The Eye is Like the Dawn
An excerpt from Anam Cara by John O'Donohue
The first
sense we will consider is the sense of sight or vision. The human eye is
one place where the intensity of human presence becomes uniquely
focused and available. The universe finds its deepest reflection and
belonging in the human eye. I imagine the mountains dreaming of the
coming of vision. The eye, when it opens, is like the dawn breaking in
the night. When it opens, a new world is there. The eye is also the
mother of distance. When the eye opens, it shows that others and the
world are outside us, distant from us. The spur of tension that has
enlivened all of Western philosophy is the desire to bring subject and
object together. Perhaps it is the eye as mother of distance that splits
the subject from the object. Yet infinity somehow invests our
perception of every object. Joseph Brodsky points out, beautifully, that
an object makes infinity private.
Yet,
in a wonderful way, the eye as mother of distance makes us wonder at
the mystery and otherness of everything outside us. In this sense, the
eye is also the mother of intimacy, bringing everything close to us.
When you really gaze at something, you bring it inside you. One could
write a beautiful spirituality on the holiness of the gaze. The opposite
of the gaze is the intrusive stare. When you are stared at, the eye of
the Other becomes tyrannical. You have become the object of the Other’s
stare in a humiliating, invasive and threatening way.
When
you really look deeply at something, it becomes part of you. This is
one of the sinister aspects of television. People are constantly looking
at empty and false images; these impoverished images are filling up the
inner world of the heart. The modern world of image and electronic
media is reminiscent of Plato’s wonderful allegory of the cave. The
prisoners are in one line, chained together, looking at the wall of the
cave. The fire behind them casts images onto the wall. Looking at the
wall of that cave, the prisoners believe it to be reality. Yet all they
are seeing are shadows of reflections. Television and the computer world
are great empty shadowlands. To look at something that can gaze back at
you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen
your sense of vision.
There
are those who are physically blind; they have lived all their lives in a
moonscape of darkness. They have never seen a wave, a stone, a star, a
flower, the sky, or the face of another human being. Yet there are
others with perfect vision who are absolutely blind. The Irish painter
Tony O’Malley is a wonderful artist of the invisible; in an introduction
to his work the English artist Patrick Heron said, ‘In contrast to most
people, Tony O’Malley walks around with his eyes open.’
Many
of us have mad our world so familiar that we do not see it any more. It
is an interesting question to ask yourself at night: what did I really
see this day? You could be surprised at what you did not see. Maybe your
eyes were unconditioned reflexes operating automatically all day
without any real mindfulness or recognition; while you looked out from
yourself, you never gazed or really attended to anything. The field of
vision is always complex and when your eyes look out, they cannot see
everything. If you attempt a full field of vision, then it becomes
unspecified and blurred; if you focus on one aspect of it, then you
really see that, but you miss out on the larger picture. The human eye
is always selecting what it wants to see and also evading what it does
not want to see. The crucial question then is, what criteria do we use
to decide what we like to see and to avoid seeing what we do not want to
see? Many limited and negative lives issue directly from this
narrowness of vision.
It
is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determines how
and who you will be. An interesting way of beginning to o some interior
work is to explore your particular style of seeing. Ask yourself: what
way do I behold the world? Through this question you will discover your
specific pattern of seeing. There are many different styles of vision.
