At the local restaurant, in the window, they have a circular arrangement of small flashing lights. They are arranged in a continuous loop and the sequence of firing goes like this: first all the odd numbered lights flash on and then as they extinguish, all the even numbers switch on.
Can you visualise that? It is certainly a pattern you will have seen many times before. For me, it usually creates the illusion that the lights are running around in a clockwise direction. But with just a little application of the will, you can make them go backwards. It’s not really difficult at all to ‘make’ them go anti-clockwise.
Whilst I was sipping my glass of wine, waiting for my meal to arrive, I was wondering how other people saw this effect. Would they see it running clockwise or counter-clockwise I wondered? I managed to resist the temptation to ask, but then I began thinking to myself that those lights were not really moving at all; they were just flashing in a particular sequence.
So, armed with this knowledge and just a little bit more effort I was able to see the reality i.e. all the odd lights flash first, followed by all the evens. It’s quite amazing how we can so often fail to see reality. Our problem is that we are often so convinced that what we perceive – which is not the same as what we see – is right. Take a look at these images for a good example of what we are talking about.
The flashing lights provide a good analogy of a problem we constantly face in life. Turning this over in my mind made me realise that there are probably lots of things that are just like that. You know: you see things one way and someone else sees them a completely different way, possibly even the opposite way. Not only that, but you could spend a lot of time debating about which one of you was correct when, in fact, neither view would be a proper representation of the actual reality.
This is something I will be trying to remember when I next find myself in the kind of situations we were discussing here. Such an understanding might allow me the space to be able to detach from my perspective on the issue at hand, whatever it is and however I might feel about the correctness of my viewpoint.
Thanks Will. Your focus becomes my focus and I can feel very clearly that I learn something important whenever I read what you have written here. I’m still a bit of a newbie at making replies like this and its hard to express the level of thanks I mean to do so. I find your words very useful and they help me to gain more understanding of myself and my nature as a human.