Two Rock Institute

Seeing Whole

Carol Lee Flinders

When we want to understand something, most us begin by trying to isolate it. This approach can make perfect sense, but only as long as that isn’t the end of the inquiry. Everything exists in the midst of something else, and before you can know anything for what it really is – animal or artifact, religious teaching or utopian vision – you have to be able to see it in context: figure and ground, all of a piece and interactive.

I’m acutely aware how difficult it can be to see the part without losing sight of the whole. I know that it can stretch one’s cognitive powers to their limit because I had to do something like it as a small child, and the memory of that struggle is locked into my neuromuscular system.

When I was just a few months old, it became apparent that my left eye had no burning interest in entering a working relationship with the right one. Normally, the brain takes in information from both eyes, and as long as their readings differ only slightly, it can collate them, so that when we look at a tree, or a face, we see just one tree, just one face, but we see it whole and in three dimensions. If the difference is extreme, though, and the brain can’t reconcile the two images, it will effectively ignore one of them. 

In my own case, it turned out that the right eye was doing most of the actual seeing, and since the information coming in from the left one was more or less random, my brain kept favoring the right eye, and the left one got weaker and weaker from disuse. If nobody had intervened, my visual world would have been one-dimensional and, because my ability to gauge distances was impaired, treacherous as well.

Fortunately, my parents and the best ophthalmologist they could find did intervene. Corrective treatment started when I was three or four years old, with a patch I had to wear over my right eye: this was the only way the left eye would find out what it could do and become strong enough to work in tandem with the right one. 

I described the treatment once to a friend who teaches ballet, and he nodded in immediate understanding. When a dancer is learning a new position or routine, he said, he begins by performing exercises meant to strengthen each of the specific muscle groups that are involved.

“First you isolate, then you integrate.”

And indeed, once the left eye began to get stronger, my mother and I started paying weekly visits to the doctor’s offices, where I would sit for an hour at a time in front of a series of machines that worked the muscles in my eyes much as a room full of exercise equipment does the muscles of today’s eager body sculptor.

The machines were of several kinds, but the one I remember most vividly involved a lion and a cage. Through one eyepiece I could see a cage, through the other a lion, and my job was to turn the left eye in and hold it there for a few seconds, so that the lion was inside the cage. There were several similar exercises. The uniting theme wasn’t so much “cage the beast” as “place the free-floating entity in an appropriate context.”

The integration phase of the treatment was desperately hard work, bordering on the painful. Even now, when I think about it my breathing becomes a little labored. But in time, everything fell into place. My wandering eye settled down so that I could see quite well with glasses, and I still do. But because of what I had to go through to become binocular -- and because on a couple of unnerving occasions eyestrain put me back at square one – I never take it for granted.

 The language we use to describe how we learn and think is drawn by analogy from the language we use to describe what our bodies do: We may not “grasp” a particularly complex idea at first – may not be able to “absorb,” or “assimilate” or “digest” it -- but once we do, we are able to “run with it” and even “build on it.”

Maybe, though, “by analogy” is too weak a term. Perhaps the time we spent as a species learning to walk, climb, run, and throw was an actual apprenticeship for what our intellects would have to do further down the road. While the ability to co-ordinate the input from our two eyes develops in most of us without conscious effort, our having acquired that skill as a species, over vast reaches of biological time, may have constituted a long drawn out rehearsal for a task we would face over and over and over as we ceased to be foragers and moved out into ever more complex relationships with one another and the natural world, entering that phase of our collective existence that’s commonly called “history.”

The ability, and before that the willingness, to embrace complexity – to see things with both eyes, isolated and integrated, and address them in their wholeness – is perhaps the essential task of human understanding. It is invariably hard – at least as difficult as putting lions in cages and hats on cowboys. Ultimately it requires that when we’re constructing a hypothesis, that hypothesis must account for all the available data, even when the bits and pieces seem to contradict each other, and that if it’s a society we’re constructing, that society must accommodate the whole range of human truths and human types – the fact that we are, for instance, relational and ambitious; reverent and innovative; idealistic and pragmatic; playful and industrious. 

The easier thing, always, is just to shut down information that doesn’t fit. The easier thing always has been to limit ourselves to what we could see out of just one eye.

From Carol's Introduction to Rebalancing the World, (HarperSan Francisco).