Week 1, Day 5: Seeing isn’t believing; How illusions reveal the truth

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When Jacob woke from his sleep, he thought to himself, The Lord is definitely in this place, but I didn’t know it. (Genesis 28:16)

Thanks for letting me share some of my favorite optical illusions with you! Because most of us are so visually oriented, I wanted to start week one of Advent with optical illusions. They are a good way to start talking about consciousness. When we become aware that we are not seeing reality, but our brain’s best guess at reality, we become more aware of our own mental processes.

What is consciousness? It’s the collection of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that make up your experience right now. It includes your sense of self, time, and memory.

We are rarely aware that we are aware, rarely conscious of our own consciousness. Instead we ride the wave of whatever thoughts or impulses arise in the moment: my to-do list, my hunger, my need for a nap, that conversation I wish had gone differently. We are aware of the passage of time, mentally dividing our day into chapters and scenes. But unless we sit down to meditate, or something (like seeing an illusion) jars us out of our usual way of seeing, we are not aware of this profound thing that is happening to all of us: we are aware.

This week I’ve used optical illusions to illustrate some of the ways we get perspective on our own consciousness: 1) we notice that we can’t perceive what is actually there, 2) we notice that we do perceive what isn’t there, 3) we become aware of how context changes our perception, and 4) we become aware that contrast changes our perception.

I believe the story of Advent and Christmas, like most sacred scripture, is meant to create a change in our consciousness, a shift in the way we see the world. It is meant to unmask the illusions by which we live, to make us more sensitive to context and contrast, to show us what is really there (like divine presence), and what is not (like human-made concepts of “deserving”).

This kind of consciousness-altering revelation is, to borrow a word from psychedelic culture, “trippy,” as encounters with God often are. We readily identify trippy Biblical images in Ezekiel’s wheels with eyes, Isaiah’s vision of God’s robe filling the temple, or John’s apocalyptic monsters and pregnant women. But the New Testament images of manger, cross, and empty tomb are likewise consciousness-changing.

Next week, I’ll turn from perceptions to automatic behaviors as we continue to explore Christmas and consciousness.

Prayer: Divine Light, light up our world and renew our minds. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

If you’ve enjoyed the optical illusions this week, you can find more at the Illusion Index.

Bonus Christmas image from the article We Wish You a Trippy Christmas:

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Week 1, Day 4: Seeing contrast

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Here is a classic optical illusion that shows how easily our judgments are thrown off. I remember first seeing this illusion in elementary school. Although the horizontal lines are the same length, we usually perceive one as larger than the other.

There are several theories about why this illusion works. One theory is that our brains shift into interpreting the horizontal line as a 3-dimensional image, that we’re seeing the line as a corner of an object that is close or far away from us. A corollary of this theory is that in cultures where people do not grow up around a manufactured environment with lots of right angles (in tribes of hunter-gatherers, for example), people are not thrown off by this illusion. The evidence for this theory is inconclusive.

One of the most fascinating papers I heard presented at the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference was about the visual perception of people on psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”). It turns out that people on psilocybin are more sensitive to contrast in such optical illusions (the strength of the illusion is greater), but that they also have greater “surround suppression,” meaning they are better able to filter signal from noise (Swanson, 2022). In some ways, people on psilocybin were seeing more clearly, not less.

This illusion reminds me of something my friend Melissa Scott says. She introduced me to the term “right-sizing,” a spiritual and mental awareness that corrects our tendency to think of ourselves, our problems, or our importance as either too big or too small. I think in many ways, the Christmas story is about right-sizing the human experience and our relation to the universe when we find God in a feeding trough. It’s about filtering the signal of divine presence from the noise of the distractions that dominate our attention.

I think seeing through the eyes of Christ helps us to see things more clearly, often in ways that put us at odds with the dominant culture. Richard Rohr calls this “Christ consciousness.” This way of seeing dispels illusions that tell us one person or being is greater than another. It helps us begin to clear away some of the cultural and cognitive biases that lead us to make errors in judgment.

Prayer: God, help us to see the world through the lens of Christ consciousness. Help us to right-size ourselves, our culture, our problems, and our importance in your awe-inspiring creation. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(The above optical illusion was created by Franz Müller-Lyer in 1889. Sourced from Wikipedia.)

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Week 1, Day 3: Seeing context

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This isn’t an Advent scripture, but it’s good quote to introduce today’s optical illusion:

“When they moved, the wheels moved; when they stood still, the wheels stood still; and when they rose above the earth, the wheels rose up along with them, because the spirit of the creatures was in the wheels.”  (Ezekiel 1:21)

In this optical illusion, the motion of the wheels is the same, but you will observe them moving left right, up, down, and in and out.

At first, I thought the arrows had something to do with the illusion of motion, but it turns out that the main effect is caused by a faint border of pixels around the wheels. If you cover up the arrows, the wheels still seem to move in different directions. (An explanation for how the optical illusion works can be found here.) Some people report that the arrows give the illusion a “boost,” making the motion more prominent.

In the last two devotionals, I pointed out that a) we don’t see things that are there, and b) we do see things that aren’t there. This illusion demonstrates that our brains interpret ambiguous data from very subtle context clues.

As a pastor and counselor, I try to be very sensitive to context. Context determines how we understand the narrative trajectory of the Bible. For example, do we read the New Testament as a story of a wrathful God throwing us one last lifeline before damning all of creation to hell and destruction? Or do we read it as an unfolding revelation of God’s grace, with Jesus as a herald of a new kingdom? You can certainly find support for either reading. I believe context imparts a certain direction to our reading.

I read the Bible as the story of God’s faithfulness to God’s people, a God who has been trying for ages to teach the principles of abundance (manna) and forgiveness (mercy) to humans who are infatuated with an economics of scarcity and a politics of coercive power. I come to this reading because of my own social context (how I was raised, the groups I identify with, etc.) and because of the historical context of the Bible. The Bible was written by escaped slaves, returning exiles, and oppressed people. Even though I belong to none of those groups, I see the direction of scripture informed by that background.

And I see it especially in the story of the pregnancy of an unwed mother, the visit of pagan astrologers, and their family’s refugee flight to Egypt. When I read scripture, I try to imagine what seeing it in or from a different context would be like. I squint, I cover up arrows, I draw lines around it. I apply historical, literary, intertextual, and womanist and queer lenses to see what the movement of scripture looks like from a different perspective. All of this makes me more aware of how my own consciousness, my own experience, shapes how I understand the movement of God not only in scripture, but in the world.

Prayer: God, help us to pay attention to context. Help us see through eyes other than our own. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(Optical illusion based on the work of Twitter user @jagarikin. )

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Day 2: Optical Illusions: When we see what isn’t there

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“…You say, ‘I’m rich, and I’ve grown wealthy, and I don’t need a thing.’ You don’t realize that you are miserable, pathetic, poor, blind, and naked” (Revelation 3:17).

I’m going to be sharing a lot of optical illusions with you this week, because I think they are great ways to illustrate how our consciousness works.

The two illusions I’m sharing today work because our eyeballs are always moving in very tiny ways. These micro-movements are involuntary. Paired with the tendency for our brains to fill in missing information about data they don’t directly perceive (see yesterday’s devotional), images that are still may look like they are moving. Lines that are straight may appear to curve or wiggle.

Yesterday I wrote about the fact that we don’t always see what is there. Today’s illusions show that sometimes we see what isn’t there; in this case, our brains add motion or curves to still images. In the above image, wheels that are still appear to move, because your eye is moving around the image to try to capture all that is there. But whenever you focus on a spot, you see that the wheels are still. Below, for a similar reason, lines that are straight appear to curve.  

Both of these illusions illustrate that the area your eyes can clearly see is actually pretty tiny. Even when you stand on a cliff and look out an immense sky, your brain is able to convey the enormity of your panoramic vision, but you are really only able to focus on an area about the size of your thumbnail.

We always add information to what we perceive. In relationships, this may look like hearing an angry tone or a nasty implication in a neutral statement. It may look like the assumptions we make about someone else’s intent or state of mind.

In society, it may look like making value judgments about wealth, status, and deserving. We associate money with success, and success with virtue (which John points out in the passage from Revelation above).

This doesn’t mean “everything is relative.” We can take out a ruler and measure. Using careful observation, we can see that the lines or wheels in the illustrations above do not move. The optical illusion only works as an illustration because there is a consensus-based reality that we can know.

I’m reminded of the story of Hannah from 1 Samuel 1, who prefigures Mary. When she kneels in the temple, praying without making a sound, the priest Eli initially assumes she is drunk. She sets him straight: “Don’t think your servant is some good-for-nothing woman. This whole time I’ve been praying out of my great worry and trouble!” (1 Samual 1:16). When we tell the story of Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, we’re aware that people who had incomplete information probably added their own information and assumptions to her story.

These illusions also highlight an important theme in both Christmas and consciousness. When we look at the stars, whether we see divine portents in the heavens or simply balls of burning gas, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

Prayer: God, help us be circumspect in our assumptions and judgments. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(Spinning Wheels optical illusion was sourced from Optics4Kids, and appears to come from a 2007 issue of Scientific American. I was not able to find an original source for the map/curving lines illusion.)  

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Week 1, Day 1: Blind spots: When we can’t see what is there

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The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
    to proclaim release to the prisoners
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
    to liberate the oppressed,
    and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)

I keep a file of my favorite optical illusions, and I sometimes use them with clients who are disturbed by hallucinations.

To normalize hallucinations, I tell them that we are always hallucinating. Our brains are piecing together what we see, hear, and experience every moment from incomplete information. Your brain filters out information you don’t consider relevant, and adds information it believes is missing. And even if your eyes are wide open and your vision is fine, your brain is not aware of what it cannot see.

Until you see something like this:

There are several dots in this illusion, but (depending on how close your face is to the screen) you will likely only see a few of them at a time.

The illusion above has to do with how your brain processes information, but there is a more obvious, physical blind spot where your optic nerve attaches to your retina. You can read about the experiment here. You seldom perceive your own blind spot, because your brain fills in missing information. It’s only when you try to track more than one spot with one eye open that you become aware how your brain is tricking you.

There is a lot of language in the Bible and in Christian tradition about healing blindness which, while sometimes ableist, is a good metaphor for coming to a new understanding. We talk about “revealing” or “revelation,” having an “epiphany,” or finding “enlightenment.” All of these metaphors are about light and sight. But we are walking around with “veiled” vision all the time and do not notice it.

Acknowledging that there is much that we do not perceive or know is called “epistemological humility.” It means trying to keep in mind that we jump to conclusions, make faulty assumptions, and have cognitive biases that shape our perception of the world. I’ll say more about epistemological humility later in the week.

The New Testament tells a story of a messiah who shows up but remains unseen, veiled, hidden. Looking at a crowd of people, you might miss that God incarnate is walking among them. Once you see the Incarnate One, you may become aware that there are other places you’ve missed seeing them. You might start to see Christ all around.

Prayer: God, reveal to us what is hidden. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr. 

(Optical illusion first posted on Facebook by Dr. Akiyoshi Kitaoka, from a paper by Jacques Ninio and Kent Stevens.)

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For the next five weeks, I’ll be sending out a short daily devotional informed by my work as a pastor, theologian, organizer, and psychedelic-assisted therapist. I’ll be delving into scripture, theology, and recent research into neuroscience. If that sounds like your jam, feel free to sign up!

(You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.)

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Christmas and Consciousness: An Advent-to-Epiphany Devotional Starting Soon

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The world is in a precarious place, and the message of Christmas is more urgent than ever: God does not dwell up in the sky, but among the least of us. Encountering the incarnation of God in Christ requires a mental reset, a different kind of consciousness.

For the next five weeks, I’ll be sending out a short daily devotional informed by my work as a pastor, theologian, organizer, and psychedelic-assisted therapist. I’ll be delving into scripture, theology, and recent research into neuroscience. If that sounds like your jam, feel free to sign up!

If you’d like to follow along, you can sign up for email devotionals or visit my website here. 

(You can support the ministry of Saint Junia United Methodist Church by clicking here.)

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Prayer: God, you have taken us on a wild journey. Give us assurance, patience, resolve, strength, and peace for the days ahead. Amen.

—Rev. Dr. David Barnhart, Jr.