"Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see." That is a quote by Rene Magritte. Depending how literally you want to take this quote, it is obviously true. To start, I am going to look at it scientifically, and then I will try and get a little more touchy/feely with it too. The easiest way to grasp this quote is scientifically. When we look at anything, we only see what we have the ability to perceive. Our eyes can only see color in certain wave ranges. What we can't see, we won't perceive, unless we have special gauges that allow us to pick up what is there but is not visible to us. A good example of this is found in King Tut's tomb. The tomb was originally opened in the early 1920's, but it was just recently that they discovered that there is a hidden chamber behind one of the walls. They believe it is the queen's burial chamber. It was found by looking at the chamber thermographically. This is a diagnostic technique originally used in the medical fields, where an infrared camera is used to measure temperature variations on the surface of an object. In archaeology, a wall with a cooler area implies that there may be a chamber of some type hidden behind the wall. Without the use of the new equipment, we may never had known about the chamber! It was there the whole time, we just couldn't see it. Other examples include bacteria and viruses. Although they have always been present, we didn't know about them until the invention of the microscope. To take it a step further, animals have different senses than us also. A dog's sense of smell is nearly 400x more sensitive than ours, and they can hear things in ranges a human will never hear. We interact with dogs every day, and yet they perceive the world in an entirely different way than we do. Sometimes, I think the reasons we have not found evidence of extraterrestrial life forms is because the way we perceive things are just too different than the hints that the other types of life are producing. Here is another example of what I am talking about. On the earth today there are animals that can live at depths that man could simply not handle. There are also some types of life that can live in ocean vents that are spewing boiling hot water. Man cannot live in either environment. Yet once we found a way to look at these environments, we found that there is life there. Giant squids and sperm whales often battle in the depths. At the depth that giant squids live, there is no sunlight. and yet the whales are able to find the squids and eat them. Sucker marks have been found on whales that are up to 28 inches across! These likely came from 50-foot squid. Although we can't survive under those pressures, and we cannot see in the darkness at those depths, The whales and the squid both seem to have the ability to do so. If these large creatures can be alive and yet under our line of regular site, how many other things are we missing, simply because we don't have the ability to perceive them? One more scientific example before I move on. Did you know that not only are there things that live in the depths of the sea, but that there are also creatures that can live more than 1000 meters below the sea floor as well? That's right, scientists have found bacteria in drill cores that they took up from below the sea floors. The bacteria lived off of things that died millions of years ago. It is truly amazing if you think about it! Will we find life in space? Who knows! We are still finding life we didn't know about on our own planet. Sometimes, even what we see with our own eyes can hide other truths from us.Oftentimes, my first impression of someone is wrong. People I thought were rude and abrupt were really only having a bad day and I later grew to like them immensely. Meanwhile, other people who I liked right away turned out to be manipulative and scheming. I always like to paraphrase Shakespeare with his "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." I usually mix in other quotes about masks, which totally kills Shakespeare's original meaning. Even so, I find that we all do wear many masks in our lives. My daughters see my father mask. My friends, my friend mask. And on and on. At work, I am an analyst and my actions show all that that entails. At karate, I am a sensai, and likely given more credit for knowledge than I truly feel. Still, I do have that knowledge, and I can effectively teach people what I know. My actions have more truth than my feelings about my actions. I think we are all like that, to some extent. We are uncertain about some of our actions and we wear a mask. We hide our nervousness or the fact that we are uncomfortable with a mask of competency or assuredness. Funny, I know that I know what I know. And yet, sometimes I feel uncomfortable trying to exp[lain to someone what I know. The mask slips, and my humanity trickles out. So what do you see when you look at me? I am almost certain that it is not the same thing I see when I look in the mirror. If you have a few minutes, write a couple of sentences in the comments. What do you see?
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