Hidden In Plain Sight

By Leo Gura - January 27, 2017

The best way to hide a thing, is in plain sight.

I love examples of how something can be hidden in plain sight. A sleight of hand so obvious, you smile when you see it. Nowhere does this apply more than with spirituality.

When people first start to learn about spirituality they tend to fall into one of two traps:

• Spirituality is just a bunch of fairy tale wishful thinking
• Spirituality is some exotic set of otherworldly experiences

In both cases, nothing could be further from the case. Spirituality is about becoming conscious of reality exactly as it is, but at a deeper dimension. In Zen, they like to say: Nothing is hidden.

What rationalists and “skeptics” who poo-poo spirituality don’t understand is just how significant a simple shift in perspective can be. Nothing has to change about the facts on the ground, so to speak. All that needs to change is your perspective and your entire world flips upside down. But this is the pity of materialistic thinking. It’s mesmerized by the gross, superficial dimension of reality. People who are used to thinking in materialistic ways expect spirituality to be a gross, materialistic sort of thing. As though if the facts on the ground don’t change, it doesn’t matter. That’s the huge oversight! Spirituality is SUBTLE! It’s seamlessly interleaved into the gross. Like a beautiful chameleon in the rainforest, lost on the tourist.

To illustrate this point, take a look at these stereograms. Cross your eyes as you stare at them to spot the hidden object inside.

Did you see it?

Notice that none of the facts changed, but the shift in perspective you experienced was very significant and real. It’s like you discovered a new dimension to reality. And it was right there the whole time! Hidden, but not really hidden.

What if — right now — there was something equally obvious about your perception of reality that’s been hidden in plain sight your whole life? What if people have been pointing to it for 2,000 years, but you’ve kept saying, “You must be crazy! There’s nothing there to see.”

Enlightenment is like that. It’s a shift in perspective, not a change in personality or behavior, as people often confuse. The lesson here is never to underestimate just how significant a “mere” shift in perspective can be. Perspective is everything.

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