What is this guy protecting himself from?
One of my favorite pieces of clip-art is the ubiquitous “sun wearing sunglasses” – not because it so wonderfully communicates the message of “hot fun in the summertime” and is the perfect embellishment for a summer picnic invitation – but because it illustrates a subtle facet of the human condition.
Let’s just look at this for a minute…
There he is, Mr. Sun, blazing in all his glory, pumping out 3.8 x 1033 ergs of energy per second and yet, for some reason, he feels the need to don protective eyewear? Why? There’s no other nearby star bright enough to cause damage to his massive solar retinas. And what planet could possibly reflect enough light to require sunglasses?
He’s the sun! The source of all life and energy in the solar system – everything literally revolves around him! But somehow, he appears blissfully unaware that he himself is the one responsible for generating the blinding flares and hazardous ultraviolet rays. The truth is, only by turning his gaze upon himself will Mr. Sun find something worth shielding his eyes from.
And here we find our metaphor. Our awareness and sense of reality so often seem to be shaped by the things out there. We mistake the outer world, the things around us as the primary source of illumination, when really, we’re the ones doing the shining. All those shapes, colors, sounds and feelings – all the wonderful sensations we know – are happening behind the shades, in the recesses of our brains. Just like the sun in his Ray-Bans, we’re often blind to the fact that it’s our own internal processes that are responsible for making things shimmer and shine the way they do.
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