The invisible is one of the huge regions in your life. Some of the most important things about you and your life are invisible. What you think and the way you think control how you feel, how you meet people, and how you see the world. Yet your thoughts are invisible. One of the most fascinating questions about your thinking is, Why do you have the thoughts that you do, and why do you link them together in these patterns? The secret bridges from thought to thought are invisible. No surgeon operating on a brain has ever found a crevice full of thoughts. What you believe about yourself determines how people treat you. Yet you can never see your beliefs. Belief is invisible. Your feelings make you sad or happy, yet the feelings are invisible, too. The greatest presence from whom all things come and who holds all things together is also invisible. No one can see God. Because the invisible cannot be seen or glimpsed with the human eye, it belongs largely to the unknown. Still there are occasional moments when the invisible seems to become faintly perceptible. Sometimes, over a fire built out in the open, one can glimpse layers of air trembling. Or when a candle seems to make the air quiver. Maybe this is why we love colours. They bring the longing at the heart of the invisible to such passionate expression.
Under the guise of emptiness, the invisible keeps its secrets to itself. Yet the invisible remains the great background which invests your every gesture and action with possibility and pathos. The artistic imagination brings this out. We see this especially in sculpture. The shape of the sculpture evokes the shape of the emptiness around it. Also in dance we see how the body creates fluent sculpture in the air. It draws out the hospitality of the invisible. There is something quite courageous in the endurance of human presence against the vast canopy of the invisible. We endure the invisible by forgetting it—for as long as we can. When you become aware of the invisible as a live background, you notice how your own body is woven around your invisible soul, how the invisible lives behind the faces of those you love, and how it is always there between you. The invisible is one of the most powerful forms of the unknown. It envelopes our every movement. It is the region out of which we emerged and the state we are destined for, yet we never see it. There is no map with which to discern territories of the invisible. It is without texture. This is probably why we long to ignore the invisible. There is a sense in which the invisible is the home of fear. We tend to be afraid of what we cannot see or know.