The Eyes of the Soul
I’m sure we’ve all heard the saying, “The eyes are the windows to the soul.” The other day, while sitting in a hospital room, I read something that made me think about it differently.
In its original wording, the phrase can be taken to mean something like a physiognomic principle. When you gaze into the eyes of other humans, you can tell a lot about what they’re thinking and feeling, and even about their general character, without them needing to utter a single word.
This is true enough. In fact, the principle even extends to certain kinds of animals. A dog’s eyes will often reveal certain wants, desires, emotions and even loyalties. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops. For instance, you can see murder in another being’s eyes, and other dark hungers. Madness too, and misery and torment. Again, while these clues are largely instinctual, they also map onto material patterns. That’s why the most talented actors can broadcast convincing facsimiles of them, and are well paid to do so.
But it’s not the whole story, because proper windows are bi-directionally translucent. So in addition to being windows to the souls of others, they’re also windows through which our own soul gazes upon reality.
When Saul is blinded in the desert, it was the shocking blindness of seeing a truth that was invisible to him before. The experience might be akin to skulking through a fenced-off property at night, then having a flashlight suddenly shined in our darkness-adjusted eyes. The flash is even painful, though it’s the kind of pain that’s hard to describe. We sense some form of damage is being done to us, and the unexpectedness of the light makes us afraid of who or what might be behind it. So, we tend to squint or shut our eyes in response.
It’s the same with the metaphysical eyes of the soul, which gaze through the windows. They aren’t necessarily closed or blind, but they might have adapted to the darkness. When a light is shined, our first reaction is therefore likely to be a disorienting terror. I think this is especially the case when we are exposed to a really big, bright light. These are the kinds of truths that seem like contradictions to the systemizing parts of our minds.
We are Self and Other.
Past and Future.
Fleeting and Eternal.
The left half screams, “But it can’t be both!” It wants an answer it can fully deconstruct, and analyze in a petri dish. It doesn’t wish to understand the infinite, but to replicate it in the finite for local advantage. This is an impossible quest, of course, with the potential to drive the questers batshit insane. Nowadays, this spell of madness is spread far and wide on the digital winds, through the black ether of cyberspace. It lulls us to sleep with lies about the nature of reality, including our own human nature.
Some of these lies are so preposterous that we can’t help but believe them. In Twain’s formulation of “lies, damned lies and statistics,” these are the latter breed, and often come bundled with facts and figures designed to lead us to our doom. We’re convinced that no person could possibly be evil or crazy enough to tell such incredible whoppers, so we ironically feel compelled to believe them.
This is especially the case with those material-reductionists who preach upside down sermons about “emergence” and “epiphenomena” to describe the conscious soul. In fact, they are horrified and outraged by the s-word, because somewhere deep down they know it marks a final bridge they cannot cross, an essence they can never dissect and reverse engineer for fun and profit.
That soul is the source of the light that shines out from the windows of our eyes. Sometimes it shines very brightly, like twin beacons of a joy that can become hilariously infectious. Other times, the windows are clouded by the accumulated dust and dirt of our earthly struggles and regrets. For most of my own life, my windows have been streaked with crud and slime. It got so bad at times that I convinced myself the light itself was an illusion, that it was only blackness out there. But no matter how dim our vision becomes, the light’s still there. We can still see a glimmering speck of it, if we know where and how to look. Sometimes we need a little help with that.
In fact, I think those eyes with only a speck of light shining through might be God’s favorite target for revelation. I don’t claim to know why He chooses who He chooses — that’s His business, not mine. But I know that it happens. Like the mystery of the Alpha and the Omega, the lost soul is somehow closer to getting blinded by that flashlight than the churchgoing penitent. I think this is something I have “known” all my life, even back when I regularly attended church with my mother as a child. Known in my bones, not in my mind.
The big difference now is that I’ve come to accept that I’ll never fully comprehend The Why or The How of God’s decision to reach across the veil, and transform us with his light. I am but a child, after all. Or, at least, I aspire to be one. I’ve only begun the journey home, but at least I’ve got my Windex spray in hand. I know the light exists, and now that the pain has passed I find myself yearning for what it can show me.
And that’s the main thing: not the light itself but what it reveals. We call it “light” because its material offspring is the essential medium of Creation, obtaining coherence at different speeds and phase states. But it’s also, you know… how we see stuff.
Sometimes those lamps are small and dim, barely more than a flickering candle. Like all else, this spiritual principle casts echoes and shadows in the material. For instance, the distant stars don’t typically shed enough light for us to easily transact with the nighttime world. They do, however, provide enough light for other sorts of creatures, who might want to hunt us down and eat us. That’s the material reason why we’re afraid of the dark.
So we set fires, made candles and lanterns and such. Eventually we captured lightning in a bottle, contrived devices that, when shined together, made night seem almost as bright as day. This is the case in my own city, a.k.a. the City That Never Sleeps. One could wander Times Square at 3 A.M. and believe they’re seeing everything around them with crystal clarity. Unfortunately, what you’ll mainly be seeing is animated advertisements screaming at you from all directions.
This little magic trick of ours can produce dangerous levels of delusion and distraction. As
recently put it in Unplugging from the devil's electric nervous system:Does this make electricity evil? Well, not in any simple sense. As St. Thomas would say, being as such is good. That electricity has existence makes it, as such, good. But when any being becomes more than what it is, in its very nature, good is warped. Evil, we should remember, is not the ontological other of the good but its corruption and distortion. Evil has no being of its own, after all, but relies always on the good.
So, of course, in one way, you’re lying to your eyes about the time of day when you switch that light on at night. But what is really at issue here, as (Marshall) McLuhan’s way of looking at things helps us to see, is one of scale and proportion. The trouble is, quite apart from our conscious awareness, we mistake the lightning for the sunlight; we mistake the gnostic universe within the electric nervous system for wholeness. Most significantly, electricity, more than any other medium or technology we use, distorts our relationship with the intimate and the distant. It does this precisely because of its discarnate form. What is far comes close when it should remain far. What’s close becomes distant when it should remain close.
In the electric world, we attend to matters that have nothing to do with us. In the electric world, we are distracted by notifications and emails and all kinds of other things, when we should be paying attention to what is closest. (Jean) Baudrillard proposed that the simulacrum can become so totalising that we lose contact even with the distinction between the truth and the falsehood. McLuhan allows for the same possibility but also allows for a remedy that precedes the distortion. He allows for the restoration of scale and proportion. This is not a simple thing to achieve, given that we are immersed in a highly technologised world. Remove one distortion of scale and another is likely to throw us out of whack in a different way.
In other words, there are two cliffs to fall off. We could wander one way and do the full Ned Ludd/Uncle Ted routine, but that would leave us stranded back in the terrorizing darkness with all the bandits and monsters. We could blunder off the opposite edge too, believing there’s no difference between our ersatz light and the Real Deal. But that would so wildly distort our sense of proportion and range that we’d wind up in a state of permanent psychosis. The City That Never Sleeps also Never Dreams, never replenishes or heals from damage, never makes contact with that higher reality beyond the Veil. All becomes a shadowplay disguised as dazzling forms.
That’s not to cast aspersions on the starlight, or of the waxing and waning moon, or of night itself for that matter. In fact, one of the worst side effects of electric light is that it pollutes and drowns the night sky, and draws our attention to our own inferior works. God created night as well as day, to teach us different lessons about Creation. It gives us mysteries to explore and problems to solve, not all of them terrifying. And what light we see in it humbles us, reminding us of all we do not know.
But the other light — the light of the Sun, of Sol — is what we mainly think of when we try to grapple with God’s Truth. Again, it contains within it something that looks superficially like a paradox; Sol is the reason we can see anything at all, but we cannot look at it. At least, not directly or for long. To do so would blind us. The best we can get is small, blurry glimpses of its edges — and even that is dangerous. “Lucky” for us, the sun’s position in the sky is predictable, and we are shielded from its otherwise deadly rays due to a matrix of other extremely “lucky” phenomena.
But now try to conceive of the Sun as a hyperconscious being that can reposition itself on a whim. You can try to avoid its gaze all you like, but your puny efforts are futile. The best you can do look down at your shoes, or shut your eyes, or maybe lock yourself in a basement to escape it. Good luck navigating reality with that strategy!
But even then, this version of the Sun can find your eyes, if and whenever it wants to. And so we are struck blind in the moment. The Veil is pierced, and for a moment the physical and spiritual intersect in observable spacetime. We label these unpredictable intersections with words like “magic” and “miracles” to account for the way they break supposedly unbreakable rules.
What didn’t occur to us in the preceding darkness is that a proper “rule” requires a rule-maker. It also requires a judge to determine whether a given rule has been broken, and if so what the remedy should be. This principle of rule-making and judgment applies not just to humans, but to all living beings at some level. A lion or a toad plays by them, but only if God doesn’t suddenly will it otherwise.
And if the permission model is accurate, that could mean literally every “rule” we observe is merely a guideline, which can be altered by God on a case-by-case basis.
In this model the relationship of mind to brain is much like that of a river’s water to the riverbed. Consciousness might be thought of as the flowing water, and the brain as the channel through which the water flows. Both are necessary for the river to exist. Without the riverbed, the water would simply spread out, perhaps in a stagnant pool, perhaps to soak into the ground, perhaps to be baked out of the soil by the Sun. Without the water, the riverbed would be dry and dead. When the water flows through the riverbed, there is a directional flow, one which is, moreover, co-creative: the riverbed directs the water, but the water also carves the riverbed, and therefore changes the form and direction of the riverbed over time. In just this fashion, thought flows through the brain and experience takes shape according to the established neural pathways, while at the same time that flow of thought can change those neural pathways. It is not a question of whether mind or matter are dominant, or whether one is illusory and the other reality. Both are real, and both are important. Matter affects mind, and mind affects matter.
The power of constraint is crucial to this concept. Far from generating consciousness as in an emissive model, in the permissive model brains serve to limit consciousness, and through the imposition of restriction thereby give it form. Considering again the river, it is precisely when the riverbed narrows that the sluggish, gentle flow becomes a raging torrent. The constriction of the flow concentrates its energy. The neural connections that don’t exist are as important as the ones that do, as this forces thought to take one path in exclusion to the infinite others, and thereby shapes that raw consciousness into definite memories, personalities, and experiences.
While our language models and opinions differ immensely on certain subjects, I’ve found that
‘s perspectives on consciousness (and by extension, many of McGilchrist’s) align in strange ways with my own. I nicknamed the brain the Guardian of the Veil in the past, which is pretty similar to the limiting/focusing function described above. The difference between our minds and the Alpha-Omega mind of God is that the latter is functionally limitless in what it may permit or deny. He makes the rules, and so He may break or change them as He sees fit. And when He does, we are duly amazed and transformed.In the the wake of these moments, some of us might also become very confused. We may start to think that we ourselves can break the rules, either by petitioning God or casting spells or what-have-you. We are made in His image, after all, and so through our efforts we find a limited ability to alter the course of the river and riverbed. But there are limits that we cannot transcend, and would destroy ourselves in the attempt. Our soul’s eyes gaze upon Creation, but we cannot ourselves create. We can observe, extrapolate, remix, modify, assemble, adorn, enjoy. But we can never create as God creates. Some people see this limitation as an unfair set of shackles, or even a prison we must escape. But without this limit in place, we cannot possibly fulfill our mission.
What’s that mission? The way I’ve come to see it, it’s both impossibly complicated to describe and ridiculously simple.
First, the ridiculously simple version:
Spread joy, dummies!
Or maybe “comedy” is the better word. Or “good times,” or “God’s glory.” There are so many words, for that indescribable light you will sometimes see gleaming back at you, even through a set of very cloudy windows. And if the eyes of our souls have been exposed to some simple but titanic flash of truth, we might see quite a bit more than that, once the blisters fall off.
The complicated part of the joy-spreading mission is how exactly to do that, since each of us is designed and honed in our own unique way. Making the whole thing even more complex is that our solutions in any given moment are temporary and unstable. Joy is a moving target, and at times a prey so elusive that it practically seems invisible. Similar to our survival strategies, we therefore need to get super imaginative at times, and figure out how to adapt our best techniques in other situations.
Another complication pertains to the edges of the canvas. The goal isn’t only to make others joyful, but to be joyful ourselves. If we get the hang of it, the joy circuitry can enter a kind of self-amplifying feedback loop, in the same way that laughter is infectious.
The problem is that the Devil’s workshop churns out a lot of products that superficially resemble joy, but are just cheap, shoddy imports that fall apart the second you unbox them. A lot of these can be found screaming down at you in Times Square, or across the cancerous ecosystem of screens in general. Sometimes they will be other humans who are literally screaming at you, having been persuaded the shadows are the shapes. We saw this everywhere during Covid, for example. But in a way, we’ve all been hounded by this unholy screaming for our entire lives.
So the real trick is to figure out how you — and you alone, with your own unique gifts and flaws — can maximize joy in a world full of pain, misery, noise and distraction. Some of that work might be intellectual. For instance, we might apply our acquired knowledge and skills to the wonders and mysteries of nature. Others might play music, sing songs, make beautiful pictures, crack funny jokes, lend a helping hand when the chips are down.
That’s only a tiny sampling of the joy stack, and even within it there exist an infinite number of variants and combinations. I suspect that’s the main reason why we’re made as individual beings, instead of undifferentiated blobs or identical clones. Like comedy or magic, true joy requires a bit of a surprise. For most people, this concept seems easy to grasp.
What often seems less easy for some to grasp is that joy requires the possibility of tragedy. This appears to be the fundamental error of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Catharism, Rosicrucianism and other -isms that posit a jailer-demiurge or evil godhead.
detailed the supposed contradiction in a recent piece, which can be boiled down to the following question.“Why would an all-good and all-powerful God ever allow bad things to happen?”
As usual, the key problem here is with defining (or not defining) our terms.
What is “good”, for instance? The undeniable truth is that there can be no goodness without joy, and no joy without the legitimate threat of suffering. We are made to choose, and to learn from those mistakes that lead away from joy, or into suffering, or both. This is “all-good” because the possibility of suffering is what allows for joy’s existence at all, let alone its proliferation.
That’s why we call God the Father, and His love a fatherly love. A mother’s love is often called “unconditional”, meaning it’s not bounded by rules or laws. The child is swaddled and protected from all dangers, and the mother would break every rule in the book to keep it safe. That is a good kind of love to receive as an infant, because you are completely defenseless at that stage. But as the child grows, the mother’s love can become blind, jealous and suffocating, causing her child to become weak and frail. That’s when the wise father must step in, and allow his child to fail, suffer, and grow stronger in the wake of damage.
Now, suppose you see a dad who constantly gives his kids candy and money and booze and cocaine and whatever else they desire, whenever they desire it. Would you call that man a “good” father? Or would you think that he was spoiling them, and thereby condemning them — and everyone who transacts with them — to a future of joyless misery and disaster? We could call the dad short-sighted at the very least, if not utterly soul-blind to the tragedy he’s cultivating.
The error compounds due to our temporal position. While we have our Father’s eyes, we don’t have anything like His range or wisdom. So when we beg for more candy, and don’t get it in that moment, we see the Father as unfair, uncool, double-plus-ungood. That’s because we don’t see things from the high angle that He sees them, don’t know what He knows. If we persist in this childish state of mind, we may indeed come to view Creation as a prison, and shake our fists at its Creator with a wrathful fury. That’s the way the Devil sees reality: a jail. And for him, it is.
Meanwhile, we must learn to choose well among the many options and paths available to us. If religion has any use at all, it may be in giving us some useful hints on how to minimize damage and suffering along the way. But if the goal is mere safety, then the religion has failed. Safety shouldn’t be a goal in itself, not least because it’s impossible to be both completely safe and even marginally alive. The goal is to open our eyes, and to see as far and as clearly as we can. It’s in that state that we’ll be most capable of spreading joy and love, and experiencing those things for ourselves.
As
wrote in “Spiritual Sight: How to See the Unseen":Seeing the unseen means to gain a subtle “uplink” to the higher world, the world of Spirit, and to be able to discern the spiritual reality, the hidden meaning, behind the material world. This then leads to better decisions and actions—decisions based on “the things of God” as opposed to “the things of man,” as Mark’s Jesus expressed the Pauline teaching.
Now, part of this process is pretty straight-forward and can be expressed in modern terms: we need to learn as much as we can about the world, based on observation, life experience, and study. And this without blinking, for truth can be uncomfortable: we have our sacred cows, our ideologies, our obsessions, our blind spots, our temperaments, etc. Although we might never be able to move past those entirely in this life, at least we must get better at discerning certain unhealthy dynamics and reactions when faced with new observations, experiences, and knowledge.
Such knowledge, life experience, and self-mastery then allow us to recognize patterns and see clearer. For example, we might get better at setting priorities in our life, recognize who we should help and who we should better leave to their lessons, who has a negative impact on our soul and who lifts us up, how we can best put our individual talents to use, and so on.
If religion can help you do that, then it means religion is good for you. It may even continue to be good for you, throughout your entire life. But if it doesn’t help your soul’s eyes to see God’s truth and align with His will, then it probably should be discarded. All things should be discarded, if they stand in the way of that.
This was the lesson Jesus imparted to the rich man in Matthew 191, and why the latter walked away disappointed. For some, simply “following the rules” will not be enough to open their eyes, and to become truly alive. The point wasn’t that wealth is evil, but that wealth — or religion, or atheism, or tradition, or novelty, or literally anything else — could be crudding up your windows.
And while all paths to God must ultimately go through Christ, we are made as unique individuals whose paths through life will necessarily be different. Does that mean there are no rules whatsoever that we must adhere to? That one person’s path to God can be littered with bloody corpses? Crying women? Orphaned children? Cities looted and burned to the ground? YOLO as apotheosis?
No. There are rules to this game.
When the rich kid asked, “Which ones?” Christ told him the score:
Jesus said, “‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
Don’t murder. Don’t break promises. Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t forget where you came from. Love yourself and the people around you.
Is that too much for you to handle, sport?
Does it conflict with your grand Vitalist scheme to rule the world, bang as many chicks as possible, and slaughter anyone who gets in your way? Do you want to endure endless, expensive therapy sessions, where you learn to blame your mother for every problem in your life? Do you want that Playstation 5 so dang much that you’ll smash the window, then pin it on someone else?
Forget for a moment what the world would be, if everyone ignored these simple rules. Depending on where you live, you can just look out your window and see for yourself. I live in New York City. Enough said.
Think instead of what that will do to yourself. Or rather, think about how breaking these rules on a regular basis will greatly limit what you can do, and what you were made for doing, because you’re basically flying blind in a fog. +
And one of these days, your physical life will end. Your biological eyes will become useless to you. You’ll only have your soul’s eyes, from that point on, and no available means of changing their condition.
What kind of shape will they be in, when all is said and done?
What will you have prepared yourself to see?
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When I entered the room to identify my Mom’s body shortly after her death from a car accident some 26 years ago, I was immediately struck by the utter absence of animation that had always superseded the physical processes of her body. The heart had stopped but the departure of her soul left a form bereft of any semblance to the warm, loving person she had always been. And while I grieved, I was assured she had departed this place to journey to a far better place. The very absence of her soul affirmed my belief in the existence of her soul…and by extension the belief of my own.
Speaking of free will, I have always appreciated the absolute power of choice coupled with the unknown consequences of random choices exercised by other people. When you roll the dice you take your chances. Most of my imperfect experiment of traveling through life with God has been a series of mitigations designed to pick the best path forward between my stubbornness and his perfect will. The closer I can follow the six rules Jesus set for us, the happier I am. His grace and steadfast love remains the greatest mystery of all. It inhabits everything in my life
Reminds me of
"The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
And the painful albeit beneficial awakening covid has brought, with the subsequent awakenings to the deceptions permeating our reality.