was hungry.

I ate.

---

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Related Reading:

Touching Ground — The long way back to here.

Face — On what happens when an activity becomes someone.

No Other Place — On leaving inherited answers and staying close to here.