Vision is taken for granted. We all have eyes. You may believe that you see what I see. That is a false assumption. You see want you have learned to see.
"It is only with the recent discoveries about the visual brain that our concept of vision as a process has changed. We now view it as an active process in which the brain, in its quest for knowledge about the world, discards and collects selected information, generating the vision in the brain, much like an artist. (This is within the last twenty five years.)"
"Visual Intelligence occupies almost half your brain's cortex...it is intimately connected to your emotional intelligence and your rational intelligence. It constructs the elaborate visual realities in which you live and move and interact. It forwards these constructions to your emotional and rational intelligence, which use them as raw materials in further constructions." Donald Hoffman, Visual Intelligence
Joseph Conrad wrote, "The mind of man is capable of anything- because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."
"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back anymore - the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us into joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires - expires too soon - to soon, before life itself." Joseph Conrad
"We dream of traveling through the Universe - but is not the Universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us - the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds - the past and the future - is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows - it throws its shadow into the realm of light. At present this realm certainly seems to us dark inside, lonely, shapeless. But how entirely different it will seem to us - when its gloom is past, and the body of shadows has moved away. We will experience greater enjoyment than ever, for our spirit has been deprived." (Novalis, from "Miscellaneous Observations", 1798)
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world, is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one." John Ruskin
"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books, in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books.. a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects." Andy Goldsworthy
"Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. "Childlikeness" has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. Then this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like the showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage." D.T. Suzuki
Robert Farris Thompson writes, "persons possessed of the spirit of the Yoruba deity...look anbout grandly with fixed expressions the radiance of the eyes, the magnificence of the gaze, reflect ashe the brightness of spirit..According to the Yorba:
"The gods have "inner" or spiritual eyes with which to see the world of heaven and "outside" eyes with which to view the world of men and women. When a person comes under the influence of a spirit,his ordinary eyes swell to accommodate the inner eyes, the eyes of god."
People think that they see, but they don't. Henry Moore