This is what great pilots share with artists, and monks and mystics. The heightened perception, the fascination with flight, eventually turns into an aeronautical superpower. The great pilot sees things and corrects before the average pilot ever knows anything is amiss.
The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look. Within a summoned and hybrid awareness, the inner reaches out to transform the outer, and the outer reaches back to transform the one who sees. Catherine of Sienna wrote in the fourteenth century, “All the way to heaven is heaven”.
Quote is from Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World by Jane Hirshfield.