If you look at a Magic Eye picture in an ordinary way, the three-dimensional image hidden in the picture will never come out. If you stop seeing it in the usual way – tensing the muscles around the eyeballs to focus on the object – and relax those muscles and wait patiently with a soft-focused eye (“Magic Eye”), a three-dimensional image suddenly emerges from nowhere.
Then we immediately try to see the image more clearly by focusing, and without realizing it return to the ordinary way of seeing, and the image immediately disappears. The attitude, the way of seeing and what is seen are interrelated.
Sometimes it’s important to focus on detail in a very conscious and meticulous way. I once found an important ‘crack’ in a cover-up by comparing the metadata in an email to the date on the letter in the attached email. The email was sent months before the letter was written – that was an important detail.
Other times it’s all about having the proper scale – seeing things from the right distance. Take the feature graphic for this series for instance. How many buildings do you count in that mock-up of future Buddhist Development?
You likely assumed the gold coloured spots on the image were buildings, and you would have been correct. However, they are the BIG buildings – the hub buildings – the temples and meeting halls and libraries and what not. There are also huge, long buildings surrounding each of those hub buildings. I count dozens of buildings in the entire image: below is a zoomed-in image of the centre section of the image showing the buildings surrounding the hub centres. I’m guessing from the scale of the map they are quite big. How many did you think there were?