Imagine a vertical line of LEDs in front of you. They seem to be partially lit, flickering slightly. To the left and right of the line are individual LEDs, periodically flashing back and forth. As you look over the scene, images appear for a moment. However, the more you look for them, the more you concentrate on seeing them, the less they appear.

Some directions instruct you to follow the lights on the side as they flash back and forth. As a result, you shift your gaze shifts back and forth. Suddenly the momentary images appear regularly, and you find that you see them only when shifting your gaze in time with the other LEDs. Doing anything else, especially staring at the vertical line, makes the images disappear.

This effect is related to other toys in which a line of LEDs waves back and forth to create an image, often a clock. However, in this case the LEDs are stable and it is one’s eyes that move.

The result nicely illustrates the idea of seeing fresh perspectives. In this case, it’s not enough to enhance our normal vision like we do through technology, with microscopes or telescopes or other machines. Focusing more and more closely doesn’t help. What’s needed is to participate with the effect we are trying to observe. We need to do something unusual, so that our perception matches the reality.

This can help illustrate the hard-to-grasp nature of the spiritual, and why it does not seem obvious. It requires a different perspective, not just a closer look with conventional thinking. Imagine focusing on the LEDs without knowing the secret, recording each one and looking for patterns, making guesses about what’s going on. It’s possible that the closer we look, the more we’d become convinced that there’s nothing there. Even if someone were able to map out the pattern in a drawing or video, that’s a completely different experience than seeing the patterns directly.

In a way, thinking about spiritual matters from a natural standpoint is like focusing on individual LEDs, trying to see the patterns by staring intently at the column rather than moving in synchrony. Instead, we need to follow the movement and include spiritual reality as part of the thinking process. For example, it’s very common to evaluate spiritual concepts using only natural definitions of good and evil, or physical life and death. In other words, reasoning about the spiritual while ignoring key aspects of it. Instead, we should accept all aspects of a spiritual perspective in order to evaluate it correctly, and include things like spiritual life and eternity. We still may disagree with the results, but at least we would be reasoning coherently.

Maybe this is like human relationships: we can study them all we want, but we need to participate in order to really understand.

I think there’s more to be said about what it looks like to see in this way, hopefully to be explored in future posts.