Seeing with spiritual eyes is a way of saying seeing things as they are. Seeing things as they are eschews of prejudice, evaluation, bigotry, judgment, and even preference. Seeing things as they are means seeing through things to their essence, the essence in which we are all love.

When you embark on the exercise of seeing with spiritual eyes immediately you are struck by the objectification. You notice fairly quickly how you appraise everything you look at. Next you notice how each of the evaluations of things you look at reflexes with others. Thus something is more beautiful than something else, more ugly, more useful, and so on.

Further on, you begin to notice projection: the beautiful, ugly, and useful parts of yourself are perceived in the outside world as disowned parts of you. The world outside is your garbage dump, the place you put things you cannot quite handle in yourself. You might well ask, if the outside world is comprised of projections – disowned parts of yourself – then is it anything else at all?

The isolation and alienation inherent in that idea may be too much to bear. Indeed it is too much to bear for many who make their way back from these further reaches of inner enquiry out of fear of losing the comfort of projection and having to face themselves.

But if the intention to see with spiritual eyes remains strong, then you persist. Persisting at this point involves a radical shift from seeing things to mere seeing. Instead of objectifying and identifying with the objectification, you bring your attention to the field of seeing itself.

For those of us who have worked with deep emotions, it is like watching feelings arise in the body form and tolerating the arising without expressing the feeling themselves. After a while you rest in the experience of awareness, awareness of arising feelings. Emotions then cease to have such a powerful, insistent, and incontinent effect on you.

Resting in the source of seeing rather than seeing something, a gentle alchemy begins to work within you as the world becomes subject to your direct perceiving rather than processed through the separating, dividing process of thought.

BLOG entry #24