Visioning with the Eye of the Heart

   Which, if any, image calls to the “eye of the heart?” One of the opportunities I find in photography is to notice how certain visuals have special appeal and persist in their command. Of the many photos I’ve taken in recent years, I’ve selected 85 or so for my screensaver folder, so that they appear in random order upon my computer screen, often showing next to the page I’m typing or viewing. 

    Perhaps more than any other, when the one shown above appears, my breath most often holds and tells me to allow my being to still and to receive the peace it offers. Maybe it’s the backdrop field of diffused green, sometimes said to be the color of the heart. Or it might be from the butterflies, as they frequently transport an image for the soul. And the purple-pink flowering plant, the native American medicinal plant echinacea, has constituted “ the top-selling herbal medicine in health food stores in the United States.” Of course, without any such confirmation, without exercising cognitive analysis, the “eye of the heart” knows the value of this manifestation of beauty, whether or not the human accesses such knowing.

            As discussed in previous blogs, The Eye of the Heart, is the title of one of Frithjof Schuon’s books and the first essay in the volume. A favorite passage, tells of this point of “seeing”:

“Thus the heart lies as if between two visions of God, one outward and indirect and the other inward and relatively direct, and from this point of view the heart may be assigned a double role and a double meaning: firstly, it is the center of the individual as such and represents his fundamental limitation—his ‘hardness,’ as the Scriptures say—and thereby all his secondary limitations; secondly, it is the center of the individual insofar as he is mysteriously connected to his transcendent Principle: the heart is then identified with the Intellect, with the Eye that sees God—and that consequently ‘is’ God—and by which God sees man…” (p. 7; Footnote 12 explores the meaning of “Intellect.”)

          The Bible and the Qur’an each offer over 100 scriptural references to the human heart. The “hardness,” which many of them attend, along with simply the awesome prospect of even looking toward God, suggests how it is that a person might easily pass through the lifespan with little if any benefit from this treasure gifted in the heart. As with any beloved, it’s important to pay attention and thus increase our realization of the subtle beauties. These hints of the Beloved, signaled by the heart, while in a sense are “free,” yet they also demand respect and love, or they may well disappear, their deep value never becoming known.

         Again, a kind of teaching metaphor for the activity of the eye of the heart is readily available through photography. How does the image produced through the framing, focusing, and editing open our eyes to the many manifestations of beauty? Frequently, the initial viewing of a photo just taken stirs disappointment with a sense that the photograph doesn’t reflect the experience. But I’m also finding that when I play with resources available through my camera and in editing, I’m able to feel further into the treasure of beauty. Is an artistic rendition real? The search of value to me is toward the Truth that moves further than the eye of science and that believes beyond into the vision suggested by the eye of the heart.

Thru the Snow Fog

In a dream last night, the figure that was most clearly me was directing others preparing the activity we were about to conduct, and in the midst of the detail came the essence. The purpose of the whole crystallized along with the awareness that this raison d’etre was probably not prominent in consciousness and should be articulated. This morning wakens with woods steaming in a snowfog, the spring-seeking twigs budding in rainbow drops, each whispering the secret of the hidden universe, for the clean heart to witness.

My dreams and thoughts doubtless reflect readings. Yesterday I finished Omid Safi’s Memories of Muhammad and Matt Rees’ Mozart’s Last Aria. I was also copying passages from recently completed Schuon’s Eye of the Heart and had looked up references to Chittick’s Self-Disclosure of God. One gem: “Each person has a unique knowledge from God that is given to no one else” (Chittick, p. 138).

     And yet, who sees through the fog of to-do distractions enough to remember the essential truth, the message inscribed deep in the individual heart? Who troubles to clean away the false attractions, who allows the pain necessary to polish the mirror, and lets in the light that makes the rainbow trail into the secret? Perhaps it’s not as hard as we fear. 

     The world has too many preachers of hellfire and peddlers of fake gold. Fear and anger block the way. Fundamentalist rule-keeping makes a short cut to nowhere holy. Instead, the clean heart bows toward love. The only way. “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8).

     The fog is lifting outside a bit now. The path into the woods opens further. 

I’m learning to listen to the voices that carry a special tone and looking for the lens that hones into beauty. As Rumi says, “like this… like this…”

Muddy

Muddy. Last night’s dream may have offered this term as a guide to enable a confluence of currents to merge in order to yield revelation, possibly even to offer a continuing semi-substantial base (i.e., mud) for holding my own, or perhaps better for surrendering to the higher Will, whether to stand, sink, or swirl.

     One stream, as the previous blog noted, moves along with persistent musing around theodicy: trying to reconcile A with B: A—the existence of suffering and evil in the world, and B—God who is both all-love and all-powerful. That stream carries the force of several overlapping themes and sources including a number of readings relating to the biblical book of Job and extending way back some fifty years to college days when a course that I was taking required our involvement in the theatre production of MacLeish’s J.B. This stream has churned more muddy through certain life experience, particularly in relation to the death of my son fourteen and a third years ago, still weighed in the heart most every day. 

     And the dream was likely provoked by reading from two quite different genres. From fiction, Iris Murdock’s Black Prince and Owen Egerton’s recent (2017) book Hollow, described in a back-cover review:

 “a beautifully strange modern take on the ‘Book of Job,’ populated with haunting and hilarious characters worthy of Vonnegut’s best. A meditation on grief and love, Hollow is simultaneously heart-wrenching and laugh-out-loud funny.” 

Both of these books pursue existential questions of life and death, love and hate, heaven, hell, here or there, God or not. Such questions cannot be satisfied by anyone, by any way other than the individual living them out.

          And still I read because I believe in the “imaginal world” where one wonders about truth, not about facts, but about the True that runs free of literalism, materialism, and the “hardened heart.” Usually these wonderings lead into other kinds of reading focused on spirituality. 

     Not long before being presented with the muddy dream, I had been steadily reading, ten or so pages a day, in Frithjof Schuon’s The Eye of the Heart: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Spiritual Life (copyright 1997). From his final section, I was trying to absorb as much as possible of the revolutionary ideas, revolutionary because he turned keys to the kingdom upside down. Fear turns to perfection in overcoming evil. And, what of Love?

“… its most direct expression is the contemplation of the Divine Perfections which may be designated synthetically by the term ‘Beauty.’ This perspective of love is situated beyond fear and negation: instead of having painfully to reject the world on account of the ephemeral and deceptive nature of its always limited perfections, love, on the contrary, attaches itself to the divine Prototypes of these perfections, so that the world—henceforth emptied of its content, since this is to be found again infinitely in God—will be only a play of symbols and an accumulation of husks, and thus will have no further hold over man.” (pp. 170-171)

     The dream was not dramatic but perhaps just a hint to notice. Sometimes the important things turn more subtle. In the dream, a new system became available; perhaps it involved an improvement in teacher evaluation. The interesting aspect was that it could only be accessed by persons who already had in place a certain level of sophistication in their practice. The term applied to the more developed system was “muddy.” In the dream, I was surprised to hear that term because I had just encountered it somewhere else—perhaps an echo from the reading?

     In waking, perhaps still in the between space, I wondered if the reading from Schuon might only be accessible to persons who had in place a muddy readiness that’s built by certain life experience, also by reflection, and by (to use Schuon’s title for this final section of his book) “Meditation” in The Eye of the Heart.

“… if [Beauty] is most immediately graspable in the created, it is, conversely, the most difficult aspect to grasp in the Uncreate. If God’s Beauty were as easily accessible as that of creatures, the apparent contradictions of creation—the sufferings that we consider to be unjust or horrible—would be resolved of themselves, or rather, they would vanish away in total Beauty… When we look at the sufferings of this world, we must never forget that God compensates them infinitely by His Beauty; but this is beyond rational demonstration.” (171-2)

     Approached from this world especially with expectations of rational demonstration, the problem of suffering will appear “as clear as mud.” But if a sufficient foundation is built, life experiences and questionings which otherwise risk mind-splitting and heart-breaking may instead take one further on the the path or in the river of Love and Truth, Beauty, and the other names of God as they swirl eventually into the One.