In my search for why seeing is a problem in the West, I came across one more possibility. We will explore that in this lesson, Why People Can’t See, Lesson VI, Part B.
One hot August day, a friend walked twenty-five-odd New York City blocks to visit me. He arrived fatigued, sweat dripping from humidity. I knew his route: stinking bus exhaust and street side garbage cooking in the sun. Street repair clatter and the incessant blare of gridlocked honking. Unenforced “pooper-scooper” laws. There was plenty of visual violence, too — much clutter and litter and graffiti.
My friend complained about all his affronted senses, what he felt, smelled and heard, but he never mentioned what he saw. He illustrated for me how insensitive our Western eyes can be. I believe that for most of us who grow up in the West, we are taught to focus on hearing. Thus, some theorize, our eyes become weaker than our ears. In this lesson, let’s explore how it may happen and why it matters.
Our Talents and Our Weaknesses
I taught learning-disabled children for years. If they were disabled in one way, they made it up in others. I saw dyslexic children better at music or remembering facts. Those with speech or auditory issues noticed much greater visual detail around themselves.
Children on the autism spectrum had other gifts. Think of Temple Grandin, the autistic women whose hyper-sensitivities enabled her to feel with animals led to slaughter. I got to know one young man on the spectrum who became a noted genius with a music synthesizer. He lived with a painful sensitivity to noise, but without his disability he could not have heard every sound’s layered nuances. His disability/gift produced the most exciting and melodic music.
Nadia and the Left Side and the Right Side of the Brain
Then there is my favorite story: Nadia, a severely autistic three-year-old, could draw like Picasso. Some even compared her drawings to da Vinci.
Nadia would often just stand staring at nothing. To learn to talk at just over seven years old, she was placed in a strict behavioral modification program. As she began speaking in the third grade, her drawings lapsed to stick figures characteristic of her age, and she lost the gift of drawing like the masters. It makes sense. One side of our brains, our left side, oversees language; the other side oversees artistry.
Researchers say that the disabilities of some children make room for their genius. The lesser weaknesses in the rest of us may make room for other strengths.
For most of us who grow up in the Western world, the culture teaches us to focus on our hearing. Thus, some theorize, our eyes are weaker than our ears. So we relate to the world through hearing, not seeing.
Searching for the Answer
To answer why we are a hearing culture, I looked at a trend in psychology. When people show signs of trauma, psychotherapy has begun to search for the experiences of past generations. An idea to explore is how millennia of Western philosophy and cultural conditioning may have influenced us. There may be cultural influence affecting visual perception going back nearly 6,000 years.
Looking At How Our Ancestors Dealt with Sound and Vision
Jostein Gaardner’s novel Sophie’s World suggests an answer. The novel’s teacher explains to young Sophie the basis of Western culture. The teacher cites two distinct language/cultural groups as the basis for Western culture.
- The Indo-Europeans, who believed we learn from seeing. The immigration of the Indo-Europeans (about 4,000 BCE) influenced the ancient Greeks and Romans, Europe, and Asia.
- The Semites, who believed hearing is the route to knowledge. The culture of the early Semites (3,800 BCE) provided the basis for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The Indo-Europeans
The Indo-European tribes lived along the Black and Caspian seas. They filtered into Iran, India, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, and most of Eastern Europe. All but Basque and the Finno-Ugrian languages — Lapp, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian — speak a form of Indo-European.
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Their religions tended to be pantheistic and polytheistic, believing in many gods. They believed divinity was in everything, so meditation was a common way to reach the divine. They believed that time was cyclical and has no beginning or end. Most importantly, the Indo-European culture associated vision with finding inner knowledge. Linguists who examine all the Indo-European languages find common root words.[1]
The Semitic origin of Jews, Christians, and Muslims
The Semites originated in the Arabian Peninsula..
They were eventually ” monotheistic believing in only one God. While the Indo-Europeans sought divinity from inside themselves, the Semites prayed to a deity outside themselves. In time, they looked for the divine in scripture — the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an.
Unlike the Indo-Europeans who expressed the love of the divine in pictures and in sculpture, the Semites forbade it. This is a reason some of the most beautiful tiling is in mosques. Leaders wanted beauty but feared that sacred images would lead to idolatry. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image of God,” their scripture warns.
They believed that time was linear, created by the divine with a beginning and an end, beginning with the creation of light and ending on “the end of days” or “judgment day.” The Catholic Church who incorporated the Semitic view of linear time, rejoiced when scientists came up with the “big bang theory,” a beginning.
Most important, the Semitic culture associated hearing with finding inner knowledge. We can find many examples in the various language groups that sprang up from the Semitic language/culture. The Judaic prayer begins with the words “Hear o hear o Israel.” The Judaic scripture refers to people hearing the words of God. The Christian Book of John begins, “In the beginning there was the Word and the Word was made Flesh.” Muslims are “called” to prayer. Seeing is secondary.
The Basis of Western Culture
Christianity is based on a mixture of Indo-European and Semitic language-cultural groups. It spread first in the Indo-European Greco-Roman world. The Semitic-based religion fused with some Indo-European Greek philosophy. Christianity does utilize the Indo-European pictures and statues in its places of worship, but it kept Semitic monotheism, linear time, and the belief that hearing is the root of knowing.
All of Europe speaks some version of an Indo-European language that originated from a visual culture. As they adopted Christianity, however, they also adopted the Semitic monotheism, linear time, and hearing as a base of sacred knowledge. On the other hand, Iran and India, two Indo-European language/culture societies not influenced by Christianity, maintained an Indo-European view. The largest religion to emerge from those areas, Hinduism, spurred the belief in meditation. The visual words “insight” and “enlightenment” come out of Hinduism.
Can Something So Ancient Affect Our Way of Seeing in the West?
We can’t know for sure. Yet most languages still affirm ancient ideas of knowledge and wisdom. The religion of most early American settlers thought of their primary means of knowing as sound.
In contrast, the first peoples of North and South America have thought visually. Researchers find their likely origin was Indo-European migration from Asia through the Aleutian Islands south into North America. Their spiritual experiences traditionally emerged from “vision quests.”
Our Strength Is Hearing – Our Weakness is Seeing
People spiritually “called to hear” may lose their optical acuity. Visual stimuli enter our minds and may yet influence our subliminal selves. What we see, however, may not rise to consciousness. Thus, we have what Le Corbusier called “eyes that do not see.”
Our Western culture knows that music is keenly important. Concerts often become our meditative experience. Take The Grateful Dead. My massage therapist, Jeffrey, introduced me to the band. At first, I thought their music gave the wrong feeling to a good spa massage. Jeffrey insisted, though, that The Grateful Dead’s musical stories made it deeply mystical. In twenty minutes, the Dead did as jazz musicians do. They deconstruct melodies, returning to the main melody. The Dead’s crowds would suddenly awaken to a mystical meditative experience.
The crowd behaved as a single person. Their energy energized the band, in turn reenergizing the audience. With three Deadheads in my family, I have watched two generations travel the country to revel in this experience.
Sound and Technology
Six hundred four speakers, powered by eighty-nine 300-watt solid-state and three 350-watt vacuum-tube amplifiers generating 26,400 watts of power.
The Grateful Dead’s “wall of sound,” its 604 speakers powered by eighty-nine 300-watt, solid-state amplifiers as well as three 350-watt vacuum-tube amplifiers. Together, they generate 26,400 watts of sound.
Jerry Garcia, Beloved by Many
Jeffrey told me the story of when the leader Jerry Garcia was dying but made a miraculous recovery. The Dalai Lama weighed in on this event saying that the prayers, thoughts, and good wishes of his followers energized a cure. The Dalai Lama saw the religious aspects of a culture that found spiritual awakening by sound. Now we have a new generation of music followers with the Swifties. The meditative aspects of Taylor Swift’s music are less dense than the Dead’s, but it illustrates how sound is the culture’s dominant spiritual modality. (Yes, Ben and Jerry did name an ice cream after Jerry Garcia.)
When Vision Comes Through
Not all people in the West are hearing dominant. A friend reminded me of her artistic talent and said she believes it emerged because she was partially deaf until she was 10. Like many others, I find myself in a similar situation. My obsession with design is evidence that I am vision fixated. I wonder if it is because I have an auditory discrimination problem. It seems as if we are strong in one modality, we are weaker with the other.
As long as we occasionally visit the weaker side, that is OK. The West needs to occasionally open its eyes to look at the world around. It needs to see the visual noise that saps its Energy. But the West must first realize that our brains naturally override what we see unless we call attention to it.
It starts with a few individuals overriding the cognitive override of sight. Behind everything we see is a hidden geometry made up of the details of what we see. These are the fixations that the eye must absorb first. If the fixations rest on a geometric form resembling nature, it is called Sacred Geometry.
Eliminating unwanted fixations is simple. It’s as simple as picking up a piece of garbage off the streets or making sure our gum wrapper gets into the trash bin as we walk through the streets with our ear buds plugged in listening to Taylor sing “Shake It Off.”
Who are you? Before you decorate, you must answer that question.
[1] Common root words include the Latin videre, the English to see and video. The related Wissen (German) and viten (Norwegian) mean to know, and then there are the related English words wise and wisdom. The ancient Greek root to see was idein; the Greek idea (ἰδέα) meant form or pattern, which Plato used to mean knowledge.
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There are two parts to this website, The Lessons, which are more difficult in concept, and the blogs, which are lighter in nature. A blogs that you might enjoy with the same theme is:
When We Do Not “See” – An Invisible Line in the Sand
Two Lessons that relate to this blog are:
Seeing 101, A History of Visual Perception, Lesson IV
The Gestalt Laws of Perception, Lesson V
Please note that my website allows you to leave comments at the end of the blogs but not at the end of each lesson. If you have a comment or question about a lesson, you may email me at ruta@rutas-rules.com