The Power of Shiva's Third Eye. Now Known to Science as "Anthro-Vision"

Lord Shiva 
Also known as Triambakesh - the God with the third eye

Why does Shiva have a third eye?

To see the most important things.

And what are these most important things?

The things which cannot otherwise be seen.

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This interpretation of Shiva’s third eye – that it is for the most important things, the things which cannot otherwise be seen – has long been a personal favourite. This interpretation just received scientific validation from Gillian Tett, Ph.D.

In her recent book Anthro-Vision, Gillian Tett, a Cambridge-trained anthropologist. explains that this Shivite thought – that the most important things are the things that cannot be seen – is right at the heart of Anthropology. She explains that Anthropology “enables you to see around corners, spot what is hidden in plain sight” by listening to “social silences”, by hearing what is left unsaid. Or, by observing the world through Shiva’s third eye.

Now that the provenance of Gillian Tett’s good ideas are clear, her exhortations to use Anthro-Vision in all walks of life take on an added urgency. Anthro-Vision is God’s will!

So let us open our third eyes, see the most important things, hear the sounds of silence, and therefore gain the empathy, insight and sense of humour needed to make the world a better place. 

Gillian Tett, Ph.D.
wants us to use our third eye

Moonwalking with Einstein. On why I blog, and take pictures

Just finished this excellent book called Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. Among its many pleasures was this passage, which feels close to the heart of what keeps me blogging, or taking photographs, for that matter:

Until relatively recently…people had only a few books – the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.

But after the printing press appeared around 1440, things began gradually to change. In the first century after Gutenberg, it because possible for the first time, for people without great wealth to have a small library in their own homes...

Today, we read books “extensively”, without much in the way of sustained focus, and with rare exceptions, we read each book only once. We value quantity over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read…

We read and read and read, and forget and forget and forget. So why do we bother? Michael de Montaigne expressed the dilemma of extensive reading in the sixteenth century: “I leaf through books, I do not study them”, he wrote. “What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else’s. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued; the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget.”

He goes on to explain how “to compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory”, he adopted the habit of writing in the back of every book a short critical judgment, so as to have at least some general idea of that the tome was about and what he thought of it.

I know that works for me too. Synthesizing a thought on what a book, or movie, or trip was about, and writing it down, makes the experience itself richer, more memorable.

Joshua Foer