Neutral Vision and Programmed Vision: Discovering the Differences

How the ability to see yourself and your own reality can change your life

My name is Silvia Giovanna Sestini, and I have made photography, and my ability to select and focus on a single point rather than on the whole, a defining feature of my practice today.

In daily life it is easy to be distracted by the constant flow of visual and sensory information picked up by our five senses, and the ability to concentrate, to deepen one's understanding, and to keep searching with ever greater depth is a quality that is difficult to maintain.

In this first article on the theme of vision I open the discussion by exploring the difference between neutral vision and programmed vision, and by asking how it is possible to see reality with awakened eyes while remaining human beings.

How Vision Comes into Being

In physiological terms, our eyes are very similar to a camera lens: we have a fixed focal length comparable to that of a modern 35 mm, a diaphragm to regulate the entry of light and the focus, a shutter effectively managed by our eyelids, an optic nerve that inverts the image top-to-bottom, sending the brain an already flipped picture, and a sensor that receives light and transmits it, in the case of the eye, to the occipital lobe.

Depending on age and visual capacity, we may also enjoy Full HD or even 4K vision.

Our human visual system is as close to perfection and exceptionality as anything can be; yet there is a but. It is a programmed and programmable system that goes far beyond the software of even the most advanced camera.

Software That Constantly Needs Updating

In an era of convergence between augmented reality and the enhanced human being, we forget that the body and the entire mind-emotion-expression system already constitute the most complex and formidable programmable system that no scientist could successfully improve upon.

We speak of beliefs, of programmings, of genetic imprints, of life memories and the storage of emotions and lived experiences that reach us from our parents and their parents before them, across infinite generations. Perhaps the only true human limitation is self-devaluation, not any shortage of complexity or talent.

From Jung to modern cognitive psychology, the consensus is that every individual who comes into the world is "impressed" from the moment of conception with an infinite amount of information drawn not only from the direct genetic line but also from the collective unconscious.

In short: what we see is almost never reality, and the reality we see could be something entirely different, even in terms of meaning, from what we are actually observing.

A vision programmed to recognise as red an object that is in fact violet does not make that object red; but for that person it will be red until they receive different information confirming the object's true colour as violet, and clarifying that what made them see it as red belongs to a different experience, a different vision.

From childhood I questioned this very thing: I wondered whether, beyond those who are colour-blind, we all see colours in the same way. And I told myself: no. It was not possible. Because each of us is ourselves, the sum of impressions accumulated from childhood to the present day, with the addition of a personal quality that belongs to that person alone.

It was from that inner loop about colours that my search began, leading me to explore new paths until I discovered Ileana Rotella's QTR method. There I held onto the awareness that everyone sees in their own way, while a common vision, one compatible with that of others, can still exist: in a certain sense, a communal one.

We Are Machines If We Choose to Be, Human Beings If We Choose to Be

Observing the world through a camera viewfinder made me understand how everything outside the frame, and therefore invisible, does not exist. Or rather: it exists because I know it and accept it, but from the perspective of that lens closing on a specific rectangle, everything outside the frame I can also choose not to see and not to take into account.

This is, in brief, the selective attention we all know. There are those who cannot see beyond the end of their nose (evidently using a macro lens), those who look at others but not at themselves (equipped with a powerful zoom, say a prime lens from 600 to 1000 mm), and those who see both themselves and others (mounting a standard lens on their "camera body", another name for the 35 mm).

Whatever your way of looking at reality, it is likely that you are keeping something out of your frame: something you do not want to see, something you do not know how to see, something you cannot see because your family tree does not show it to you, or because you are a woman or a man and that particular thing is simply not given to you to perceive.

My vision of the human being is that of an individual endowed with free will, capable of choosing: choosing to change, choosing to see with their own eyes and through their own system of beliefs, or choosing to see through someone else's eyes, taking on a system of beliefs foreign to their own.

I always loved the SLR camera before moving on to a modern mirrorless, because you could change the lens and see directly through the viewfinder exactly what you were about to photograph.

Looking, often, is not seeing or observing. For me, looking means integrating the vision of what one observes with an awareness of all the inner and outer processes in which one lives. We are not only vision, not only a lens: we are also body, also thought, also choice, including the choice to change perspective.

I spent years hiding my face behind a camera without ever appearing in the photograph. I told myself it was the photographer's curse; perhaps, more simply, I did not want to be in my own frame.

What Is Your Vision?

I close this first article with a reflection I have made many times: everything you choose to see exists. Do you exist in your own vision? Are you capable of showing yourself to yourself, to your own eyes, to your own lens? If not, what are you afraid of?

True judgement begins from within and makes its way first through the one who judges, before projecting outward.

Where there is vision, where there is light in the frame, where there is the ability to observe yourself with a neutral eye, everything can be resolved.

I learnt to do this through the Quantum Touch Releasing technique, which has been part of my life for over ten years.

With the QTR technique I learnt to use a wide-angle lens to look at reality and to include myself in the frame even while I photograph. Impossible to imagine, yet possible to do once you learn that you are both the one who looks and the one who is looked at.

And with this small reflection, I look forward to meeting you in the next article.

Good Vision to you!

Silvia Giovanna Sestini