We do not see everything, so we do not know everything.

We do not even know how much we do not know, nor do we know how much of what we know

is actually impartial, distorted, or false.

That is why we seek to open our eyes, to encounter the world afresh,

in humility and in silent wonder, to learn to see. In the first season of learning how to see,

Jackie Lewis and Richard Roar joined me in introducing a baker's dozen of biases that make it hard for us to see what is there.

In this season, we want to turn our desire to see into prayer, into something we feel in our bones and bodies,

something we desire so deeply that our hearts are stretched and deepened.

I was enthusiastic about bringing the program design team of the Center for Action and Contemplation onto this season because I've worked with them for the last couple of years.

And I realized they have so much wisdom and so much depth and so much to offer.

And in addition, I wanted to talk about translating and understanding of the biases into actual practices.

And I know these colleagues actually live what we teach about contemplative practice.

How would you define bias? How do you understand it? Where do you see it out there causing trouble in our world today?

The image that comes to me is the image of a pinhole camera. As human beings, we only have a limited amount of sight.

And the pinhole camera, I'm near sighted in myopic, so when I look through a pinhole camera

without my glasses, I can actually see much clearer than I can if I don't have a pinhole camera

and I'm not wearing my glasses. But that clarity of sight comes at a huge cost. By having

everything cindered down to that pinhole, there's a whole lot that I can't see.

And if I'm not aware of the fact that I'm only seeing through a pinhole,

I can act as if my whole world is what I can see in that pinhole.

And I think that's something that is in some ways necessary for survival.

We have to limit the amount of input that we get and just look at what's most important

...