Seeing isn't Believing.

How do you really see someone? I mean really enter into their being for a moment. Sure you can hear what they say, look at their expressions, ask questions and make notes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Sure you can investigate the history that made them who they are, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Sure you can summon up empathy and express your felt responses, but that’s not where I’m coming from either. We meet usually façade to façade. This isn’t shallowness; our façade is who we know our self to be, what we project as our truth of who we are. It’s the source of all our constructions. It is how I meet people 99.9% of the time from strangers to my dearest friends and my client meetings as a trainee therapist. I am there doing all the things ‘I’ do, think, feel, imagine and understand. All this is not what I’m talking about. Sorry to labour the point but I want to identify a completely different experience; that of when I’m not there, when this whole constructed self of mine is not present. I can’t describe it, only to say it is unquestionably different to normal perception. I experience the being behind the façade. I’m guessing it’s perhaps how particular people who have a deep penetrating stare, who seem to look right through you, are experiencing you. It’s not primarily that they ‘can see’ but that ‘they’ aren’t there in the seeing of you. Their eyes don’t reflect the usual presence of a person. It’s not that they’re hiding but for those moments ‘they’ are simply not there. Afterwards they can use what they’ve seen when ‘they’ are back again. What I experience at least is not thoughts but an all-enveloping movie, a complete experience of another being-ness. I achieved it the first time by more prosaic means; by ‘profoundly’ imagining the person standing in front of me and then stepping and turning into their place, and just as importantly leaving behind where I was. Try it.

In this way everything has a being-ness, behind the façade we see, that can be glimpsed, people, animals, trees, the earth. Not by conjecture or emotion but by simply not being there to do those things. But it is a struggle to find the effortlessness to put oneself in abeyance even for a little while. Then again it’s a very joyful habit.