Too Bad I Didn't Have the Foresight to Give this a Title

By -
“Seeing is believing,” a sentiment I learned from that ghost on the Polar Express. Sight as a sense seems to transcend just seeing the world around. To see is to understand. To wake up we open our eyes to perceive the world. We see the truth, a new perspective means looking at something from a different angle. Vision becomes a part of faith to see the divine both literally and figuratively.
Not The Polar Express
Mountain
In Darsan: Seeing the DivineImage in India, Diana Eck talks about seeing is a vital part of Hindu faith in India. The seeing of the divine becomes some important that “the places [to see the divine] becomes an icon” of the divine itself (Eck 73). Seeing is a vital part of the religious experience and feeling a connection to the divine. Being able to see the divine in the real world is integrated into the religion unlike the Puritan idea that religion must be entirely mental. Eck refers the rejection of religious images as a “Western antagonism to imaging the divine at all” (18). There is less religious faith placed into the literal sight of the divine for the West.
So how does a Christmas movie I watched as a child connect the religious experience of a country? For me, the answer is that to believe something, we must see it; and to be able to see something we must believe in it. Sight and belief are intertwined in a way that makes it difficult to separate them. If we cannot believe in the divine then how could we see it? But if we do not see the divine, then how can we believe it? To see means to believe in a sense, otherwise you would not trust your eyes.
Sight is difficult to connect to a personal experience since it acts as the understanding of those experiences. For example, if I recall a family meal to invoke the sense of taste, my sight is still a part of setting the scene. Vision helps me recognize the food, look at my family and see what I am doing. Though seeing can also evoke powerful feelings without any of the other senses. The awe and majesty felt when you see a giant mountain loom above you or the shoreline sprawl out below you. Watching the clouds stretch out in the sky or seen the sun shine down on the world. Sight has the power to inspire such strong feelings with its beauty. Sight is in itself a recognition of the divine.

Comments

  1. William MyungApril 24, 2020 at 11:10 PM

    I feel like sometimes our sight can be used against us. It can be used to hide and twist the truth. I think that "believing" with your sight necessitates making certain mental jumps. Like, maybe you can believe that someone is a good person, but you are not with that person 24/7. You would have to make inferences based on what you know of that person and how they behave.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more