Today I had thoughts like this. And I use this to show you the power of our imagination. I wondered what a blind person 'sees' the world as. First, we will Analyse the scenario, then we would discuss the learning points. And finally, I will show you what to imagine next.
It reminds me of the teledrama 'Kung Fu' which I have seen years and years ago. The story of a runaway monk who lives a shadow life under different names. It had exiting episodes with full of life advice. I can remember the teacher, the 'grasshopper' had. Teacher was blind, yet he could see the world with his hearing, smell and tactile sensations. He could see more than the one with eyes. That is only one example. More modern example can be found in marvel comics. The Daredevil is blind. Yet he could see with his ears, and even fight Kingpin and win a brutal battle. Although I am not sure about the former the latter is blinded, during his childhood. So, at least he would have an imagination of how the world would be like in colors.
Perspective of a blind person
With these imaginations, I invite you to imagine perspective of a blind person. Imagine a person born blind. If you close your eyes, you can quickly switch into that mode. Yet it is not complete. When we close our eyes and keep them closed, we do not see anything, yet we know, where we are and what kind of things are surrounding us. Now, try to forget where you are and try to imagine that you are blind from the beginning, that you came into your room with closed eyes. It is empty right? It is empty except what you hear or what you can touch, what you can feel and what you can taste. Most of it is empty. That is empty only because we are so much used to our vision. When that is not there, we 'see' the vision is not there. I bet a blind person would feel otherwise.
The blind person would feel the room is full of warm air, sunlight, and silence, and his world would not be that empty like ours. He would feel the smell of the dampness of the bedsheets. And the presence or absence of the others. He would touch and feel the general arrangement of the room and settle down when the mental picture of the room is complete. And like all of us, he would start wondering and making judgments on what he hears, and feel, and start to be happy and sad with this mental world of his.
Power of imagination
Now, we have somewhat reliable picture of what a blind person's world look like. We can start imagining more and more. If you read my article on a talking tree, you would notice that a 'tree' 'sees' the world differently than us. That is going backwards on the evolutionary tree. Yet surely the tree has a different picture of the same world, even animals do. If we move forward in the evolutionary tree, imagine a person who could see through material with mental focus. Imagine that person can even see through walls and see through your skin. He would say that your liver looks abnormal and ask you to get a surgery done. He would say a burglar is coming before even he break your windows. And relative to that person, we would be blind. He would say that we are blind, and we are not harvesting the full potential of the world. If he is kind, he would empathies us. Would you agree with him? If you passed a judgement on a blind person, I suggest we can take it back now.
We can discuss what we have learnt so far from our little thought experiment. It seems, that although we experience the same world, for a blind person the 'world' is markedly different from us. And if we take our sensations one by one out of the equation, the 'world' would disappear completely if all the sensations are gone. So, essentially, we can give a different meaning to living. Living is just creating the mental image of something. For living to happen, both the sensations and the 'world' should be there and as we already know they co-exist rather than one after the other.
So, why do we have to investigate such phenomena? Can't we take what is true, as it is. Can't we take what we see is as the truth? But, as the latter example, there is a danger that we all are blind as a species to the truth, which just hides in front of us, just in our clear eyes. Is there truth hidden in front of us?
Join us with this beautiful thought journey to find out.
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