177: Learning to See

When we discover that we're not really separate from one another - that in a very ordinary way we are always deeply shaping and affecting one another - we also open to new ways that we might be of help to one another and care for one another. And we can also find that we can be profound teachers to one another - that we learn to see, feel, and hear in new ways by the very act of being present to each other. This episode of Turning Towards Life is a conversation about the gifts of reciprocity, hosted as always by Lizzie Winn and Justin Wise of Thirdspace.

This is Turning Towards Life, a weekly live 30 minute conversation hosted by Thirdspace in which Justin Wise and Lizzie Winn dive deep into big questions of human living. Find us on FaceBook to watch live and join in the lively conversation on this episode. You can find videos of every episode, and more about the project on the Turning Towards Life website, and you can also watch and listen on Instagram, YouTube, and as a podcast on Apple, Google and Spotify.

Our source this week is chosen for us by Justin.

Learning to See

To learn to see, then, is not simply to trigger a pre-established circuitry but to acquire a new use of one’s own body; it is to enrich and recast the body image.

Put differently and more dramatically, to learn to see—or to hear or speak or feel—is to become a new self, a self that includes (as the previous self did not) perceiving, speaking, or feeling.

This new self emerges at the instigation of other selves already possessing the requisite dimensions of human existence. Just as there are no teachers without students, no husbands without wives, no parents without children, so there are no human selves without human others. For the same reasons, there is no unchanging, independent self. Self and other are nondual. It is as true to say that relationship creates both self and other as to say that self and other enter into and create a relationship.

Photo by Edi Libedinsky on Unsplash