I recently took a virtual reality picture of a local bookstore (click on the picture to see it). It was for a worldwide virtual reality photo project with the theme “concrete”. I used the picture of the bookstore to highlight the concrete nature of physical books against the ephemeral nature of ebooks. This comparison also made me think of the concrete nature of the material world relative to the spiritual, so that this picture makes a good illustration.

Of course, there’s no evidence of ebooks in the picture; they aren’t present at all. At least, you can’t see any, for ebooks aren’t something that you see independently of the display of an ebook reader. Electronic books are really just computer files.

Yet in another sense, they were all around me when taking the picture. The smartphone in my pocket had an ebook app with many books loaded on it. The computer in the corner could have been displaying an ebook or had some on its hard drive, and a wireless network permeating the whole space could have been filled with the transfer of ebooks and access to services related to them. In a more abstract sense, many books in the store undoubtedly have electronic versions, so that the titles point to ebooks in a very real way.

So while ebooks are not immediately visible in the picture, they really were present in many different ways. It’s just that they were invisible without taking deliberate steps to see them, taking actions that make no sense otherwise, like using an ebook reader.

This is a nice illustration of the present, yet unseen, nature of spiritual reality. It is readily available and all around us, but we need to make the choice to look, and take deliberate action to see it. Some of those actions may make no sense without the spiritual, but that makes them no less valuable.

It’s all about having eyes that truly see.