Project Vision 21

We know what The Little Prince taught: The essential is invisible to the eyes. But from knowing that truth to living and practicing it there is a great distance that, due to its size, leads us to accept as “essential” things that are not and does not allow us to see the fundamental and truly essential sources. In other words: we judge without basis or knowledge.

That thought recently came to my mind when, while walking through a park south of the city where I live, I came across a crooked tree or, rather, leaning like the Tower of Pisa. It was the only tree in that condition among numerous other trees that had grown without deviating from a strictly vertical growth.

The crooked tree situation reminded me of the saying that people, like trees, are difficult to straighten if they are born and grow crooked. Perhaps they live long and productive lives, perhaps literally or metaphorically they reach impressive heights. But they will always be crooked and, therefore, they will be easily detected and attacked.

As I continued walking and I approached the crooked tree, I noticed something that was not seen from afar: it had grown on a large rock. While all the other trees were on solid ground, the crooked tree was on a rock, and worse still, the rock was on the edge of a small cliff. One wrong step, so to speak, and the tree would fall.

Due to the place where the crooked tree had grown, its roots were not buried, but were left above ground, literally clinging to the rock. And that was the key: the crooked tree had been born and raised in a place where it needed to use all its energies to cling to life, no matter how crooked or not the tree was and regardless of what other could say.

The essential element of that tree, its roots clinging to a rock, remained invisible to my eyes not only until I got close enough to the tree to see its roots, but also until I put aside my prejudices and my judgments about "crooked trees", be it plants or people. 

To use another metaphor, if we only see the visible part of the iceberg and we believe that this is the whole reality, our thoughts and our understanding will be distorted and limited. Many times, the reality, the essential, is submerged within two great seas: history and the subconscious (to use that particular word).

Everything we believe today and what we assume we know has a historical origin. And much of what we believe and say we believe we do not believe or say it consciously, but it arises from the non-conscious level of our mind.

For this reason, we cannot see what the iceberg hides under the water, nor the historical origins of our ideas and situations, nor what is really hidden inside our mind. The hidden sources of reality can only be seen with appropriately trained eyes.