By Ethan Maurice | November 12, 2020
We are each viewing the world through a lens. This lens is difficult to notice, though, because it doesn’t exist.
Rather, this lens is a collective conception of influential intangibles: culture, beliefs, values, awareness, and all sorts of other ingredients we each picked up in our past. Together, these ingredients amount to a figurative lens — a lens that sits between the world external to ourselves and our internal experience of it — focusing our awareness on particular details.
Through books, writers with minds and prose superior to my own brought this lens through which we are each viewing the world to my attention. Had I not copied a few of their particularly profound passages into my Commonplace Book, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it:
““The question is not what you look at, but what you see.””
““We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and we call that handful of sand the world.””
““In the end it cannot be doubted that each of us can only see part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the painter sees another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and is still never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them.””
Herding these literary giants together and standing on their shoulders for a look, it is easy to see that we see the same things differently. In the process of sensation becoming experience, we seem to each have our own, unique, tremendous something dictating which sensations we consciously notice and framing what we think about them. For simplicity’s sake, we can call this the lens through which we view the world — a lens through which we must always look. This lens is like a pair of sunglasses inextricably glued to our heads tinting not just every ray of light, but our experience of all sensations.
One example of lenses at work that comes to mind was hiking way back into the Beartooth Mountains in Montana to find this glacier with my friend. After hiking for six hours, we were stunned to find the glacier, which was over five miles long when first discovered in the early 1900’s was simply gone. My immediate thought was, “damn, global warming.” While my friend with more conservative political leanings simultaneously said, “Wow, the local weather patterns must have changed.” I was even more stunned by this second discrepancy than the first. How could we glimpse something as simple as melting ice and simultaneously draw two completely different conclusions? Of course, our past experiences were filled with people telling us two very different stories about melting glaciers.
Once we realize the power of this lens that lies between us and our experience of the world, it’s natural to start asking questions.
Questions like, “do I like the lens I look through?”
Or, “What would the world be like through someone else’s lens?”
Or even, “My God! How do I take this thing off?!”
Understanding we all have a unique lens through which we are each viewing the world lends many awareness expanding questions and gifts. As a concrete concept, the lens helps us understand why others see the world fundamentally different from the way we see it. We can find compassion for even people we might consider “evil,” understanding their past experiences (and largely their childhood in which they had little control over) compose the lens through which they view the world.
Most curious, though, awareness of our lenses begs a question: can we shape our lenses? Because if so, we could fundamentally change how we experience of the world.
Our lenses are composed of culture, beliefs, values, awareness, and all sorts of other ingredients we each picked up in our past, right? And the experiences we have today will continue to shape those ingredients? So, by choosing some of the experiences we have today, does it not make sense that we can shape the lens through which we will view the world tomorrow?
I see this ability to shape our lenses by deliberately choosing certain experiences as an unsung fountain of free will. Of course, most of the experiences we will have will happen without our choosing. However, once aware that our experiences shape the lens through which we see, and that we can deliberately choose some of our experiences, each of us has the ability to become our own opticians, working to fundamentally change the way we will experience the world tomorrow by deliberately shaping our lens today.
This begs another question, though. What sort of experiences can we seek to shape our lens?
What follows is a short list of resources I’ve discovered thus far in life for working on my lens and better shaping my experience of the world.
5 Resources for Shaping the Lens Through Which We View the World
1. Books
For me, nothing cleans and shapes a lens like reading a book. There is something about the self-paced control with which you can read and re-read a passage when you have a hunch you’re not quite grasping something the author seems to grasp. Like suddenly noticing the edge of the protective plastic layer on a scratched up cell phone screen, thumbing for it, and peeling it away for a clearer view — books are like that for the lens through which we experience life.
Perhaps early twentieth-century French novelist and purveyor of remarkable insight, Marcel Proust penned it best: “the writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
Also, what we read is of utmost importance, because we will both see and become more like the books we read. Here’s one of my greatest hero’s recommended reading lists. I keep a list as well.
2. People
The more time we spend with a person the more our lens will be shaped by theirs.
Over the past few years, my brother has been working to become a fitness and mobility expert. I have a background in anatomy from college, so we often discuss his latest discoveries. Lately, he’s been studying correct posture for anything from sitting to running to lifting weights. Now, when sitting, running, or lifting weights, I can’t help but analyze and try to better my form.
The headstanding man about to be plowed by a wave in the photograph above sees possibility in the present better than and any human I’ve ever met. I took some of the best chances I’ve ever taken largely because I spent a grand summer in Hawaii attached at the hip with him and now see opportunity the way he sees opportunity.
While this strongly suggests we want to spend time with we want to see more like, it is also vital to spend time with a wide variety of people. If we surround ourselves only with people who have similar views to ourselves, the dust of unawareness will not be cleared from our lenses and we will run the great risk of thinking what we see is what is, and that anyone who sees it differently is simply wrong.
Lastly, discussion groups rock. Discussion groups are places where everyone examines their lenses together and collectively try to see the world a little clearer. Here’s an article about one I created a couple of years ago.
Photo courtesy of erika.gallery
3. Art
Proust, the French novelist I previously quoted above, believed art was the best way to see through another lens:
“A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we really fly from star to star.”
I didn’t understand this function of art until I built a portfolio website for my mom’s photographs. Through many hours of interaction with her art, my experience of sight began to shift. The best way I can describe it is I used to see objects as separate and more so for their function, but now sight sometimes becomes this whole, ever-changing-based-on-where-my-eyes-are tapestry in which movement of my point of view is not unlike the spin of a kaleidoscope. Great artists offer the world what can be seen or felt, but for whatever reason isn’t.
4. Travel
I realize Proust just denounced travel as a means of acquiring “other eyes” in the above quote. But I disagree. It’s true, in foreign lands we will still view the world through our own lens, but potential lens shaping influences are all around.
A culture fundamentally different from our own just doesn’t feel quite right, and this constantly felt incongruence is insightful, lens-shaping friction. The way people do things won’t always make sense, and our lack of understanding spurs us to find out what or why others see differently.
For truly lens shaping travel, observation is not enough — we must participate. Our lenses are not composed of observations, but experiences. Observation may open new ways for us to think, but it takes experience to fundamentally change the lens through which we see.
5. Mindfulness
Whether we know it or not, we are all our own opticians, making choices that will shape the lens our entire sensory experience must pass through before becoming the version of “reality” that exists in our heads. As no two people have ever lived the exact same life, everyone’s lens is shaped at least slightly different. It is up to each of us as individuals to decide how best to shape our own, unique lens, based upon its current shape.
To be aware of the shape of our own lens requires a certain mindfulness, mainly self-observation and awareness for those “Aha!” moments when the difference between our lens and someone else’s shows. The more we mind the lens, the better we can see through its distortions and work to shape our own.
Other Resources for Shaping the Lens Through Which We View the World
This list is but a handful of powerful resources for shaping our lenses. There are many others that I am simply unaware which are obviously not included in this list. Other resources I don’t have the space, personal experience, or will to write into the permanent record of the internet at this time include:
Various forms of talk therapy
Holotropic breathwork
Marijuana
Magic mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelics
Each works best led by professional guide, someone experienced we can trust or, at minimum, extensively researched beforehand.
A Limited View of An Endless Landscape
It’s funny if you think about it. Our lenses shape our view of the world precisely because our view of the world is so limited.
To pull from the Pirsig quote above again, we simply change the grains in “handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness” we grasp, and we experience the world differently.
By approaching the world with curiosity and understanding of the limited scope of our lenses, we can shape and re-shape our experience of the world at a fundamental level.
What a weird, wonderful human freedom.
