Still not done: what is seeing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAijya6GL4&list=RDfgAijya6GL4&start_radio=1

These stereogram videos are excellent objects of meditation.

They trick the visual system into creating an entity that is not there.

Through this we can see how it works when it creates things that are there!

Now previously I've marvelled at the "hallucinatory" nature of visual experience. How the appearance of things when they are seen is a pure miracle.

But here I want to look at this from another angle.

Who is seeing this?

Now normally, say when we are driving, we use our vision for a purpose to safely navigate along the roads. If we go to the cinema we use our vision to embed us in a story and experience created by the movie makers. This is seeing. And we tend to absorb into this seeing and not think much more about it.

But when we are not doing anything else and have time to consider seeing for its own sake, as it is we probably look at it as still "doing something."

Altho while:

"what are you doing?"
"oh I'm watching TV"

makes sense:

"what are you doing?"
"oh I'm seeing"

doesn't make so much sense.

And in there is the mistake. We settle down to watch the rotating mandala stereogram and then begin to examine what is there from a questioning perspective of what is that and how can it be there when it is just empty space in front of me.

So until almost all other demonstrations of seeing, here seeing is becoming the object of enquiry. Where say I may watch a bird in the garden normally, in this aware enquiry mode seeing itself has become the object of enquiry.

And the mistake is that we think we are looking at seeing, in the same way that seeing looks at things!

Turn that around. If see is looking at thins, how can we examine the process of seeing as if it was an object of seeing itself?

So the problem appears to be that we are used to "doing" things. I'm going to the shops to buy bread. We starting doing walking, and shopping and we get home with bread. A lot of doing.

When it comes to seeing we think in the same way. I am seeing.

But are you? How do you go about seeing? You have no idea, it just happens. You cross your eyes and suddenly from no where the 3D image of the rotating mandala gets created.

We take a short cut and say well I made it by crossing my eyes. If that was true cross them now and see what pops up. Crossing them was just a very specific part of it, the rest is magic.

Seeing is magic. And here it all starts to fall apart.

Do I really see? I'm not sure I do anything. Seeing happens all by itself.

Now this is rather unsettling. Perhaps a slight unsettled feeling in the stomach. The gradual dawning realisation that underpinning what I take as the commander of the world, there are a lot of little minions just getting on with stuff. And obvious example is our heart pumping away in every moment of our life, and our breathings. and the digestion in our stomach and endless things that all happen by themselves. We just sit on them like on a washing machine that has its own program cycle and we don't really have to do much.

But when it comes to something as intimate as seeing we are more unsettled that it is not us doing the looking.

That is a story that we narrate over the top.

What is actually happening is a miracle that we have no idea about.

And perhaps I lost the key thread here: there is no seeing of seeing here. Seeing is the creation of what is seeing. There is no secondary seeing of that to enquire about how it happens. That second seeing is a narrative that comes from always approaching things by doing something. We naturally think when the 3D rotatig mandala turns up that it needs to be seen again to be examined and studied. There is no second seeing, not usefully. We may narrativise that there is, but it makes no difference, it is just a story in the way that an action man can look at his tank, or so the kid can pretend he does.

So looking at the 3D mandala is how it comes into vision. That is the looking. Studying it then as a marvellous miracle in the room is not a second seeing. The seeing is done.

And that removes an avenue of time wasting. we can get stuck looking at the things we are looking at believing we are examining seeing a second time, like a bridge of the SS Enterprise in Star Trek looking at the display. There is no second display in our heads there is just seeing the first time.

Seeing is what makes the mandala. There is no second sensing. What comes next is just questioning and narratising what is there. And it is in the process that we get the sense that it is "I" who is seeing. Having no second seeing, means that there was no one there when it was first seen! and that is what the narrativising is trying to reconcile and cover up!