There is a beautiful paradox here, and it is worth sitting with rather than solving too quickly. One must see to know. And yet one must know to see.
This sounds like a dead end. But consider: if you have never encountered a chair, and someone asks you to retrieve the one placed directly in front of you, you will not see it — not because it is invisible, but because you do not yet know what you are looking at. The moment you know what a chair is, the object in front of you becomes visible. Seeing and knowing are simultaneous acts. Neither precedes the other. They arise together.
This means that knowledge is not always the child of the senses. There is knowing that comes before observation, and knowing that arrives from within. You know you are alive — not because you have seen your own life displayed before you, but because you are life. You know love, longing, and meaning — yet no instrument has ever measured their outline or bottled their center. The most crucial truths are not visible; they are felt, intuited, and lived. They reveal themselves only to the awareness that is awake enough to receive them.
The word realize carries something important within it. Hidden inside it is the phrase real eyes. The real eyes are not the eyes of the self, but the I that owns the self. The self and its observer are like two poles — subject and object — and the I that sees is the center point between them. It is the one that witnesses. It is the awareness that does not look outward at things, but beholds from within. And in beholding, it etches meaning into the world.