The Distance Between Seeing and Knowing
I was watching a YouTube video one evening—nothing dramatic, just one of those algorithm rabbit holes that lands you somewhere strange and unexpected. In this case, it landed me on a video about “throne angels”—what the Bible calls the Ophanim.
When I saw the image—those radiant, intersecting wheels covered in eyes—something in me stopped.
I know that. I’ve seen that.
Not in the outer world. Not in dreams.
But in that deep inner space where presence becomes experience without explanation. That image on the screen—biblical, ancient, symbolic—wasn’t new to me. It was familiar. Not because I’d studied it, but because I’d been with it. Or rather, it had been with me.
That moment triggered something: a realization not just about the symbol, but about how the mind renders experience.
We Only See What We Already Know
The human mind can’t grasp what it hasn’t already been prepared to see. And even when it encounters something radically unknown—something direct, raw, numinous—it still has to filter that through what it already understands.
The mind doesn’t receive reality. It renders it.
And it renders it using the symbols, language, metaphors, and sensory patterns it has available. 5,000 years ago, if someone encountered a field of omnipresent awareness that could perceive from all directions at once, what might they see?
- Wheels within wheels.
- Eyes in every direction.
- Fire that doesn’t consume.
- Motion without movement.
It makes perfect sense. That was the language of their time. The mind painted the ineffable using the brushstrokes of its culture.
But today? If someone—say, me—has that same encounter, the mind might render it as something else entirely:
- A holographic sphere of light.
- A still point around which all reality bends.
- A presence that sees not from somewhere, but as everything.
- A kind of “awareness engine” that doesn’t move, yet changes everything around it.
That’s the beauty—and the trap—of consciousness. It’s not wrong. It’s not illusion. It’s just that everything we see is shaped by what we’re able to see.
What I encountered was a radiant presence with 360-degree awareness that didn’t need to move through space like going “from t0,” because it could be anywhere at any time – is everwhere, all the time.
What If the Mind Had No Word for “Wheel?”
After seeing that video and feeling that recognition, I kept circling the question: “What would Ezekiel have seen if he’d never seen a wheel?”
It’s easy to forget that “wheel” was a cutting-edge technology back then. It was a symbol of movement, coordination, divine precision. But had he never known the wheel, what then?
Maybe he would have seen a tree with infinite branches curving in every direction. Maybe it would have been a song—a pattern of tones folding inward and outward. Maybe it would’ve been a swirling wind, or a cloud that shimmered with awareness.
The form would change. The essence would not.
Because what was being revealed wasn’t a thing. It was a way of being. A field of presence. A mode of seeing.
Alien Eyes and Familiar Minds
This got me thinking even further. “We do the same thing with aliens, don’t we?”
Every science fiction book or movie—no matter how wild or “imaginative”—still presents aliens using the raw material of what’s already known. Tentacles. Light. Code. Technology. Even the truly bizarre ones are just clever rearrangements of what the mind already recognizes.
We cannot conceive of what is truly alien. We can only recombine the known in ways that seem strange.
So we’re not really imagining aliens. We’re discovering the edges of our imagination. The same goes for God. For angels. For archetypes. For the “unknown.”
We give them wings and robes, or wheels and fire, or quantum fields and light codes—but they’re all just costumes stitched together by the need to make some-thing out of no-thing.
The Ophanim Is a Mirror
So what is a throne angel, really? Is it a being? A vision? A metaphor?
Or is it a mirror—a way of showing us how we see?
It doesn’t matter if it appears as wheels, light, silence, or song. What matters is that it touches a place in us that’s older than language, prior to culture, and immune to dogma.
The moment I saw that video, I didn’t say, “I understand that.” There was simply recognition.
And maybe that’s the real invitation here. Not to figure it out. Not to make it conform to belief. But to ask:
“What part of me is so ancient, so wide, so still—
that it can recognize eternity… even when it’s wrapped in symbols?”
And perhaps the better question isn’t what Ezekiel saw. But:
“What am I seeing—
that my mind still doesn’t know how to name?“
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.