"I See You." - Jake Sully, Avatar (2009)

Something scary that I heard once is that people who become blind see darkness, but people who are born blind see NOTHING. That is just such a crazy concept to me that makes me so thankful for the fact that I can see. While all senses are important, I feel that sight is one of the more important ones because it helps to confirm things. Sometimes you can mistake what you hear, mistake what you smell, and might even need a second opinion on how something tastes. But in most cases, when you see something, you see it, and sometimes it can be hard to un-see it. 

Apart from performing the necessary top-down and bottom-up processes, sight can be depicted to mean so much more, like how "seeing" is a religious experience to people of Hindu descent. "Darsan" is a religious connection that one shares with their deity in the Hindu religion; the people are figuratively "seeing" their deities. One of the things that struck me as interesting was how Darsan is not solely the devotee taking in the greatness of their deity, but is instead an exchange between the devotee and the deity. The idea of Darsan gives such power to the sense of sight and creates so much meaning with it that it enables the devotees to feel a religious connection via one of the most taken for granted forms of perception. It really adds meaning to the age old quote that "believing is seeing."


When I was thinking about how the sense of sight is given importance greater than what it actually is, I immediately thought of the movie Avatar. The characters in this movie use the line "I see you" almost synonymously with the phrase "I love you;" however, it almost means a little more than that. While "I love you" depicts a high sense of value and appreciation, "I see you" in the movie carries on an undertone of connectedness at a very deep level. The phrase takes the sense of sight and gives it so much more meaning, which I feel exemplifies how much we appreciate the sight of other people during times like these. I mean, we've been using video calls for classes instead of just audio calls, because the sight of others is something that we truly value. It's a comfort, to say the least. Seeing others is using our sense of sight to comfort ourselves, which makes this form of perception one of the most meaningful and important.