Odysseus and the Blind Seer

We sometimes say “Come to your senses!” to enjoin somebody to wake up to how things actually are. Usually though— you may have noticed—people don’t magically get sensible just because we are imploring them to. (Nor do we when we implore ourselves.) Their whole orientation—to themselves, the situation, and everything else—may need an overhaul, sometimes a drastic one. How to go about that? Sometimes, it takes a health crisis to wake us up—if it doesn’t kill us first. We say “He has taken leave of his senses” to mean he is no longer in touch with reality. Most of the time, it is not so easy to get back in touch. Where would one even start when you are already so off?Andwhat if the whole society or thewholeworld has taken leave of its senses, so that everybody is focusing on some aspect of the elephant but nobody is apprehending the whole of it? Meanwhile, what we thought was an elephant is morphing into something more like a monster running amok, and we are stuck, unwilling to perceive and name what is so, much like the spectator–citizens in the realm of the duped emperor with his new set of invisible “clothes.” The fact of the matter is that it is not so easy to come to our senses without practice. And as a rule, we are colossally out of practice.We are out of shapewhen it comes to our senses.We are out of shape when it comes to recognizing our relationship with those aspects of body andmind that partake of the senses, are coextensive with the senses, are informed by the senses, and are shaped by them. In other words, we are colossally out of shape when it comes to perception and awareness, whether oriented outwardly or inwardly, or both. We get back in shape by exercising our faculties for paying attention over and over again. And what grows stronger and more robust and flexible through such workouts, often in the face of considerable resistance fromwithin our own mind, is a lot more interesting than a bicep. Most of the time, our senses, including of course our minds, are playing tricks on us, just from force of habit and the fact that the senses are not passive but require coherent active assessment and interpretation from various regions of the brain. We see, but we are scantly aware of seeing as relationship, the relationship between our capacity to see and what is available to be seen.We believe what we think is in front of us. But that experience is actually filtered through our various unconscious thought constructs and the mysterious way that we seem to be alive inside a world that we can take in through the eyes. So we see some things, but, at the same time, we may not see what is most important or most relevant for our unfolding life. We see habitually, which means we see in very limited ways, or we don’t see at all, even sometimes what is right under our noses and in front of our very eyes. We see on automatic pilot, taking the miracle of seeing for granted, until it is merely part of the unacknowledged background within which we go about our business. We can have children and go for years without really seeing them because we are only “seeing” our thoughts about them, colored by our expectations or our fears. The same can be true for any or all of our relationships. We live within the natural world, but, much of the time, we don’t notice it either, missing the way sunlight might be reflecting off of one particular leaf, or how surrounded we are in the city by amazingly misshapen reflections in windows and windshields. Nor do we sense, as a rule, that we are being seen and sensed by others, including wildlife in the landscape—you’d know it better spending the night in a rain forest—and in ways that might very much diverge from our own view of ourselves. Perhaps, such pervasive and endemic blindness on our part as human beings is one reason Homer, at the very dawn of the Western literary tradition, crafting his orally transmitted tale circa 800BCE, in the middle of The Odyssey, has Odysseus seek out Tiresias on the border of Hades to learn his fate and what he must do to return safely home. For Tiresias is a blind Excerpted from the book Coming To Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Copyright © 2005 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. Published by Hyperion. All Rights Reserved.