What Are You Not Seeing Because of What You See?

I am writing this from Paradise Valley, Arizona, where I am vacationing in the shadow of Camelback Mountain. The mountain rises above the landscape with a presence that is impossible to ignore, but its name presents an interesting invitation: before you can see the camel in Camelback Mountain, you have to know what you are looking for.

Camelback Mountain: Photo Credit, Courtenay S. Brown

You have to understand that the mountain is said to resemble a camel lying on its stomach, with its head and neck extending at one end and its familiar hump rising behind it. Once someone points out the shape, it becomes difficult not to see it. Without that explanation, however, the mountain may look like something else entirely.

When we arrived, the bellhop shared a story about Omar Epps visiting with his family. According to him, when Epps’s son looked at the mountain, he did not see a camel at all. He saw a unicorn. The mountain had not changed. The eyes looking at it had.

Perhaps the story stayed with me because satya, the Sanskrit word for truth, was part of a recent conversation during our 300-hour yoga teacher training at Shabach. We explored truth not simply as the absence of dishonesty, but as something we must be willing to examine beneath our perceptions, assumptions, and deeply held beliefs.

One of the questions that emerged from our discussion has remained with me: What are you not seeing because of what you are seeing?

Camelback Mountain brought that question into focus. Two people can look at the same mountain, receive the same visual information, and still see two very different things. One sees a camel. Another sees a unicorn. Both are responding honestly to what their minds have made of the image before them, but neither interpretation changes what the mountain actually is.

This is what makes the practice of satya more complex than simply telling the truth. Satya is one of the yamas, the ethical principles found within the practice of yoga. It calls us to speak honestly, live authentically, and refuse to deceive ourselves or others. Yet truthfulness also requires us to examine the filters through which we perceive the world. Before we can speak what is true, we must be willing to question whether what we believe we see is the whole truth.

The question may sound almost contradictory, but it points to an important reality: whenever the mind settles on one interpretation, other possibilities can become invisible. Once we decide that the mountain is a camel, we may no longer be able to imagine the unicorn. Once we decide what another person meant, we may stop listening for what they were actually trying to say. Once we form an opinion about ourselves, our relationships, or our circumstances, we begin collecting evidence that reinforces that opinion while overlooking anything that challenges it.

Sight is powerful, but it is not neutral. We rarely see anything without bringing our memories, expectations, fears, desires, wounds, and previous experiences into the moment. We see through the lens of who we have been, what we have endured, and what we already believe to be true. This is why what appears obvious to one person may be completely unrecognizable to another.

Sometimes sight leads us toward truth, and sometimes it persuades us that our interpretation is the truth. Our five senses connect us to the world around us, but they can also contribute to our suffering when we become overly attached to the information they provide. We assume that because we saw something, we understand it. We confuse observation with knowledge and perception with certainty.

• I saw the expression on your face, so I know what you were thinking.

• I saw that no one responded, so I know I am not valued.

• I saw someone else succeed, so I know I am falling behind.

• I saw what happened, so there can be no other explanation.

Yet what we see is often only one angle of a much larger landscape. We may be looking at the hump without seeing the head, studying one rocky formation without understanding how it connects to the whole mountain. Even when our observation is accurate, the meaning we attach to it may not be.

Practicing satya invites us to create space between what we observe and what we conclude. It encourages us to say, “This is what I see, but is it the whole truth?” It asks us to remain curious enough to question our first interpretation and humble enough to acknowledge that another perspective may reveal something we missed.

This does not mean distrusting ourselves or dismissing our intuition. It means learning to distinguish intuition from assumption, truth from interpretation, and discernment from fear. Sometimes our first perception is correct. At other times, we need someone to point toward the mountain and gently help us recognize the camel—or perhaps invite us to consider the unicorn.

Truth is not always immediately visible. Sometimes it reveals itself only when we change our position, soften our certainty, or allow someone else to describe what they see. The practice of satya is not merely about telling the truth after we have found it. It is also about becoming more honest about how limited our view may be.

Here in Paradise Valley, Camelback Mountain remains exactly what it has always been, regardless of the shapes we discover within it. The camel and the unicorn exist in the interpretations of those who look upon its ridges. The mountain simply stands.