How to See Differently

Hello and welcome to life as lab - a philosophical lifestyle column for messy times.

Darshana, the Sanskrit word for philosophy, literally means seeing. Not as in a worldview — more like the act of seeing itself. As a verb.

Philosophy gets used three other ways, too — a way of living, a practice, a worldview. I mean all of them at once, and I almost never say so. When I say philosophy as a way of life I mean life as a lab, when I say practice I mean the PhilosophyGyms, when I say worldview I mean the mechanistic one that caused much of the social and environmental damage of our times.

So, philosophy is that which allows us to see things in a certain way. Ayurveda, for example is described as a philosophy which allows physicians to see patients the way Nature sees them. Other philosophies allow different ways of seeing.

I love this.

Because I have no clear way of seeing the world, I experiment with what is possible.

I explore ways of seeing. Ways of looking at what makes up a day, such that the mundane everyday, such as my mornings, body, my routines, my perceptions and other beings become visible as something other than resources or problems.

Philosophy as seeing means we can hold up a lens of optimization and everything becomes a thing to improve. Or we can hold up a lens of love and the same things becomes beauty. Not the objects, but the seeing changes.

We can test this in any afternoon. Pick one ordinary thing — the dishes, the commute, your face — and ask: what lens am I holding?

We'll find one.

There's always one.

The question is whether we chose how we are seeing, whether we are able to choose*. Or not.

This seems obvious when I write it.

And yet it’s not always obvious in my day-to-day experience.

Ayurveda sees the body the way Nature sees it. I want to see the world the way Nature does.

*And even the choosing though is always already co-constituted through us as relations, not us as individuals. So how we choose is determined by today’s weather, your upbringing, and maybe your past lives.

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