FREE ESSAY ON LIGHT MATTER

LIGHT MATTER

Inner Light
In order to understand what light is one has to understand how vision works. The process
of visual perception is incredibly complex, involving many functions of the brain. In
Arthur Zajonc's book Catching the Light, he writes, ...vision requires far more than a
functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual
imagination, we are blind. The function of registering visual information, seeing,
requires learning to see, in other words, in order to see the light one must posses inner
light. The process of visual perception is connected to all the other senses, functions
of the body as well as mind. People learn to see by experience. For example: one acquires
the knowledge of what any given object is by examining said object from all sides, by
holding it, touching it, sometimes even tasting it. One, thus, 'learns' the object, so
that whenever one later sees it, one already knows what it looks like and is able to
anticipate the shape and textural qualities of objects related to the original.
Zajonc writes, The light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to
bring forth a world. This ability to conceptualize is what makes perception so
fascinating. Goethe had written that the inner light, or the 'organ' in the body that
makes us consciously perceive, is created by light itself. He wrote, The eye owes its
existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ to
correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light for the light so that the
inner light might meet the outer. As one becomes older the organ for perception develops
more. Our memory is foremost connected to vision; one remembers mostly what one perceived
visually, only after that the recollection of other senses and thoughts begins. Our
earliest memories come from a period when the conscious visual perception becomes
possible. That is why people's earliest memories vary in age. Every individual develops
at different rate. Once one knows, or understands what it is one is seeing, or that one
is seeing something at all, the world begins to make sense.