if seeing is believing ..

Passing this on Dumbarton Road I can see it. Two googly eyes placed just so and there is the drainpipe creature agog in the light. I smile and delight in a slightly worrying fantasy where we have a chat and I keep cracking jokes in order to tell Drainy that he's "laughing like a drain !! Get it?? Drain.." Aside from this psychotic episode I thought about the eyes.

I'll believe it when I see it, is a common thing for people to say. I want to ponder a while on what "seeing" is.
We get so much information about the world from the available light of the sun through our eyes and how we then decompose this into the everyday objects and people that we meet. We make things familiar. This, we say, is how the world is: I can see it right there. Yet seeing is no pure neurological act of sending the truth signals of a thing to the brain. Like Drainy in the picture, our brain searches for a frame of reference and once it finds it it sticks with it. Suddenly there is wee mad Drainy, laughing like a drain.

The science of Perception details all these ways that we can deceive the brain into seeing something that isn't actually there - hello Magicians and Tricksters of the world - or into seeing two things in the one image, depending on what frame of reference we take. You know the kind of images I mean: it's a rabbit, no wait it's a duck.
Our eyes also only work by seeing light within a given frequency, according to our visual hardwiring. Does this mean that other frequencies do not exist? Well of course they do, we cleverly build machines to see infra-red. Can we then stretch the thought further that there might be other frequencies that we can't see and haven't the capability to build machines to register?
When I look at a friend, or my kids or someone who rubs me up the wrong way what am I seeing? The image on the retina is pretty much the same but my emotional response will be completely different to the next person seeing the same thing.
Is it possible then that we are blinded by the way we see? That it actually limits a purer more truthful engagement with the people and the things around us? We see race, gender, clothes, facial expressions etc... All trip-wires to judgement and not the person.
So, seeing shouldn't be believing. It's an old conjuror's trick to kid you on about a way of understanding the world. In my opinion, by-passing the fight-or-flight neural sparks leads to a deeper truth that leads to connectedness and not separation and, indeed, this in turn leads to seeing things in a whole different light.

What's that you say Drainy? Laughing like a ... hey! I told YOU that!!