Seeking Is Believing

I sat on the steps in front of my apartment one sunny morning, looking out at the sidewalk, enjoying a rare moment of stillness in an otherwise noisy day in Los Angeles. I watched as the neighbor’s orange tabby cat strolled through the yard without a care in the world, and made his way through his favorite hole in the hedge and onto the sidewalk beyond. I had taken an interest in animal tracks while out for walks in the mountains. I read some books by Tom Brown Jr., a world-renown tracker and I wanted to learn to see tracks in the way he claimed was possible. So, as I watched Caramel, I paid close attention to where he placed his paws. Then I went over to look at his tracks.

I thought it would be easy to find them but no matter how hard I looked, I saw absolutely nothing. I looked and looked, but all I saw was barren, hard packed dirt with a few pebbles pressed in. The grainy beige surface of the earth was totally cracked and dry. The ground around the apartment gets flooded when it rains. As soon as the sun comes out, it quickly transforms from pudding into cement. Nothing seems to grow in my yard except for the established nopal cactus, the colorful but sharp bougainvillea and the green hedge. The earth around these plants is parched and becomes about as interesting as the surface of an old crumpled brown paper bag.

I felt slightly annoyed at not being able to see Caramel’s tracks even though I had just carefully watched were he put his paws. I got down on my hands and knees and looked hard as I could for the tracks. I went around to see from different angles, hoping the direction of the sunlight would assist me. I found nothing. I slowly went from annoyed to mad. But my anger had a motivating effect. At the point where I would usually give up, I kept up the search. It would have looked odd if anyone was watching me, crouching on the ground, staring at nothing. I stared until it nearly seemed ridiculous. The problem was, I knew it was there. At least I thought it must be. Because of what I’d read about tracking, I refused to give up looking. What if I was wrong? If it was there, why couldn’t I see it?

While I was searching so intently, I noticed many other marks in the ground. Seeds and leaves from the trees overhead were pressed into the ground, a bottle cap, a children’s toy truck wheel, a tiny piece of broken glass, half a boot print left by me when it rained a month earlier. Slowly, I forgot my search for the tracks as the ground went from boring dirt to a mini landscape. The grains of soil were not just beige-brown as they had seemed when I was looking down from standing height. When I got close to the ground, I noticed that many grains were blue-gray, brick-red, or crystal clear. Among all the various colors some grains were dull and some were shiny. The more I looked, the more amazing this little neglected area became. It was like the palm of a hand, full of details and intricate lines and patterns only seen if you look closely. This little patch of cracked mud that I walked by every day without a glance became fascinating.

For a while, my search for the track was nearly forgotten. It was like a meditation. I was crouched down but otherwise relaxed and I was barely conscious of anything except for the ground and the details all over it scrawled out like a manuscript or a topographic map in miniature, with each detail, each scratch and mark an indication of something that had happened. I would occasionally remember what I was looking for, but then get lost in the terrain again, almost forgetting to care or seek out the track, but just taking it all in like a Martian landscape. Then I saw it. It was an incredibly faint impression of a cat track. I hadn’t realized how it would look. I mean, I know cat tracks — four toes, one heel pad, no claws showing — but I hadn’t expected to see how gentle and soft and imperceptible it would be, barely a few grains of dust deep on the hard ground.Though I was surprised to finally see it, I was more astonished by what happened next. As my gaze drifted up from the single track and towards the hedge where Caramel disappeared, his entire trail lit up before me as if it was made of silver and a ray of light shone on it. The moment filled me with awe. After I had seen the single track the entire line of tracks seemed to magically appear because, in some strange way, my eye finally understood what I had been looking for all along.

I spent a long time just looking at those tracks and the trail, just trying to soak it in, to memorize it. When I finally got up off of the ground and stretched, and let the blood return to my limbs, I felt a deep gratitude. I stuck with the search and was rewarded. I also felt a deep sense of gratitude to the knowledge I had received from Tom Brown Jr., without which I might not have had the inspiration to get down and take the time to look.

I wish I could say it became easy for me to read tracks after that day. Alas, I seldom have such patience and persistence. However, the experience gave me a deep respect for the amount of effort and determination it takes to become a master tracker. It also taught me something else. It is not always so easy to see something that is right in front of your face. I never would have noticed those tracks if I hadn’t tried, but I would not have tried if I didn’t believe it was possible. Sometimes we have to believe first, and then we will see.

There is a moment in the Gospel of John when Jesus tells his disciple, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” What a puzzling statement. How does it make sense in a material world when our beliefs should be based, in theory, on empirical data? It must be that our beliefs, to some degree at least, are predicated on choice. When I look at the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, I see mundane subjects that are made sublimely beautiful. A pair of old shoes, a gnarled tree, a care-worn face, an impoverished family. Van Gogh’s letters reveal that he didn’t just see the world differently, he believed in the holiness of the objects and people he portrayed. His way of seeing reflected his deeply held beliefs in a beauty not commonly recognized in the subjects of his paintings.

I worked on commercials for many years. I have watched from behind-the-scenes as thousands of images were created for television and internet ads. Every one of those images was beautifully lit and attractive in some way. Every one of those images was manufactured with the purpose of influencing what we think and feel by what we see. That is because our vision influences us in a major way. What we see affects our beliefs.

Eyesight takes up about 40% of our brain’s functioning. We tend to trust our eyes, not just to get around, but to decide what is real. “Seeing is believing,” we say, and we tend to think that the universe operates on observable principles. But is that really how we operate? No one has seen an atom, a strand of DNA or a distant galaxy with the naked eye, but we believe they exist. Why? Because we’ve seen the pictures and those seem to be enough. We take it on faith that viruses and black holes exist because that is what we are told by scientists. Why shouldn’t we believe them? Their theories make sense. For the majority of us, pictures and explanations serve as stand-ins for the things we cannot see and yet believe to be true.

Belief in the existence of things that we cannot see is called faith. We are all creatures of faith in one sense or another. We work and save money because we believe those paper bills in our pocket or the numbers on our bank statement will be worth something tomorrow. A piece of paper money is not objectively valuable. It is a symbol of something invested with a shared belief. Heck, banks are built on the belief that there will be a tomorrow when you can buy that thing you’re saving up for.

We know that our beliefs are courted by advertisers and media. We are attracted to the newest, shiniest things, the things that they claim will make our lives so much better. When it comes to commercials, individual images don’t even matter. What matters is if an ad made you feel something. Did it motivate you? If an ad can make you think and feel that you are missing something, then it’s done its job. It has spoken to our beliefs. What tends to motivate us when we are watching advertisements is the belief that we do not have enough or are not good enough or healthy, wealthy or popular enough. We are all susceptible to these beliefs and ads capitalize on them. If you believed you had everything you need materially, ads would have very little interest or power over you.

Irish writer Emmet Fox noted that when it comes to thoughts, “It makes no difference whether the knowledge content is correct or not, as long as you believe it to be correct. Remember that it is what we really believe that matters. A report about something may be quite untrue, but if you believe it, it has the same effect upon you as if it were true; and that effect again will depend upon the quantity of feeling attached to it.”

Beliefs go deeper than physical reality. They form a sort of substructure that is as real to an individual as anything physically tangible. The dictionary says that a belief is “something one accepts as true or real” and also “a firmly held opinion or conviction.” Opinions can change. Convictions may be challenged. What I accept as true today can be rejected tomorrow. Our conception of reality is malleable. Perhaps it is the mutable nature of beliefs that makes them so important to our survival. We need to be flexible in the face of new information that changes our perceptions of reality.

That brings me back to choice. What we choose to believe will in many ways determine what we see and ultimately, what we seek. Therefore, it is wise to question our beliefs. Do they come from the best that is within us or do they come from the many influences of culture? By believing there is more to the world than what we see, we begin to interact with mystery. By seeking truth in the mysteries, we unlock parts of reality that are otherwise hidden from view. Perhaps by seeking out new ways of seeing, the most modern shiny things will begin to appear dull and trivial and the things we think are most ordinary will appear, as they did to Van Gogh, to be holy.