Seeing Things Clearly

“Everything you can imagine is real.” Pablo Picasso

Sean P. Durham

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We can never fully trust the validity of our own awareness. It is always shifting and morphing to meet the outside world.

Whatever we look at, and how we interpret the material object, or a constellation of human activity, is always tainted by our own pre-knowledge.

Even seeing something for the first time can be confusing enough, but our minds will draw on the many memories and reaction of fittingly similar experiences, and project rough ideas onto what we see — so we feel as if we already know, more or less, what it is we are seeing.

Balance

It’s good enough to live this way, it’s how it is supposed to be, nothing is fixed, life is a flux of events continuously crashing into each other. Our awareness perceives the broad ideas of life, and we teach it to focus on the smaller events. We find balance.

We can never be full sure about what we have seen because our memories will take the vision, log it, categories it, and distribute it through various nodes, lobes, cortex’ and channels until it has been established as a memory. In other words, it went through the mill before your brain decided what to call it.

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Sean P. Durham

Berlin Notes — Creative Writing about art, Life, photography & cats. https://seandurham.eu