If you have ever been in the hands of a mental health professional, you may have been give a Rorschach ink blot test and asked what the blots remind you of. Or you may have been given a minimalistically styled series of pictures and invited to make up a story around the pictures. And even if these things have never happened to you, you may have seen on TV news those occasional manifestations of the likeness of the Virgin Mary in a cookie or the wall of a house.

What seems to be happening here in each case is the same. Our sight is not an objective sense at all; it is strongly colored by what we expect to see, based on experience and the input of our other four senses. We see what we expect to see. We do know, from the very limited number of people whose sight has been restored after a lifetime of blindness, that those people have the greatest difficulty in reintegrating sight into their apprehension of the world that they know. Vision for them is simply a mass of color and movement. Not infrequently, the stress of "seeing" is too much for them; they prefer their "blindness" to their new-found ability to see.

Awareness meditation as part of our Step 11 practice is therefore extremely valuable, because it pushes us back to the experiences that we have rather than our interpretation of those experiences. Awareness meditation can help us to "see" in the way that those people with restored sight can "see" - that is, it can reduce our "meaningful" relationship with the world we "think" that we know to simply a stream of experience, some of it sense-based, some of it memory-based, without any intrinsic or God-guaranteed "meaning."

Unless we are able to do this to some extent, we will never be able to get past our emotional, mental, physical, and religious preconceptions of what life is. We will be for ever stuck just where we are, because we "know" that where we are is "true." We will never come to understand that this is "a random universe to which we bring meaning"; we will forever blot out any possibility that we might be seeing something that simply isn't there, and -- more importantly -- failing to see something that is there.