We tend to take our perspective seriously. “Hell, Jim,” he said, standing in his cotton field in Panola County, Mississippi, talking with me, his pastor at the time, about racism, “This ain’t how I SEE things! This is how things ARE!” His perspective wasn’t just his perspective–it was the TRUTH!!! “I know when it’s time to change the subject,” I said, and asked him how the current drought was impacting his cotton crop.
How do we get outside of/beyond our perspective in order to see ourselves seeing and know when to question our conclusions because we are projecting too much of ourselves into “how things are” to be able to distinguish facts from feelings about facts, and see that our seeing isn’t taking our feelings about things into account when we are talking about things we have a serious stake in?
We cannot talk about things that matter to us the way we can talk about things that don’t matter to us. We have to be able to distance ourselves from what we see in order to see what we are looking at with objectivity and accuracy. This is the way medical personnel have to see patients who are wheeled into emergency rooms everywhere. The cannot allow their feelings about the person to interfere with their ability to treat the person as an innocent human being who needs help. And how a doctor would have to excuse himself from treating an accident victim he, or she, was married to. The more we have at stake in the outcome of our interaction with what we are looking at, the less likely we are be to see objectively, impersonally.
There is much that we look at every day that we cannot see because of the stake we have in how we see certain things. Bias and prejudice skew perception by way of projection, and keep us from seeing what we look at with any reasonable degree of accuracy, because it matters to us that things ARE the way we take them to be.
And so, the need for copious amounts of emptiness, silence and solitude in which we might “just sit,” empty of all emotion, fear, anxiety, desire, interest, concern, etc., so that we might be entirely objective with nothing to gain or lose in our encounter with what arises of its own accord in the silence (etc.) to call us to action in the service of doing what is called for, when, where, how it needs to be done, as though we are a medical attendant in an emergency room tending whatever comes through the door in the right way, here, now.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 