In one of the most emotional scenes in the musical Love Never Dies, Christine sings to her son Gustave about perception. And it is this advice that lingers with Gustave to the crucial moment when he is told that the Phantom is his real father. She sings:
Love’s a curious thing
It often comes disguised
Look at love the wrong way
It goes un-recognized
So look with your heart
And not with your eyes
A heart understands
A heart never lies
Believe what it feels
And trust what it shows
The heart always knows
Love is not always beautiful
Not at the start
So open your arms
And close your eyes tight
And when it finds love
Your heart will be right
Learn from someone who knows
Make sure you don’t forget
Love you misunderstand
Is love that you’ll regret
And not with your eyes
The heart can’t be fooled
The heart is too wise
Forget what you think
Ignore what you hear
It always sees clear
Love is not always beautiful
Not at the start
But open your arms
And close your eyes tight
And when it finds love
Your heart will be right
So much of what we focus on in perception is on the rational and behavioural, a fixation of the safety industry. Yet, when it comes to the mysteries of love, relationships and trust, there is no evidence that is enough to make for certainty.
We symbolize in the language of the heart and the gut, a third way of knowing that cannot command any sense of measurement, certainty or matter. When Christine sings this song we know exactly what she means. Bronowski called this The Visionary Eye, Merleau-Ponty called it ‘The Mind’s Eye’, the Egyptians called it the Eye of Horus, Pallasmaa called it The Eyes of the Skin, Paul called it the ‘psyche’, ‘nous’, ‘faith’ and ‘kartia’, Enns calls it The Thinking Eye, The Seeing Brain, Fuchs calls it ‘embodied rationality’ and, Jung called it the ‘unconscious’. Paul tells us that when one believes something one ‘walks by faith not by sight’ (2 Cor 5:7). All agree that there is a way of knowing that is transcendent, non-rational and beyond the constraints of science method.
If we are going to discuss the phenomenon of perception we have to consider ways of ‘seeing’ that don’t just hold to materialist eye sight. Even then we know that the eyes are easy to fool. So much of what we see is culturally and socially ‘constructed’ (see Hoffman Visual Intelligence, How We Create What We See). If we are to learn anything about visual perception is that it is not reliable. See:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228021894_Visual_Perception
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330215545_Psychology_of_Visual_Perception
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(11)00030-3.pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0301006618824879
This all brings a challenge for people in the risk and safety industry particularly because of how the industry is anchored by it’s engineering traditions to rationalism, behaviourism and science.
Yet absurdly, the fixation by the global industry on zero is nothing more than a belief system, an ideology that has no evidence, makes no sense and is something one is invoked to just believe (https://www.ishn.com/articles/106817-how-to-achieve-zero-first-you-must-believe-its-possible ; https://myosh.com/blog/2020/01/21/why-zero-harm-is-not-a-reality/).
One of the first things this faith in zero asks you to do, is firstly to believe the impossible (that humans are infallible). All of the language and discourse around the global mantra of zero is about the rejection of science, rationalism and behaviourism. What an amazing quandary this industry has put itself in. Indeed, the symbol of a phantom seems most suitable.
Dr Rob Long
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John Vivian McLellan says
I agree with the ‘Look with your Heart’ philosophy. I have often had what l would refer to as “6th sense moments” when something didn’t feel right and as it turned out it wasn’t right. I’ve come to trust this phenomena. Humans are the only creatures capable of generating “feelings” and “feelings” do not come from the brain, they are of the heart
Rob Long says
Hi John, spot on.
bernardcorden says
Through the wormhole on SBS Television recently included an episode entitled Is there a sixth sense?
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/1711796803825/through-the-wormhole-is-there-a-sixth-sense
It leads into the fascinating field of morphogenetics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenetic_field
bernardcorden says
It has much more integrity than the relentless bilge and sciolism churned out by our peak safety body and its fawning acolytes
Rob Long says
The ‘bilge’ is delusional but so entertaining when masked by the mantra of zero. The only people who don’t know they look like fools are the snake oil sales people selling bilge.