Seeing and Looking

I am standing on the back deck of our home looking out across the valley. The sky towers over the foothills of the Cascades in Southern Oregon. No matter how many times I look out at this scene each day, I see something new and different.

The light embraces the landscape -- never ending.

As I get older I see this world in new ways. My focus is no longer cast downward toward the earth, but skywards - into the clouds. There is a delicate yet complex relationship between the land and the sky. I have always looked at the earth and the sky as somehow separate -- one heavy and one light -- one cool and one warm -- one down and one up. Know I have begun to realize how coexistence becomes important in how I see the world.

Is there a difference between seeing and looking at something?

Lots of people think semantics is important. In this case it gives us a chance to understand how visual perception can be applied in our daily lives. Bates Lowry in the introduction to his book, "The Visual Experience" notes: "Looking and seeing are as different as babbling and speaking. To look means that our eyes operate only to the extent that they keep us from being hit by a car, assist us in learning the news, or amuse us through television.....Most people only look and do not see."

Frederick Franck in "Zen Seeing/Zen Drawing" argues:

"The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking-at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking at the world -- through the ever-more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes -- the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others."

Learning to see means that when we begin to see we start to notice shapes and forms in the world. Architect O'Neil Ford observes that we must learn to compare and analyze the things we see so that we can form opinions about what's good and what's bad. We when learn to see, our brain acts to process visual information based on knowledge gained from prior experiences.

According to Arthur Koestler in his book, The Act of Creation:

"Awareness is a matter of degrees….Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness."

At the same time, John Berger contends, “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”

So it is that we can distinguish between merely looking at things and seeing the relationships and contexts in which things become meaningful to us.