I like to think that this blog is about all things Inspirational.  That being so, we take yet another turn from Inspirational music to the fascinating world of vision.

I’m not exactly a frequenter of doctors.  I think I remember visiting all of two in my lifetime.  As a practicing Christian Scientist, I handle my physical problems through prayer and it works, so I’ve simply not had to go that route in life.  Nothing against doctors, in fact I think most of them do wondrous work helping people survive the trials of the body.

Last week, however, I had occasion to have a requisite eye examination and so I trooped off to a local College of Optometry where it would not cost me an arm and a leg.  There I was ushered into a room with a 4^th year student, a young Asian lady who, I’m sure, will one day soon make a fine doctor.

I spent a little over an hour under her care in a chair surrounded by the world’s space age machinery all designed to help her look deeply into my eyes.  And oh so deeply she did.

She explained that she could see down the tunnel of my pupil, the little black hole in the center through the lens into the jelly, the vitreous gel, that makes up the eye, all the way to the back of the eyeball where the retina lives.  There the world imprinted its colors, light, shapes and patterns onto my camera-like lens only to be transported to the tiny receptors in the form of blood vessels, the optic nerve, carrying the image to my brain.  It’s probably a bit more complex than that, but that’s the basic idea.

As I sat there in my space chair and she probed with her light into the recesses of my eyeballs I began to consider this wondrous world of seeing.  In the course of an hour the thoughts that raced through my brain totally blew my mind.  What an amazing gift we have that we can see!

Consider the concept!  Who but God could have possibly invented such a thing as to see – to take in the world around us through two balls of jellied protein and focus these two little tools on whatever we choose far more quickly and for most far more accurately than a Nikon camera.

I began to talk to my young doctor about the miracle of seeing and share my thoughts about the act itself.  She explained the technical side of it, but I was more interested in getting to the spiritual side of the whole idea.

I hauled out of my memory bank one of my favorite sayings of Albert Einstein and laid it on her.  “It’s not that something is out there and so we see it; rather, we see it and so it’s out there.”  I asked her what she thought of this concept knowing that Albert’s credentials and good name would grab her attention.

She paused in her examination and yet still looked deeply into my eyes.  “He said that?” she answered.  “Wow, that explains what I’ve been thinking about and considering often lately in the back of my mind.”  Here was someone who will spend her life exploring the transference of light and shape to the brain thinking and reconsidering the entire structure of Optometry.

Think about it.  In this world of illusion we’re actually making it all up.  After all, we made up electricity, we made up the Internet, we made up the ability for man and things without wings to fly.  Why not make up the ability to see?    The complexity of the act is astounding.

In my own world I have explored the world of sound and vibration and it’s just as astounding that sound comes into our ears in the form of tiny vibrations passing through the air and hitting an eardrum.  Not so difficult to understand until you consider that those little wiggles convey the intricacies of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and that that little thin piece of membrane tissue can pick up the difference between the cellos and the violas.

Seeing is perhaps even more astounding.  If Einstein’s right, that in reality, perception works in reverse, if we actually understood this phenomena, would that not change the world – especially the world of the five physical senses?  Medical science explores the one theory, but who’s exploring the other?  We, the human race, could be missing a big bet here and wasting our time on the wrong theory.  Remember how the world used to be flat and if you got too close to the edge, you’d better be careful ‘cause you might fall off?

Then along came a guy named Christopher and blew a few minds.

Where out there is our modern day Christopher?  Seems like we have much more to learn about this wondrous concept of seeing.

Visualize this: An old white haired man in a rowboat floating through a red sea at sunset.  Got it?  Aren’t you seeing it?  I am.  I made it up.  You may not be seeing the exact detail that I’m seeing, but with 15 word symbols I was able to give you a vision.  What’s the difference between our imagination and what we actually see with our eyes?  Maybe none.  Perhaps Einstein was right.  Perhaps we have it backwards.

Food for thought.

For more inspirational music, thoughts and ideas from Peter Link,
please visit Watchfire Music.