Eye Optical Quotes

Jason once told me that eye contact is the most intimacy two people can have -- forget sex -- because the optic nerve is technically an extension of the brain, and when two people look into each other's eyes, it's brain-to-brain.

Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.

What you see with the eyes of faith is more real than what you see with your optical eyes.

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

The bar staff and croupiers all wore black with the same green triangle logo emblazoned on their shirts, and contact lenses which made their eyes shine an eerie, vibrant green. The bar optics glowed with the same green light, the intensity of which was linked to the music. As the bartender walked away to fetch the drinks, a breakdown in the techno track commenced and the bottles began to palpitate. The bartender's eyes glowed with a hallucinatory felinity that made Mangle feel nervous.

In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, [...]; and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors.

The eye: the window to the soul; the center of the face's beauty; the point where a person's identity is concentrated; but at the same time an optical instrument that requires constant washing, wetting, maintenance by a special liquid dosed with salt. So the gaze, the greatest marvel man possesses, is regularly interrupted by a mechanical washing action.

That's when I saw you, really saw you for the first time. I didn't intend to look at you, it just happened. It was like those pictures, you know, those optical illusions. You can gaze at them forever and see only one thing. Then when you relax your eyes for just a moment, another picture magically appears. The funny thing with that kind of visual trick it that it's really hard to go back to seeing the original picture once you've seen the new one.

Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?

There was a sudden sunburst in my head. And then black night. That blackness was sublime. I felt distributed through space and time: One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand 150  Under the pebbles of a panting strand, One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain, In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain. There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene, An icy shiver down my Age of Stone, And all tomorrows in my funnybone. During

When explicit thinking patterns were in charge, light waves of particular lengths were thought to stimulate Jenny’s optical nerve, changing hue of her eye color.

But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye.

And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair. It was a purely impersonal hunger, if such a thing there was - and here her report to Mr. Panicker faltered under the burden of his disapproval for her "romantic nature" - a hunger devoid of prurience, appetite, malice, or goodwill. It was a hunger, she decided later, for information. And yet there was liveliness in his gaze, a kind of cool vitality that was nearly amusement, as if a steady lifelong diet of mundane observations had preserved the youthful-ness of his optic organs alone.

Infrared satellite imagery, optical telescopes, and the Hubbell space telescope bring vastness within our visual sphere. Electron microscopes let us wander the remote universe of our own cells. But at the middle scale, that of the unaided eye, our senses seem to be strangely dulled. With sophisticated technology, we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close at hand. We thing we're seeing when we've only scratched the surface. Our acuity at this middle scale seems diminished, not by any failing of the eyes, but by the willingness of the mind. Has the power of our devices led us to distrust our unaided eyes? Or have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens.

Beauty magnetizes curiosity and wonder, beckoning us to discover—in the literal sense, to uncover and unconceal—what lies beneath the surface of the human label. What we recognize as beauty may be a language for encoding truth, a memetic mechanism for transmitting it, as native to the universe as mathematics—the one perceived by the optical eye, the other by the mind's eye.

It was a dimly glowing mass of pale-blue light, mottled, immense, and terrifying. Even at the first glimpse I knew it was not a sun. No sun can be so blue and so dim. It hurt the eyes to look at it, not because of its brightness. It hurt inside the eyes, up far into the optic track; the pain was in the brain itself.

The moment you are born your death is foretold by your newly minted cells as your mother holds you up, then hands you to your father, who gently tickles the stomach where the cancer will one day form, studies the eyes where melanoma’s dark signature is already written along the optic nerve, touches the back where the liver will one day house the cirrhosis, feels the bloodstream that will sweeten itself into diabetes, admires the shape of the head where the brain will fall to the ax-handle of stroke, or listens to your heart, which, exhausted by the fearful ways and humiliations and indecencies of life, will explode in your chest like a light going out in the world.

From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in the world of souls transparent to one other; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were--but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of sudden silence, the teacher, in a chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while and finally say: "What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?" Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place.

The concept of divine revelation was central to Augustine's epistemology, or theory of knowledge. The metaphor of light is instructive. In our present earthly state we are equipped with the faculty of sight. We have eyes, optic nerves, and so forth- all the equipment needed for sight. But a man with the keenest eyesight can see nothing if he is locked in a totally dark room. So just as an external source of light is needed for seeing, so an external revelation from God is needed for knowing. When Augustine speaks of revelation, he is not speaking of Biblical revelation alone. He is also concerned with "general" or "natural" revelation. Not only are the truths in Scripture dependent on God's revelation, but all truth, including scientific truth, is dependent on divine revelation. This is why Augustine encouraged students to learn as much as possible about as many things as possible. For him, all truth is God's truth, and when one encounters truth, one encounters the God whose truth it is.

But all this doesn´t happen effortlessly, as demonstrated by patients who surgically recover their eyesight after decades of blindless: they do not suddenly see the world, but instead must learn to see again. At first the world is buzzing, jangling barrage of shapes and colors, and even when the optics of their eyes are perfectly functional, their brain must learn how to interpret the data coming in.

To be honest, owls aren’t the brightest of birds, amazing as they are; parrots and crows are much smarter. It’s all in the eyes: those magnificent piercing optics are what make all owls look like they are deep in concentrated scrutiny and steeped in long-lost knowledge.

The individual, floating, but held on a leash like a dog, like an eye popping out of its socket, hanging on the end of its optic nerve, scanning the horizon through 180 degrees but not sending back any images—a disembodied panoptical terminal, runaway organ of a species of mutants.

That wall," explained the Shaggy Man, "is what is called an optical illusion. It is quite real while you have your eyes open, but if you are not looking at it the barrier doesn't exist at all. It's the same way with many other evils in life; they seem to exist, and yet it's all seeming and not true.

The South was like that optical-illusion drawing of the duck that is at the same time a rabbit. I’d always see the duck first, his round eye cheery and his bill seeming to smile. But if I shifted my gaze, the duck’s bill morphed into flattened, worried ears. The cheery eye, reversed, held fear, and I could see only a solemn rabbit. The Souths were like that drawing. Both existed themselves, but they were so merged that I could shift from one and find myself inside the other without moving.

They rode on. The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.

Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus — the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant — and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers.

Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness, of which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.

it was a reality shared by all the world, and not merely an optical delusion confined to their own eyes in their own garden.

Then she placed her hands, vertically, over her eyes and pressed the heels hard, as though to paralyze the optic nerve and drown all images into a voidlike black.

Schopenhauer and Spinoza distilled, condensed, and funneled through the pupil, along the optic nerve, and directly into our occipital lobes. I’d love to be able to eat with my eyes—I’m

He could swear he did not look back, could not—by any optical chance, or in any prism—have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture—which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.

When a body succeeds in emitting or in reflecting luminous vibrations in a distinct and recognizable order--I thought--what does it do with these vibrations? Put them in its pocket? No, it releases them on the first passer-by. And how will the latter behave in the face of vibrations he can't utilize and which, taken in this way, might even be annoying? Hide his head in a hole? No, he'll thrust it out in that direction until the point most exposed to the optic vibrations becomes sensitized and develops the mechanism for exploiting them in the form of images. In short, I conceived of the eye-encephalon link as a kind of tunnel dug from the outside by the force of what was ready to become image, rather than from within by the intention of picking up any old image.

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be either a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or the ball.

Maybe in the afterlife,’ I say, feeling sorry for him. ‘She’s my cadaver, Dad. And after today I can’t take her anywhere because I severed her optic nerve, so she’s got one eye hanging out. It’s not a good look.

That wall," explained the Shaggy Man, "is what is called an optical illusion. It is quite real while you have your eyes open, but if you are not looking at it the barrier doesn't exist at all. It's the same way with many other evils in life; they

In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.

Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye "sees" the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and "remembers" what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically "flinch." Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor.

Why is the world full of color anyway? Sunlight is white, and when it is reflected, it is still white. And so we should be surrounded by a clinical looking, optically pure landscape. That this is not what we see is because every material absorbs light differently or converts it into other kinds of radiation. Only the wavelengths that remain are refracted and reach our eyes. Therefore, the color of organisms and objects is dictated by the color of the reflected light. And in the case of leaves on trees, this color is green. But why don't we see leaves as black? Why don't they absorb all light? Chlorophyll helps leaves process light. If trees processed light super-efficiently, there would be hardly any left over-and the forest would then look as dark during the day as it does at night. Chlorophyll, however, has one disadvantage. It has a so-called green gap, and because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum, it has to reflect it back unused. This weak spot means that we can see this photosynthetic leftover, and that's why almost all plants look deep green to us. What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use. Beautiful for us; useless for the trees. Nature that we find pleasing because it reflects trash? Whether trees feel the same way about this I don't know, but one thing is for certain: hungry beeches and spruce are as happy to see blue sky as I am.

A tear can be shed in this place on several occasions. Assuming that beauty is the distribution of light in the fashion most congenial to one's retina, a tear is an acknowledgment of the retina's, as well as the tear's, failure to retain beauty. On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound. It is the deterioration of the greater speed to the lesser that moistens one's eye. Because one is finite, a departure from this place always feel final; leaving it behind is leaving it forever. For leaving is banishment of the eye to the provinces of the other senses; at best, to the crevices and crevasses of the brain. For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil. Likewise, disappearance of the beloved, especially a gradual one, causes grief no matter who, and for what peripatetic reason, is actually in motion. As the world goes, this city is the eye's beloved. After it, everything is a letdown. A tear is the anticipation of the eye's future.

When I closed my eyes, for instance, I occasionally saw very faint bursts of light: cosmic rays—high-energy particles from some distant sun racing across the universe and striking my optic nerve like a personal lightning bolt. The flashes were right at the edge of perception, almost as if teasing me to detect them.

Scarlett activated the viola and it came down like short shimmering curtain that covered her eyes with a band of violet light. It dilated her eyes, increasing her binocular summation so that everything in her field of vision was magnified and clear. It also protected her retinas from any sort of laser fire or plasma flash.

However, questions arise. Are there people who aren't naive realists, or special situations in which naive realism disappears? My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist. This happens whenever, with the help of other, second-order representations, we become aware of the construction process—of all the ambiguities and dynamical stages preceding the stable state that emerges at the end. When the window is dirty or cracked, we immediately realize that conscious perception is only an interface, and we become aware of the medium itself. We doubt that our sensory organs are working properly. We doubt the existence of whatever it is we are seeing or feeling, and we realize that the medium itself is fallible. In short, if the book in your hands lost its transparency, you would experience it as a state of your mind rather than as an element of the outside world. You would immediately doubt its independent existence. It would be more like a book-thought than a book-perception. Precisely this happens in various situations—for example, In visual hallucinations during which the patient is aware of hallucinating, or in ordinary optical illusions when we suddenly become aware that we are not in immediate contact with reality. Normally, such experiences make us think something is wrong with our eyes. If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book In your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you. In a nonconceptual and entirely nontheoretical way, you would suddenly gain a deeper understanding of the fact that this world, at this very moment, only appears to you.

[Howard's] eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were--illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive, and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end... 'Can you hear me?' I asked him. 'I know you can see me.' Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, 'So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.

She knew that if she tied this man up in a quiet room, gagged him so his screams wouldn’t block the other noises, and held a laser like this one to his eyes, she’d hear a low pop as the surface of his retinas flash-boiled and seared onto the face of his optic nerves. Ever afterward, his would be a world of pain and darkness and weird flashes in the shadows.

The old legends of America belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine. And when they are grown tall like the wise grown-ups may they not lack interest in a further study of Indian folklore, a study which so strongly suggests our near kinship with the rest of humanity and points a steady finger toward the great brotherhood of mankind, and by which one is so forcibly impressed with the possible earnestness of life as seen through the teepee door! If it be true that much lies "in the eye of the beholder," then in the American aborigine as in any other race, sincerity of belief, though it were based upon mere optical illusion, demands a little respect. After all he seems at heart much like other peoples.

An attention economy dissolves the separation between the personal and professional, between entertainment and information, all overridden by a compulsory functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7. Even as a contemporary colloquialism, the term “eyeballs” for the site of control repositions human vision as a motor activity that can be subjected to external direction or stimuli. The goal is to refine the capacity to localize the eye’s movement on or within highly targeted sites or points of interest. The eye is dislodged from the realm of optics and made into an intermediary element of a circuit whose end result is always a motor response of the body to electronic solicitation. It is out of this context that Google and other corporate players now compete for dominance over the remains of the everyday.

Even more surprising—because we had been taught it was impossible—was that the axons from the resurrected retinal ganglion cell grew all the way from the back of the eye to a place near the center of the brain called the optic chiasm. “The amazing thing is that the regenerated axons were able to find their way home along these long, tortuous routes back to their targets in the brain . . . that’s incredible,” Huberman says.

Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.

was a brilliant ache in his optic nerve, and a steady, painless throbbing at the base of his skull—the distant thunder of an approaching migraine. He rolled onto his side and pushed up into a sitting position, tucking his head between his knees. Sensed the instability of the world long before he opened his eyes, like its axis had been cut loose to teeter. His first deep breath felt like someone driving a steel wedge between the ribs high on his left side, but he groaned through

Like the railroads that bankrupted a previous generation of visionary entrepreneurs and built the foundations of an industrial nation, fiber-optic webs, storewidth breakthroughs, data centers, and wireless systems installed over the last five years will enable and endow the next generation of entrepreneurial wealth. As Mead states, "the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life was to get a company going during the bubble". Now, Mead says, "there's space available; you can get fab runs; you can get vendors to answer the phone. You can make deals with people; you can sit down and they don't spend their whole time telling you how they're a hundred times smarter than you. It's absolutely amazing. You can actually get work done now, which means what's happening now is that the entrepreneurs, the technologists, are building the next generation technology that isn't visible yet but upon which will be built the biggest expansion of productivity the world has ever seen.

There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, it was morning. All the lamps in the room were still blazing and I was under the covers with no memory of how I’d gotten under them. Everything was still bathed and saturated with her presence—higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in optics that had produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people felt after visions of saints—not that my mother was a saint, only that her appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame leaping up in a dark room.

And yet they persist in the belief that everyone should draw the same conclusion if given the same information, as though reason operated according to an obligatory physics, like the optics of an eye. These book club members aren’t alone. We are raised believing that reasonable discourse can establish the superiority of one line of thought over another. The underlying presumption is that each of us has an innate faculty of reason that can overcome our perceptual differences and see a problem from the “optimal perspective.” One goal of this book is to dispel this misconception.

Precisely at the place of its origin, the retina of the eye has a "blind spot," where the optic nerve enters the eyeball. Likewise, the spirit is "blind" precisely at its origin-precisely there, no self-observation, no mirroring of itself is possible; where the spirit is "original" spirit, where it is fully itself, precisely there it is also unconscious of itself. We may therefore fully subscribe to what has been said in the Indian Vedas: "That which does the seeing, cannot be seen; that which does the hearing, cannot be heard; and that which does the thinking, cannot be thought.

54. Long before either wave or particle, some (Pythagoras, Euclid, Hipparchus) thought that our eyes emitted some kind of substance that illuminated, or "felt," what we saw. (Aristotle pointed out that this hypothesis runs into trouble at night, as objects become invisible despite the eyes' purported power.) Others, like Epicurus, proposed the inverse--that objects themselves project a kind of ray that reaches out toward the eye, as if they were looking at us (and surely some of them are). Plato split the difference, and postulated that a "visual fire" burns between our eyes and that which they behold. This still seems fair enough.

Every instant of every day we are bombarded by information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.

The horses trudged sullenly the alien ground and the round earth rolled beneath them silently milling the greater void wherein they were contained. In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.

He came to lying on his back with sunlight pouring down into his face and the murmur of running water close by. There was a brilliant ache in his optic nerve, and a steady, painless throbbing at the base of his skull—the distant thunder of an approaching migraine. He rolled onto his side and pushed up into a sitting position, tucking his head between his knees. Sensed the instability of the world long before he opened his eyes, like its axis had been cut loose to teeter. His first deep breath felt like someone driving a steel wedge between the ribs high on his left side, but he groaned through the pain and forced his eyes to open. His left eye must have been badly swollen, because it seemed like he was staring through a slit.

When we look at the sun we wish to know [135]something about the sun itself, which is ninety-three million miles away; but what we see is dependent upon our eyes, and it is difficult to suppose that our eyes can affect what happens at a distance of ninety-three million miles. Physics tells us that certain electromagnetic waves start from the sun, and reach our eyes after about eight minutes. They there produce disturbances in the rods and cones, thence in the optic nerve, thence in the brain. At the end of this purely physical series, by some odd miracle, comes the experience which we call "seeing the sun," and it is such experiences which form the whole and sole reason for our belief in the optic nerve, the rods and cones, the ninety-three million miles, the electromagnetic waves, and the sun itself. It is this curious oppositeness of direction between the order of causation as affirmed by physics, and the order of evidence as revealed by theory of knowledge, that causes the most serious perplexities in regard to the nature of physical reality. Anything that invalidates our seeing, as a source of knowledge concerning physical reality, invalidates also the whole of physics and physiology. And yet, starting from a common-sense acceptance of our seeing, physics has been led step by step to the construction of the causal chain in which our seeing is the last link, and the immediate object which we see cannot be regarded as that initial cause which we believe to be ninety-three million miles away, and which we are inclined to regard as the "real" sun.

The human brain runs first-class simulation software. Our eyes don’t present to our brains a faithful photograph of what is out there, or an accurate movie of what is going on through time. Our brains construct a continuously updated model: updated by coded pulses chattering along the optic nerve, but constructed nevertheless. Optical illusions are vivid reminders of this.47 A major class of illusions, of which the Necker Cube is an example, arise because the sense data that the brain receives are compatible with two alternative models of reality. The brain, having no basis for choosing between them, alternates, and we experience a series of flips from one internal model to the other. The picture we are looking at appears, almost literally, to flip over and become something else.

Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom, The void was conscious and intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way - not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God's thigh muscle. I just was part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe. ("All know that the drop merges into ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop," wrote the sage Kabir - and I can personally attest now that this is true.) It wasn't hallucinogenic, what I was feeling. It was the most basic of events. It was heaven, yes. It was the deepest love I'd ever experienced, beyond anything I could previously imagined, but it wasn't euphoric. It wasn't exciting. There wasn't enough ego or passion left in me to create euphoria and excitement. It was just obvious. Like when you've been looking at an optical illusion for a long time, straining your eyes to decode the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there - now you can clearly see it! - the two vases are actually two faces. And once you've seen through the optical illusion, you can never not see it again. "So this is God," I thought. "Congratulations to meet you." -

Thus, when the eye-cups (the future retina), which grow out of the brain at the end of two stalks (the future optic nerves), make physical contact with the surface, the skin over the contact area folds into the concave cups and differentiates into transparent lenses (see arrows on the right of the diagram). The eye-cup induces the skin to form a lens, and the lens in its turn induces adjacent tissues to form a transparent horny membrane, the cornea. Moreover, if an eye-cup is transplanted under the skin on the belly of a frog embryo, the skin over it will obligingly differentiate into a lens. We may regard this obligingness or 'docility' of embryonic tissue, its readiness to differentiate into the kind of organ best suited to the tissue's position in the growing organism, as a manifestation of the integrative tendency, of the part's subordination to the interests of the whole.

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

For many decades quantum theory was regarded primarily as a mathematical description of phenomenal accuracy and reliability, capable of explaining the shapes and behaviours of molecules, the workings of electronic transistors, the colours of nature and the laws of optics, and a whole lot else. It would be routinely described as ‘the theory of the atomic world’: an account of what the world is like at the tiniest scales we can access with microscopes. Talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics was, on the other hand, a parlour game suitable only for grandees in the twilight of their career, or idle discussion over a beer. Or worse: only a few decades ago, professing a serious interest in the topic could be tantamount to career suicide for a young physicist. Only a handful of scientists and philosophers, idiosyncratically if not plain crankily, insisted on caring about the answer. Many researchers would shrug or roll their eyes when the ‘meaning’ of quantum mechanics came up; some still do. ‘Ah, nobody understands it anyway!

She finds herself, by some miraculous feat, no longer standing in the old nursery but returned to the clearing in the woods. It is the 'green cathedral', the place she first kissed Jack all those weeks ago. The place where they laid out the stunned sparrowhawk, then watched it spring miraculously back to life. All around, the smooth, grey trunks of ancient beech trees rise up from the walls of the room to tower over her, spreading their branches across the ceiling in a fan of tangled branches and leaves, paint and gold leaf cleverly combined to create the shimmering effect of a leafy canopy at its most dense and opulent. And yet it is not the clearing, not in any real or grounded sense, because instead of leaves, the trees taper up to a canopy of extraordinary feathers shimmering and spreading out like a peacock's tail across the ceiling, a hundred green, gold and sapphire eyes gazing down upon her. Jack's startling embellishments twist an otherwise literal interpretation of their woodland glade into a fantastical, dreamlike version of itself. Their green cathedral, more spectacular and beautiful than she could have ever imagined. She moves closer to one of the trees and stretches out a hand, feeling instead of rough bark the smooth, cool surface of a wall. She can't help but smile. The trompe-l'oeil effect is dazzling and disorienting in equal measure. Even the window shutters and cornicing have been painted to maintain the illusion of the trees, while high above her head the glass dome set into the roof spills light as if it were the sun itself, pouring through the canopy of eyes. The only other light falls from the glass windowpanes above the window seat, still flanked by the old green velvet curtains, which somehow appear to blend seamlessly with the painted scene. The whole effect is eerie and unsettling. Lillian feels unbalanced, no longer sure what is real and what is not. It is like that book she read to Albie once- the one where the boy walks through the wardrobe into another world. That's what it feels like, she realizes: as if she has stepped into another realm, a place both fantastical and otherworldly. It's not just the peacock-feather eyes that are staring at her. Her gaze finds other details: a shy muntjac deer peering out from the undergrowth, a squirrel, sitting high up in a tree holding a green nut between its paws, small birds flitting here and there. The tiniest details have been captured by Jack's brush: a silver spider's web, a creeping ladybird, a puffy white toadstool. The only thing missing is the sound of the leaf canopy rustling and the soft scuttle of insects moving across the forest floor.

Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world. This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.

With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.) Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe. But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy. It was called infrared light. Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays. This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe

The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made him feel naked and weak and brave. The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer, which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where Hiro is and what direction he's looking in. Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to burn through the back of your eyeball and broil your brain, fry your frontals, lase your lobes. As everyone learned in elementary school, these three colors of light can be combined, with different intensities, to produce any color that Hiro's eye is capable of seeing. In this way, a narrow beam of any color can be shot out of the innards of the computer, up through that fisheye lens, in any direction. Through the use of electronic mirrors inside the computer, this beam is made to sweep back and forth across the lenses of Hiro's goggles, in much the same way as the electron beam in a television paints the inner surface of the eponymous Tube. The resulting image hangs in space in front of Hiro's view of Reality. By drawing a slightly different image in front of each eye, the image can be made three-dimensional. By changing the image seventy-two times a second, it can be made to move. By drawing the moving three-dimensional image at a resolution of 2K pixels on a side, it can be as sharp as the eye can perceive, and by pumping stereo digital sound through the little earphones, the moving 3-D pictures can have a perfectly realistic soundtrack. So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

Once the characteristic numbers of most notions are determined, the human race will have a new kind of tool, a tool that will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses helped our eyes, a tool that will be as far superior to microscopes or telescopes as reason is to vision. —LEIBNIZ, Philosophical Essays, TRANS. BY ARLEW AND GARBER

I'm watching you, big boy, my eyes say, but his are closed so it's an optical monologue.

do you get when you cross an optic with a mental object? An eye-dea

Expectations paint illusions Experience paints a picture Optical Illusions manufacture confused expectations and experiences.

The scene was odd; barely perceptible faces surrounded the little girl, like malevolent succubae. The more Lucie’s eye became acclimated, the more details she made out. Small feet shoved into socks; matching outfits, like hospital pajamas; a uniform floor that looked like linoleum. A parallel, latent world slowly took shape. Lucie thought of optical illusions—the image of a vase, for instance, that turns into a couple making love after you’ve stared at it for a moment. In the drop-down menu, Beckers selected the brightness and contrast option and opened a dialogue box on which he could play with the settings.

Now their eyes kept returning to the space where Polly’s right arm should have been. It was an anomaly, an oddness, an optical discrepancy. From now on it wouldn’t be her beauty that would cause people to stare at her in shopping centers.

Neuroscience has since confirmed the dominant role of visualisation in human cognition. Half of the nerve fibres in our brains are linked to our vision and, when our eyes are open, vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity in the brain. It takes just 150 milliseconds for the brain to recognise an image and a mere 100 milliseconds more to attach a meaning to it.24 Although we have blind spots in both of our eyes—where the optic nerve attaches to the retina—the brain deftly steps in to create the seamless illusion of a whole.

As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great sluglike monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough

From prehistoric cave paintings to the map of the London Underground, images, diagrams and charts have long been at the heart of human storytelling. The reason why is simple: our brains are wired for visuals. ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it speaks,’ wrote the media theorist John Berger in the opening lines of his 1972 classic, Ways of Seeing[1]. Neuroscience has since confirmed the dominant role of visualisation in human cognition. Half of the nerve fibres in our brains are linked to vision and, when our eyes are open, vision accounts for two thirds of the electrical activity in the brain. It takes just 150 milliseconds for the brain to recognise and image and a mere 100 milliseconds more to attach a meaning to it[2]. Although we have blind spots in both of our eyes – where the optic nerve attaches to the retina – the brain deftly steps in to create the seamless illusion of a whole[3]. As a result, we are born pattern-spotters, seeing faces in clouds, ghosts in the shadows, and mythical beasts in the starts. And we learn best when there are pictures to look at. As the visual literacy expert Lynell Burmark explains, ‘unless our words, concepts and ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information…Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched[4]. With far-fewer pen strokes, and without the weight of technical language, images have immediacy – and when text and image send conflicting messages, it is the visual messages that most often wins[5]. So the old adage turns out to be true: a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Repression works like the refraction of light as it passes from one lens (or psychic system) to another, thus distorting the image perceived in the mind's eye.

The physics of vibration tends to emerge as perceptions of harmonics. Insights into the field optics have revealed that human eyes perceive only a window of light called the visible spectrum, we know that a broader range of light surrounds us at all times on this globe, sailing through the cosmos as we do so.

It is a particular sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of another.

Because the girl had never learned language at all. For an hour she had held her eyes open, held them in the direction of our mother's face, but her optic nerves never had time to awaken and so that face had remained beyond reach. For her, there would have been only a voice. Don't die. For God's sake don't die. Unintelligible words, the only words she was ever to hear.

Hallucinations relate to the higher cognitive functions of the brain. I was reading about someone at Columbia who asked volunteers to differentiate between houses and faces. Signals in the frontal cortex became active whenever subjects expected to see a face, irrespective of what the actual stimulus was. They would look at a house and "see" a face. It's called, you know Predictive coding. The brain has an expectation of what it will see, then compares this with information from the eyes. When this goes tits up, hallucinations occur. Our eyes don't present to our brains exact photographs of the things we see. They are more like sketches and impressions chattering along the optic nerve for the brain to interpret. That's what optical illusions are about. The brain's software is perfectly capable of simulating a vision in this way

It may seem absurd at first, but it is perfectly fitting that our first touchpoint with Tiphareth, the Sephirah that represents the consciousness of the Christ, is represented by the Devil tarot card. The devil is merely a symbol for an illusion. At the same time, so are all man’s ideas of what “God” is: an illusion. We indeed become caught up in our own personal perceptions of God, rather than the reality of God. We get so wrapped up—and become slave to—our ideas and notions of what we think God is to us, just like the two chained persons in the tarot card. They are slave not to the literal creature “the devil”; they are slave to the established orthodoxy of their own ideas. The devil is merely a scapegoat for their own shortcomings. Too often we blame this invisible adversary for the sins which are, frankly, our own responsibility. Facing the devil, facing this illusion, is the first step in the dark night to receive the truth of Tiphareth, of the individuality. Moving further into the Great Work, our notions of what we perceive God to be are likely to change, to be turned completely upside down. We need to be ready, as we strive further and further to uncover the veil of the Mysteries, for Truth with a capital T. Based upon our current understanding of the world, this Truth can seem more like paradox than logic. Yet, the world of spirit is often irrational to the world of the nonspiritual. This takes an intuitive leap past the logical framework of Hod in order to reach new frontiers of understanding that will often seem downright scary because of their illogical nature. We must be constantly aware of everything around us as illusion. The Hebrew letter for this Path, Ayin, means “eye,” which aligns with the optical nature of this theme. The eye can be easily tricked. Ayin is a reminder of the paradox between the physical eye and one’s intuition. The initiate must understand that the material world is illusion and take great care not to confuse outer forms with inner reflection. One may relate to another in some way, but they are not the same thing. One may relate to another in some way, but they are not the same thing. As always, discernment is your ally.

The fault lies not in the eyes, but in the mind, a lazy thought process spoiled by a lifetime of optic nerve dependency. Not so for those like me.

The "Monalisa Lisa" is an optical illusion created by Leonardo Da Vinci. The woman in the painting "The Mona Lisa" doesn't appear to be always smiling. When you look at the mouth you feel she looks sad, melancholic, and hostile. But when you look at the eyes you feel she is happy and cheerful. Leonardo perfected the "sfumato technique," which translated literally from Italian means "vanished or evaporated." He created imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors. "Why the Silhouette?" appears as a simple story of a few individuals, but when you look at it from a distance, it appears to show you the philosophy of life. I have tried to create imperceptible transitions between light and darkness and sometimes between colors. Hope you see the illusion in "Why the Silhouette?

The "Mona Lisa" is an optical illusion created by Leonardo Da Vinci. The woman in the painting "The Mona Lisa" doesn't appear to be always smiling. When you look at the mouth you feel she looks sad, melancholic, and hostile. But when you look at the eyes you feel she is happy and cheerful. Leonardo perfected the "sfumato technique," which translated literally from Italian means "vanished or evaporated." He created imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors. "Why the Silhouette?" appears as a simple story of a few individuals, but when you look at it from a distance, it appears to show you the philosophy of life. I have tried to create imperceptible transitions between light and darkness and sometimes between colors. Hope you see the illusion in "Why the Silhouette?

The "Mona Lisa" is an optical illusion created by Leonardo Da Vinci. The woman in the painting "The Mona Lisa" doesn't appear to be always smiling. When you look at her mouth you feel she looks sad, melancholic, and hostile. But when you look at her eyes you feel she is happy and cheerful. Leonardo perfected the "sfumato technique," which translated literally from Italian means "vanished or evaporated." He created imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors. "Why the Silhouette?" appears as a simple story of a few individuals, but when you look at it from a distance, it appears to show you the philosophy of life. I have tried to create imperceptible transitions between light and darkness and sometimes between colors. Hope you see the illusion in "Why the Silhouette?

Receptor neurons bundle together into cables called axons, feeding up through holes in a perforated bone just behind the eyeballs called the cribriform plate. (In a serious head injury, the skull can shift, and the lateral movement of the cribriform plate shears those axons like a knife through spaghetti. Snip! No more sense of smell.) Once through the plate, the axons connect to two projections from the brain called the olfactory bulbs. There, in blobs of neurons called glomeruli, is where the bulk of the computation gets done. Mice, known for their acute sense of smell, have just about 1,800 glomeruli—but 1,000 genes that code for olfactory receptors. That’s a lot of perceivable smells. Humans have a seemingly pathetic 370 genes for receptors, but we have 5,500 glomeruli per bulb. That’s a lot of processing power. It must be doing something. The part of the brain that integrates all this information, the olfactory cortex, also gets inputs from the limbic region and other areas that deal with emotion—the amygdala and hypothalamus, among others. Processing of smells in the brain, then, is tied to not only the chemical perception of a molecule but also how we feel about it, and how we feel in general. Every other sense in the body is, in a way, indirect. In vision, light impinges on the retina, a sheet of cells at the back of the eye that makes pigments and connects to the optic nerve. In hearing, sound (which is really just waves of changing air pressure) pushes the eardrum in and out at particular frequencies, which translate via a series of tiny bones to nerves. Touch and taste are the same. Some cell, built to do the hard work of reception, gets between the stimulus and the nerves that lead to the brain for processing. Some physical effect—air pressure, reflected photons, whatever—gets between the stimulus and the perception. It’s all a first-order derivative. Not smell, though. When we smell something, we are smelling tiny pieces of that thing that have broken off, wafted through the air, and then touched actual neurons wired to actual pieces of brain. Olfaction is direct, with nothing between the thing we’re smelling, the smell it has, and how we perceive that smell. It is our most intimate sense.

There just weren’t enough professional astronomers who could observe enough of the heavens to have much, if any, chance of spotting such an event. But there were thousands of amateur astronomers all too happy to do that job themselves. Armed with relatively inexpensive computer-guided telescopes with Dobsonian optics, which allow quite large apertures (twelve inches is not unusual) in telescopes less than five feet long, and sensitive CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors that can collect more light than the human eye, contemporary amateur astronomers can photograph the skies better than astronomers with house-sized telescopes could a century ago. The first person to see Supernova 1987A was an observer somewhere between the amateurs and the pros. Ian Shelton, a Canadian grad-school dropout, was

Like Wheeler and Feynman, Cramer proposed that the wavefunction of a particle moving forward in time is just one of two relevant waves determining its behavior. The retarded wave in Cramer’s theory is complemented by a response wave that travels specifically from the particle’s destination, in temporal retrograde. In his theory, a measurement, or an interaction, amounts to a kind of “handshake agreement” between the forward-in-time and backward-in-time influences.13 This handshake can extend across enormous lengths of time, if we consider what happens when we view the sky at night. As Cramer writes: When we stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded waves from the star been traveling for a hundred years to reach our eyes, but the advanced waves generated by absorption processes within our eyes have reached a hundred years into the past, completing the transaction that permitted the star to shine in our direction.14 Cramer may not have been aware of it, but his poetic invocation of the spacetime greeting of the eye and a distant star, and the transactional process that would be involved in seeing, was actually a staple of medieval and early Renaissance optics. Before the ray theory of light emerged in the 1600s, it was believed that a visual image was formed when rays projecting out from the eye interacted with those coming into it. It goes to show that everything, even old physics, comes back in style if you wait long enough—and it is another reason not to laugh too hard, or with too much self-assurance, at hand-waving that seems absurd from one’s own limited historical or scientific standpoint. In short: Cramer’s and Aharonov’s theories both imply a backward causal influence from the photon’s destination. The destination of the photon “already knows” it is going to receive the photon, and this is what enables it to behave with the appropriate politeness. Note that neither of these theories have anything to do with billiard balls moving in reverse, a mirror of causation in which particles somehow fly through spacetime and interact in temporal retrograde. That had been the idea at the basis of Gerald Feinberg’s hypothesized tachyons, particles that travel faster than light and thus backward in time. It inspired a lot of creative thinking about the possibilities of precognition and other forms of ESP in the early 1970s (and especially inspired the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick), but we can now safely set aside that clunky and unworkable line of thinking as “vulgar retrocausation.” No trace of tachyons has turned up in any particle accelerator, and they don’t make sense anyway. What we are talking about here instead is an inflection of ordinary particles’ observable behavior by something ordinarily unobservable: measurements—that is, interactions—that lie ahead in those particles’ future histories. Nothing is “moving” backwards in time—and really, nothing is “moving” forwards in time either. A particle’s twists and turns as it stretches across time simply contain information about both its past and its future.

It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of—all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain—and, of course, you find that what we call ‘seeing a table’ lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of.

But what about mankind’s physical body? How did God conjure up the physical features of a human being? Friend, He patterned us after himself!!! “And God said, Let US make man…after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). The original Hebrew word translated “likeness” is “demût”, meaning: likeness, figure, image, form. In a nutshell, we were fashioned to look like God! Thus, the physical concept of a human being having legs to walk, arms to hold, torso to twist, eyes to see, mouth to taste, nose to smell, and ears to hear was not the product of millions of years of random, evolutionary chance: It was God making us “like Him”! It is insanity to believe mindless spontaneity created the physical features of a human being, yet macro-evolutionary theory proposes such a ridiculous idea. Scientists, if you want to know where the ear and the eye came from, study the Scriptures: “Understand, ye brutish among the people: and ye fools, when will you be wise? He (God) that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He (God) that formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Psalms 94:8, 9). Scientists are still trying to understand “light”, for it is an extremely complex phenomenon, having the properties of both waves and particles. Yet, macro-evolutionists want us to believe good-old random “nothingness” knew exactly what light is, designing an eye to “capture it”, optic

Radinka appears as a regular human female, normal in every facet except one: her eyes. She possesses a pair of grotesquely enlarged, almost froglike optical organs, their protruding lenses marring what would be an otherwise-perfect woman's face. These eyes are unique not only in their appearance, however; Radinka can perceive her surroundings only as they were in the past. She has therefore spent the bulk of her life attempting to marry her vision of the past with the messages she receives from her other senses of the present. The Conjuction, as she calls her condition, proves to Radinka beyond a reasonable doubt that reality is, in fact, more than the sum of its parts.

Saunderson lectured on light, lenses, optics, the phenomenon of the rainbow, and other subjects connected with sight. He also helped to make Newton's theories of the Principia Mathematica and other works accessible to students of Cambridge. Unlike Newton, however, Saunderson was famously (or infamously) irreligious, which adds another layer to Diderot's interest in this blind man.

After listening to that story, Rayzo had learned that he was able to roll his eyes hard enough to cause physical pain. He feared he might have twisted his optic nerve.

Optical physics refers to a phenomenon known as the ‘duct’. A duct is an atmospheric structure, born of a thermal inversion, which takes the form of a channel that traps light rays within a few minutes of the arc of the astronomical horizon. Because the curvature performed within a thermal inversion is stronger than the curvature of the earth’s surface, light rays can be continuously guided along the duct, following the earth’s own curvature, without ever diffusing up into space. In theory, therefore, if your eyes were strong enough to see that far, a duct would allow you to gaze around the whole earth and witness your own back and shoulders turned towards you. The existence of ducts has been theorized since the eighteenth century, but their science became more fully understood during the Second World War, when radar operators began observing returns from objects far beyond the normal horizon-limit.

modern science itself agrees that we don’t really see with our eyes. They are merely links in a long chain stretching from the sun, through sunlight and atmosphere and illuminated objects, through eye lenses and retinae and optic nerves, right down to particle/wavicle-haunted space in a region of the brain, where at last (it’s said) seeing really occurs.