Blinded By the Light – Part One

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”

~ John Heywood

Press play to hear an audio enhancement as you read.

Brain blindness is a term used to describe our inability to see the obvious, because we don’t believe it’s there.

“I’ll believe it when I see it” is a phrase we’ve probably heard, perhaps even spoken ourselves. It’s fundamentally false. In fact, behavioral research and leading edge brain science proves the opposite, namely, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

In a famous 1999 Harvard experiment, subjects were shown a video of students playing basketball. Half wore black shirts, half wore white. The instructions were simple: count how many passes the white players make. At the end of the brief video the answer was given: 15. Then, this question was posed: “But, did you see the gorilla?”

When the subjects watched again, they were astounded to see another student in a full gorilla suit walk on screen and beat its chest. None of them had seen that! Why not? Because they weren’t looking for a gorilla, they were counting passes. If you want to try this yourself, visit the link below.¹ Of course, now that you know there’s a gorilla you will see it. Suggestion: play this for a friend without the spoiler.

In her book, Willful Blindness, Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Margaret Heffernan writes, “We see what we expect to see, what we’re looking for.” ² She goes on to chronicle the bizarre story of Dr. Alice Stewart at Oxford in the 1940’s who exhaustively researched the connection between X-rays administered to pregnant women and incidents of leukemia in children born to these women.

“Stewart checked her results over and over again and she asked colleagues to check them before she published them. When her article, “Preliminary Communication: Malignant Diseases in Childhood and Diagnostic Irradiation In-Utero appeared in the Lancet in 1956, it caused a stir. The Nobel Prize was mentioned.” ³

And what was the medical reaction to this stunning revelation? Dr. Stewart said, “We reckoned that a child a week was dying from this practice. We thought that doctors would stop X-raying …” The author reports: “To the contrary, doctors carried on X-raying pregnant mothers for the next twenty-five years. Not until 1980 did major American medical organizations finally recommend that the practice be abandoned.”

Heffernan wrote about the pride doctors felt in their expensive new X-ray equipment and how deeply they believed in its efficacy. They believed they were helping these women so they couldn’t see that they were killing their children. Their brain blindness continued for 25 years, resulting in the premature death of who knows how many children.

So, what are we missing? In terms of our spiritual explorations, what might be something obvious that we’re failing to see, simply because we don’t believe it? How about the truth of who we are?

Millions and millions of sincere “seekers” search for truth, longing for a deeper experience of union with the Divine. What if the same brain blindness is interfering with our ability to see, and to experience that state right now?

It was 1971 when Ram Dass wrote Be Here Now. That’s 47 years ago. What if he meant it? What if that three-word instruction is all we need? Of course, we know that hasn’t been enough. Something has obscured the profound truth, which has been staring us in the face all that time… and it’s not reserved for this one book. Thousands upon thousands of texts have re-worked the same principle. Scores of spiritual teachers have given millions of addresses, saying basically the same thing. So, what’s blinding us from seeing the obvious?

We’re looking for something else. We’re counting the passes that players in white make… we don’t expect a gorilla and so we don’t see one. Well, if we want to learn from this experiment, perhaps we could identify our gorilla – what we are not looking for – and open our minds to see what we’ve been blind to seeing.

What we are not looking for is staring us in the face… staring back at us from the mirror each morning. Here we are, every day, every moment, and here remains the invitation, which has never changed: be here now!

References:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
2. from Willful Blindness, Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Margaret Heffernan