What we can learn from blind dectectives
From the forthcoming text, Befriending Our 12 Senses, A Holistic Approach to Sensing for Teachers of every Kind
What can deaf and blind people teach us? Did you ever have to find one object in a pitch black room, of your own home, at night? How did you do it?
You used memory, you remembered landmarks, you made connections in your mental map until you located your object.
A few people are physically sightless, blind. Memory, perceiving connections and patterns are what physically blind people use to navigate the 3D world. A very few now use sound, echo-location.
Most of us are not vision impaired to the point of blindness to the external world. However the vast majority of people are blind to their own internal world, the Inner Game of Life. A college education in any major outside the arts and humanities does little to change this inner blindness.
Q: What Best Practices exist to reverse inner blindness?
A: Holistic Psychology 2.0 Third Edition; Balance on All Levels, PACME+S. Finally, a general holistic theory and experimental method (2023) has a pretty good summary of these methods. In the 1990s, in methods where NLP and ecumenical spirituality converged, for the first time, cheap, easy reliable experimental methods for exploring your own inner world were innovated. Using any of these methods with “God as my Partner” makes them safe to use.
Could humans navigate the invisible lower two-thirds of their own psyche, the same way a sightless blind person navigates the 3D world?
After all, our psyche is 90% to 95% composed of memories and learned behaviors, arranged in patterns (see Bruce Lipton and Habit Body theory). Pattern recognition is one of the earliest expressions of right brain intelligence. If we understood internal patterns the same way a blind person learns to understand external physical surroundings; then, we could navigate a psyche by memory and pattern recognition.
More discussion in Holistic Psychology 2.0 Third Edition; Balance on All Levels, PACME+S. Finally, a general holistic theory and experimental method (2023)
Three real-life blind super-heroes
What if we were both deaf and blind? Three true stories of real super-capable blind persons have inspired me:
- Jacques Lusseyran, the blind hero of the French Resistance. And There Was Light is his strange and beautiful autobiography
- A second is the film, “If You Could See What I Hear” (1982). Story based on the life of blind musician Tom Sullivan. Part of the plot summary:
Tom Sullivan is a blind college student who wants to be normal. When not in class, Tom hangs out with his friend, Sly, who does not treat him like a blind person. In fact, he goes out of his way to challenge Tom. Tom likes to go jogging while Sly leads him on his bicycle. Sly leads him past obstacles such as park benches, shouting out “Bench!” at the last moment so Tom has to jump over it ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Could_See_What_I_Hear
The movie plays up the super-capable aspects of Tom. I used this movie as a touchstone for finding my way around my own unconscious obstacle course. The entire movie is on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zXM9Eh33w8
- A third real-life blind super hero is Daniel Kish who is blind, rides a bicycle with echo-location and teaches other blind persons to ride bicycles and navigate normally using echolocation.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kish
Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther
Peter Sellers’ portrayal of Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther is the exact opposite, the converse of an effective blind detective.
Inspector Clouseau is NOT curious about what’s around him; he’s NOT curious about what others think or how they live. He is on terrible terms with his own memory. Inspector Clouseau isn’t literally but he is “functionally blind.”
Why? Because all he cares about, the only thing motivating him, is to avoid feeling more shame about his inadequacy and incompetence. He’s obsessed only with avoiding feeling more hurtful shame about his incompetence.
Why were Pink Panther films so popular? Because it was “saying the quiet part out loud,” the secret, private fears of many male executives — especially in Hollywood. Sadly and especially since 2000 many males successful in corporative hierarchies live their lives this way. They bumble thru their day, “blind” and in-curious to inconvenient facts of immediate situations. They blunder about, pretending they know, pretending they are “as smart or smarter than others.”
Clouseau is comically self-centered. He acts-as-if he has healthy self-concept and self confidence — when he really has neither. Clouseau is the negative mirror image, the Jungian shadow, of the ultra-self-confident, Sherlock Holmes.
Clouseau is also funny because he demonstrates how many men refuse, avoid and dismiss both self-honesty and healthy humility; they refuse to learn how to learn. Do you know any males like this? If not, just look around at your current state and national elected officials. Not all but many of them still play out the Inspector Clouseau role.
Back to our Blind Detective looking for a needle in a haystack. If this is you, you want the smallest possible handful of hay to look thru.
The blind game in algebra and counseling
We play the blind game in pre-algebra all the time. Consider the letter “X” used to represent “the unknown.” We are blind to “X.” To solve for X, we have to manipulate other known factors and known rules of relationship to uncover and identify “X.”
An effective blind person is like Theseus in the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. When your target or destination is initially 100% “out of sight,” you have to be honest and humble enuf to follow even a single thread; trust, if you do, more will be revealed. It is this wisdom and self-reliance many of us never learn because we are sighted and can hear.
“Blind” as “ignoramus”
Consider authentic mystic persons. Virtually every authentic mystic I’ve ever met or learned about, admits feeling awe at how little they know. They acknowledge how much each day we are ‘lived by’ our past remembered habit patterns.
Michael Hayes, an authentic mystic at AwakeToLove.com says it this way, “A mantra I use very often is, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’” (paraphrase). Acknowledging our ignorance and lack of information preserves our honesty and humility.
