020 - I See You

I'd like to have a cat named Eyeball, probably as an antidote to an earlier cat of ours, Arselan, who was blind (we found her that way, one eye missing, the other a socket that looked like the pinched up end of an eggroll). I can imagine myself searching for her, walking around our house, calling, “Eye Ball…Eye Ballll.”

Cats have very expressive eyes. They are large, and remarkable in darkness, and convey nuance. When a cat looks at you, you often have a pretty good idea of what is going on in their mind beyond the eyes. This is why we say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Notice here, in conformity with our observations about dwellings and psyches, that the eyes are configured as a portal. A window is a portal to the house, as is a door. We know that the eyes are a doorway. It's right there in the phrase.

One of the things that is most important about neural platform being fluid, about our neuroception shifting under us at times, sometimes unconsciously, is that it makes it so that our experience of a situation can change even if the situation doesn't. Eye gaze provides a pretty interesting window into this phenomenon, because we interpret eye gaze very differently depending on whether we are experiencing the water, steam, or ice versions of ourselves.