UCWG 037: How Can Losing Your Sight Enhance the Clarity of Your Mind?

 Perception is never a passive process to take in the objective truth of the reality around you. In every moment, you are making educated guesses to construct an internal, conceptual understanding of the world. You frequently mistake this conception for the genuine article. You take this for granted.

Isaac Lidsky went from being a successful teenage actor on TV to losing his sight and learning to reassess every unconscious assumption he had about life as a result. Isaac contends that going blind the way that he did is one of the best things that ever could have happened to him, as he learned to see his life beyond the illusions of his mind that would have kept him a prisoner of bad luck and circumstance.

As Isaac began to lose his sight gradually over the course of more than a decade, he gained uncommon insight into the layers of meaning his mind automatically added to his perception. As micro blind spots formed in his vision, his brain would do everything it could to immediately compensate for them, often with wildly inaccurate guesses (such as perceiving a urinal as a sink in a bathroom).

The mind is always attempting to sort incoming stimuli into the categories it knows. When the old categories we carry are not adequate for new types of information, we run into conflict with reality. We cease to be able to communicate with each other. We make terrible choices about what to do with our lives because we cannot align our actions with what is real. As Isaac had to learn how to reinterpret his most fundamental perceptions of the world, he took less and less for granted about the way his mind worked. For that reason, he is thankful for the new outlook being blind gave him.

Even in communicating with other people, there are so many signals we take for granted in the subtle realm. We may completely overlook body language, tone, etc., or rely on them too much and form faulty assumptions from what we think we perceive in the many nuances of how someone presents themselves. The easiest way to clarify the true meaning of communication is to break concepts down to their simplest possible terms (“explain like I’m five), or clearly outline the premises behind an evaluation.

If a blind person were to enter a building having been told an inaccurate layout of its structure, his false impressions would conflict with his experience and make it impossible for him to get where he was trying to go. Instead, if he went in knowing nothing, he would be able to derive the truth of the situation through his own unbiased observation. The same is true with everything we ever do in life, as we are all blind and, yet, mostly unaware of our disability. We refuse to draw new categories when our blindness creates obstacles, and so we suffer without end.

Isaac Lidsky:

www.lidsky.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Lidsky

Eyes Wide Open by Isaac Lidsky:

https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Wide-Open-Recognizing-Opportunities-ebook/dp/B01HCGYXZW/

Isaac Lidsky “What reality are you creating for yourself?” TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/isaac_lidsky_what_reality_are_you_creating_for_yourself

Travel As Transformation by Gregory Diehl:

http://amzn.to/2fDzgkM

Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl:

https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl-ebook/dp/B009U9S6FI/

Isaac Lidsky on The Doctors explaining his blindness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kezluf7I_5M

Isaac Lidsky playing Weasel Weasel on Saved By The Bell: The New Class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM13axKEkDY