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Sensing, Seeing, Shifting - Diana Clark

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on October 08, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Sensing, Seeing, Shifting

Good evening, and welcome. I hope everybody is doing okay with the heat we've been having; hopefully, we're on the tail end of that.

Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about this whole notion of seeing—that common yet complicated thing that humans do. First, I want to consider how we use the verb "to see" in English. There is the obvious one: the literal perception with the eyes, like "I can see the mountains from here." We also use "seeing" to talk about dating or being in a relationship: "They've been seeing one another for a few months." We use it to talk about imagination: "Can’t you just see yourself going down the slopes?"—an invitation to imagine something in particular. We even use "see" to mean "accompany," as in "I'll see you to the door." And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, we say that seeing is related to understanding: "Oh, I see."

I like it when simple words are used in so many different ways; we can look at them differently and understand things differently. In many ways, that is what meditation and Buddhist practice are about—taking something that seems ordinary and looking at it in a different way to gain a different understanding and a different impact. I want to look at this word "seeing" and what it points to from a number of different angles, particularly how it functions as part of a path toward greater freedom, ease, and peace. Understanding how we see—and how we don’t see—is a powerful support for practice.

Sensing and the Visual Apparatus

I’ll start with the obvious: using the senses, the eyes. In classical Buddhist teachings, they talk about how there must be contact between the eye apparatus and an object in order for seeing to happen. This sounds obvious, but there are several elements to this thing we do all day long. First, there is the visual apparatus itself. Not everybody has one that works, and for many of us, it doesn't work as well as it once did. As we age, we might notice, "Oh yeah, it doesn't work the way it used to," or "It works much better with my glasses on."

The second element is that there must be something to be seen. This requires something belonging to the human body and something that doesn't belong to the body in order for the experience of seeing to occur.

The Role of the Mind in Seeing

The mind plays a significant role in seeing; it’s not just about the optic nerve. Our experience of seeing is not like a camera. We’ve all had the experience of seeing a photo of ourselves and thinking, "Oh, do I look like that?" because we see ourselves in a particular way in the mirror. We don't get a perfectly accurate view of what’s "out there."

Sometimes we simply don't notice things that a camera would catch. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time teaching on Zoom. I would sometimes wonder if a person realized that in their background was a curious object they might not want everyone to see. I heard a story recently about a Zen teacher who was giving a talk in her official robes with a shaved head—very serious—not realizing that her underwear was hanging out to dry on a line behind her. [Laughter] I'm sure that wasn't what she was imagining when she was giving the talk.

This is a well-established phenomenon. For example, I was recently at the shore and noticed a particular type of seashell. I thought, "Wow, I've never seen anything like this! This is amazing!" Then, when I looked again, I realized they were everywhere; I just hadn't noticed them before. When you really look at something and the mind recognizes it, you start to see it everywhere. People often notice this when they decide to buy a certain car; suddenly, that car is everywhere. This is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon¹.

There are cognitive processes at work here that affect what we see. One is selective attention. Subconsciously, the mind decides that something is important or noteworthy. Once that decision is made, we start to see it more and more. What was previously unseen becomes seen. The second process is confirmation bias—the idea that because we are seeing something more often, it must be prevalent or important. We start to think, "This is everywhere; it must be true," simply because we are noticing it more often.

So, seeing is not as "innocent" as we might like to think. We don't see the visual field with the fidelity of a camera. In Buddhist language, we might call the meeting of the sense organ and the sense object "sensing," while "seeing" is what the mind does when it interprets, analyzes, or manipulates that data.

Seeing versus Looking

There is also a subtle difference between seeing and looking. Seeing is a natural, effortless sensory experience. Looking is an intentional, directed action. Seeing is when we walk along and see green plants; looking is when we stop and think, "Wow, look at how this plant is growing out of a crack in the sidewalk." Looking involves focusing and investigation.

If we become sensitive to the shift between seeing and looking, we can learn a lot about ourselves. What types of objects encourage this shift? For me, it was that plant in the sidewalk. I like the idea of greenery finding its way in difficult circumstances. My tendency to look at that confirms a preference I have.

When we become aware of what causes us to "look," we understand our own thought patterns. What do we pause and pay attention to, and what do we ignore? There is a short poem about this by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer²:

I’m not sure I could say they are beautiful, these brittle brown cinquefoil³ stems trembling in the wind, though part of me longs to find beauty everywhere. Ah, the longing to see beauty shapes the way I meet the world. There—seeing this truth—beautiful as a golden flower.

This recognition—"She’s always wanting to see beauty"—is an understanding of her own orientation. Why is it helpful to recognize these preferences? Because if we have an orientation toward beauty, for example, we will also see a lot of "ugliness." Everything becomes framed: "Is this beautiful? No. Is this beautiful? Yes." This leads to a pulling back from what we don't like and a grasping for what we do. Our lives become smaller because of this aversion.

We might also have a bias toward seeing problems because we like to fix things, or we look for things that don't make sense because we want to understand them in order to feel safe. There’s nothing wrong with these patterns, but we should understand how they affect us. We might fix things because we want to be seen as capable, getting stuck in an identity as "the one who fixes things." Or we might try to understand everything because we feel uncomfortable with uncertainty. This shift from seeing to looking can be a doorway to greater understanding.

Returning to Seeing

We can also practice the shift in the opposite direction: moving from looking back to seeing. We can relax the focus, soften, and just allow the "seeing" to happen. When we just allow the scene, there is less judging, comparing, and evaluating. When there is less comparing and judging, there is more freedom and ease.

I’m not saying we should stop using our intellect to discern between what is harmful and helpful, or wholesome and unwholesome. We still need that. I’m talking about the "not good enough" or the "who do they think they are?" kind of judging. This movement toward greater freedom doesn't just happen in a meditation posture; it happens in our everyday experience.

Our minds create suffering⁴ through all this judging and storytelling. A visual cue can trigger a reaction, which leads us down a thought train into more and more dukkha. For example, I might see paperwork on my desk and think, "I have to take care of that, but I can't because it reminds me of that terrible thing that happened, and I don't want to be reminded." So I don't do the paperwork, it gets overdue, and I feel bad because I don't want people to know I failed. This low-grade suffering is all connected to a few pieces of paper on a desk.

These stories take us away from the present moment. We are no longer experiencing our life; we are lost in fabrications that have no substance. If we are dismissive of ordinary, mundane experiences because we are waiting for something "titillating" to catch our attention, our life passes us by. We become disconnected from ourselves and others. Shifting from looking back to seeing—keeping things simple—helps us stay in the present moment.

The Insight of "Seeing Through"

Finally, there is a third type of seeing: Insight. This is "seeing through" something—not just looking at the surface, but seeing the quality of the experience itself. In particular, we see that things in the visual field arise and pass away. Their nature is to be inconstant and impermanent (anicca⁵).

Noticing this change shifts our relationship to objects. It makes them impersonal (anatta⁶). If something is shifting and changing on its own, it doesn't have to mean anything about me; it has its own causes and conditions. In the same way, what I take "myself" to be is also just a collection of experiences: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, and thinking.

This insight—noticing that everything "out there" and everything "in here" is changing—reduces suffering. It helps us find freedom and let go of clinging and expectations. We disengage from our habitual reactivity. We see that it doesn't make sense to try to hold on to things or make them go away, because they are already shifting. There isn't an "essence" inside here to which experiences happen; there is just the coming and going of hearing, tasting, seeing, feeling, and thinking.

These insights lead to the greatest freedom. We see that things are not as constant and solid as we initially perceived them to be.

Q&A

Question: What comes to mind for me is that eyewitness accounts are scientifically proven to be unreliable. How would you deconstruct that?

Diana Clark: That's right. It points to the biases we all have—biases about what is important and what things mean. It is actually impossible for a human brain to see something with the same objectivity as a camera, even though we are often convinced that what we saw is the absolute truth. We fight about what's "there" because we don't recognize that our perception isn't a perfect record.

Question: When we go into a museum, we might browse through and "see" art, but then something tells us we want to go "look" at a specific piece. It seems looking is an investigation or a connection.

Diana Clark: Yes, investigation. Especially with art, there is often a resonance—a stirring in ourselves that makes us want to go look closer. We can get curious about that: what are the types of things that cause that stirring? Are they beautiful things, confusing things, or perhaps even "ugly" things?

Question: Would you say that the fewer filters we have within our perception, the "truer" we would see or look?

Diana Clark: That word "true" is interesting. While fewer filters might help, I don't think it's possible for a human to have zero filters. The power lies in recognizing what our filters and biases are—noticing what catches our attention and why.

Question: I was reminded of Shakespeare and Much Ado About Nothing⁷. The audience has information the characters don't have, and you watch them unfold this drama based on their faulty perceptions—what they overhear or think they see. Sometimes it resolves comically, and sometimes, as in The Merchant of Venice⁸, it ends poorly. It can be dangerous.

Diana Clark: Yes, human life is filled with these misunderstandings. It is the same for hearing and listening—noticing the shift from just hearing to "listening" can show us what catches our attention there as well.

Question: My dilemma is being aware of cognitive biases but then challenging my own beliefs to the point of "gaslighting" myself. How do we navigate the line between acknowledging our limitations and not falling into nihilism or denying protective beliefs?

Diana Clark: It is tricky. If we hold our views not as "the truth" but as our "current understanding" or a "hypothesis," we don't have to insist they are right. We can say, "This is what makes sense to me based on the data I have," and remain open to changing our minds when more data comes in. There is real value in questioning our beliefs—asking, "Am I sure about this?"—without necessarily denying our current reality.

I wish you a wonderful rest of the evening at just the right temperature. Thank you.