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.

Falling Rain & Theodicy

“Into each life some rain must fall” from Longfellow’s “The Rainy Day” 

Especially when the unbelievable atrocities strike (e.g., another shooting, “civil" war, genocide) or the unbearable close-to-home happens (suicide, bullying, child cancer, road-rage fatality, domestic abuse...) or the everyday heartbreaks reach consciousness (poverty, ecological crises, enormous economic inequities, addictions, animal cruelty, leaders lying…)—at such times we may question the possibility of a loving all-powerful God. A word for this complex is theodicy. From the New World Encyclopedia: 

Theodicy is a specific branch of theology and philosophy, which attempts to solve The Problem of Evil—the problem that arises when trying to reconcile the observed existence of evil in the world with the assumption of the existence of a God who is fully good (or benevolent) and who is also all-powerful (omnipotent). A "theodicy" also refers to any attempted solution to this conundrum.

        The Catholic Encyclopedia credits the introduction of the term to Leibniz in 1710, so I suppose I should know the word better by now. The “conundrum” is certainly familiar as indicated by about 20 blogs I've written that explicitly reference the problem of evil, the book of Job, or both. Kushner’s books on bad things happening to good people have been helpful. And now, Schuon’s treatment in Eye of the Heart, while dense, offers commentary of reassurance and guidance.

“As far as theodicy is concerned, it is important to realize that the Intellect perceives Universal or Divine Good a priori, that is, it perceives this Good possibly before understanding—or wishing to understand—the nature of evil; and if the contemplative metaphysician may possibly overlook the doctrine of evil, this is precisely because he is certain in advance—and in unconditional and as it were primordial fashion—of the infinite primacy of Good, under the three aspects of ‘Pure Being,’ ‘Pure Spirit’ and ‘Pure Beatitude.’ For him, theodicy will have the secondary role of ‘putting hearts at rest,’ itmi’nan al-qulub, as the Sufis would say; for him, it could not play the role of a proof sine qua non.” [p. 42]

        Schuon adds a footnote to this: “To say ‘Being’ is to say ‘Spirit’ and ‘Beatitude’; and let us remember that ‘Beatitude’ coincides with ‘Goodness,’ ‘Beauty’ and ‘Mercy.’” He continues with guidance on the nature of certainty:

   “The credo ut intelligam of Saint Anselm means that faith is an anticipation, by our whole being and not by reason alone, of the quintessential certainty we have just spoken of; faith already shares this intellection by anticipating it, without it being always possible to decide where faith in the elementary sense of the term ends and direct knowledge begins. This is one of the meanings of the blessedness of those ‘who have not seen but yet believe’ [John 20:29]; but this saying, thanks to its sacred character, applies at all levels and therefore includes that of gnosis because in fact, to believe is not only to accept with the will and the emotions, it is also—on the very level of complete and intellective certainty—-to draw the consequences of what one knows, and therefore to know ‘as if one saw’ and with full awareness of being seen by Him whom we see not. . . . for although they obviously cannot ignore the existence of evil, those who know that God is sovereignly good, know thereby that evil can never have the last word, that it must have a cause which is compatible with Divine Goodness, even if they do not know the nature of this cause. Whatever may be our doctrinal knowledge or ignorance, the best means of grasping the metaphysical limits of evil is to vanquish it in ourselves, and this is possible only on the basis of intuition of the Divine Essence which coincides with the Infinite Good.” [pp. 42-3]

        Schuon adds another footnote to these last sentences noting Buddhist teachings about goodness. He then proceeds to discuss how the problem of evil can be held and even with the removal of “its venom.” What, when caught in this world, we consider “reality” may better be known as “accident” in order to hold to the divine, the Substance, the Reality.

“He who has the intuition of the Absolute—which does not solve the problem of evil dialectically but puts it in parentheses by removing all its venom—is ipso facto endowed with a sense of the relationship between the Substance and accidents, to the point of not being able to see the latter without also seeing the former. An accident, that is, any kind of phenomenon or being, is good to the extent that it manifests the reabsorption of the accidental into the Substance. And conversely a phenomenon is bad—in this or that respect—to the extent that it manifests the separation of the accidental from the Substance, which amounts to saying that it tends to manifest the absence of the Substance—without being able to achieve this completely, for existence bears witness to the Substance.   God and the world; the Substance and accidents; or the Essence and form. Accident—or form—manifests the Substance, or the Essence, and proclaims its glory; evil is the ransom paid for accidentality, insofar as accidentality is separative and privative, not insofar as it is participatory and communicative. Knowledge of the immanent Substance is victory over the accidents of the soul—hence over privative accidentality itself, since there is an analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm—and it is, for that reason, the best of theodicies.” [pp. 44-45]

        Schuon footnotes this section elaborating on the “accidental” in relation to the “Substance”:

"In the relationship of the ‘accident’ to the ‘Substance,’ one can discern a kind of continuity, whereas the relationship of the ‘form’ to the ‘Essence’ is more readily conceivable as being discontinuous; the first relationship refers more particularly—but not exclusively—to the Infinite and the Feminine, whereas the second evokes the Absolute and the Masculine. According to the first relationship, there is reabsorption, and according to the second, extinction; or again, according to the first relationship the soul meets the Substance by penetrating—but without concupiscence—the accident-symbol, whereas according to the second relationship the soul renounces—but without bitterness—the accident-illusion. All this is a question of emphasis for, in fact, the notions of ‘Essence’ and ‘Substance,’ or ‘form’ and ‘accident’ are broadly interchangeable." [pp. 44-45]

         In this book, “The Question of Theodicies” is followed with “Concerning the Posthumous States.” Perhaps the mind-stopping unbelievables and the heart-breaking realities are needed in order to bring recalcitrant humans who too often go insensitive, even inhumane, to one’s knees in order to detach oneself (the “animal soul”) from the perilous attraction to the material world. Humans depend on prayer vigils as well as actions big and small to build compassion and to sustain hearts that return continuously, leaning further into the other side, the True Reality.
        A friend posted today from a poem of Sanai that includes: "Don't speak of your suffering--He is speaking/ . . . He has opened to you the Way of the Holy Ones." While rainy days here often carry associations with teardrops, sadness, and broken hearts, these are vital to the beatitudes: life, growth, and preparing the move home into the next world. 

Self Disclosure

In response to the photo (shown above) that I posted yesterday on FB, one of my friends asked if I had a new camera because the color looked a little different. About a year ago, due to some problems with the camera that I was using, I purchased a new one, the Nikon D5300, and began exploring some of the “effects” it offered. This has increasingly involved taking multiple shots of the same thing and then “playing” with the versions using the editing options in Photo in my Apple computer. Usually I take a “normal” image using one of three settings: “Auto,” “Aperture-priority,” or “landscape.” Frequently, I also take a second photo using a special “Effect” called “HDR painting.”  

        By taking photos with different settings and making visual edits, I’m continually reminded to wonder. For example, what is real? How can we invite more beauty into our daily lives? As elaborated below and as evident in my blog over the past year, such questions and explorations serve to open further visioning into the manifestations of the Divine.

        The new camera got a major workout during our trip to the Southwest in Spring 2018. The trip featured special attention to the art of Georgia O’Keeffe which likely complemented my fascination with the camera’s HDR-painting effect. Photos of the trip and its attention to Georgia O’Keeffe were fashioned into a blog and video. Subsequent blogs, such as Golden Snowflakes, have elaborated on the connections among my current photography and reading.

        Perhaps this exploration provides a career for retirement. My bookshelf overflows with riches that offer guidance. For example, open on my desk this morning is “The Eye of the Heart” by Frithjof Schuon to a passage marked on p. 4:

“The symbolic transposition of the visual act onto the intellectual plane provides a quite expressive image of identification through knowledge: in this process one must indeed see what one is, and be what one sees or knows: the object in both cases is God, with the difference that He appears as ‘concrete’ in the first case and as ‘abstract’ in the second.”

       Doesn’t this connect with the two kinds of photos I take? And then Schuon explicates beyond words I might dare to use but that encourage me further into the “world of imagination.” Schuon continues:

“But the symbolism of sight is universal and is therefore applicable also to the macrocosm and to all its degrees: the world is an indefinitely differentiated vision whose object in the final analysis is the divine Prototype of all that exists, and conversely, God is the Eye that sees the world and which, being active where the creature is passive, creates the world by His vision, this vision being act and not passivity; thus the eye becomes the metaphysical center of the world of which it is at the same time the sun and the heart. God sees not only the outward, but also—or rather with all the more reason—the inward, and it is this latter vision that is the more real one, or strictly speaking, the only real one, since it is the absolute or infinite Vision of which God is at once the Subject and the Object, the Knower and the Known. The universe is merely vision or knowledge, in whatever mode it may be realized, and its entire reality is God…”

Schuon’s footnotes on these pages amplify with similar passages from Hindu, Christian, and Native American texts (see especially footnote 14, p. 9, from a “wise man of the Ogalalla Sioux” on “the Eye of the heart, Chante Ishta… The heart is the sanctuary at the center of which is a small space where the Great Spirit (Wakan Tanka) lives, and this is the Eye of the Great Spirit by which He sees everything, and with which we see Him”).

        I’m also encouraged in venturing into an apparently never-ending path by Chittick’s introduction to “The Self-Disclosure of God.”

“One of the reasons for Ibn al-‘Arabi’s extraordinary stress on the importance of imagination is his attempt to make people aware of the disservice to understanding done by rational extraction and abstraction. Not that he does not appreciate reason. On the contrary, he considers the rational faculty one of the two eyes with which the travelers to God see where they are going, and without both eyes they will never reach their goal. However, much of the Islamic intellectual tradition—like the Christian and post-Christian—has employed reason to separate the bones from the flesh. In effect, this destroys the living body.     Too often, in the case of studying Ibn al-‘Arabi, ‘getting to the point’ is to kill. To get to the point is to bring about closure, but there is no closure, only disclosure. Ibn al-‘Arabi has no specific point to which he wants to get. He is simply flowing along with the infinitely diverse self-disclosures of God, and he is suggesting to us that we leave aside our artificialities and recognize that we are flowing along with him. There is no ‘point,’ because there is no end" (p. xi).

Perfect Fairy Tale

Loving Old Leaves

 I’m loving these leaves that, although their more appreciated summer appearance and work has faded away, are now simply gathering winter sunlight into gold. This treasure of the leaves’ summer-to-winter transformation perhaps hints at the potential of changing values that is made available when a person moves from workplace into retirement. The promise of transformation draws from and draws us into the imaginal world. Where else can the gold hidden in dried leaves be envisioned? 

        The conception of an imaginal world presages riches through its capacity to compose a between-space, a zone of transformational meaning-making, even a new world where qualities feel more tangible, ones like love, beauty, and peace. This is not a world of escape but instead it’s the way for mediating heaven and earth.

     The “imaginal world” of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s age may at first sound strange, but perhaps it’s only because the stage/screen/page space of our contemporary world provides such meagre spiritual nurturance. Ten centuries or so ago, the vision of world-makers such as the Brethren of Purity guided eyes to contemplate the transmission between the beyond and the below.

… the Ikhwan al-Safa [Brethren of Purity] apply different names to the fundamental cosmic duality depending upon the qualitative relationship in view. . . they explain the principle involved in shifting perspectives: ‘Know that all these words are titles and marks. Through them allusion is made to forms, so that distinction can be drawn in ascriptions that are made among them. Thus one form is sometimes called material, sometimes substantial, … sometimes spiritual, sometimes corporeal, sometimes cause, sometimes effect, and so on’” (Tao of Islam, pp. 161-2).

     Sachiko Murata helps to open up this teaching by applying the yin/yang construct so that we can better comprehend the perspective shift involved in looking toward the Divine and turning to engage the creation. Her account reminds me of a stairway descending from God to First Intellect to Universal Soul and so on down to earth. Even the shifts in perspective seem to me to be participation in a creative act, in transmission. Murata describes the double role happening through the shifting in an imaginal world in the movement on the stairway, looking up and down:

“The Ikhwan say, for example, that the Soul is an accident (yin) in relation to the Intellect, but a substance (yang) in relation to things below itself…what is matter in one respect is form in another. . . the Intellect and Soul are each in turn a source of light and activity. The Intellect is God’s radiance, while the Soul is the Intellect’s reflection. The Soul is bright in relation to the corporeal world, but dark in relation to the Intellect. . . the Universal Soul is a spiritual being, born directly from the First Intellect, it is light. But it represents a movement in the direction of Nature, so it embraces the properties of darkness as well. Like any barzakh, it brings together the properties of the two sides.” (Tao of Islam, pp. 162-3).

     This teaching and explication are valuable to me as they pertain to the possibilities of living with the Imaginal World, a barzakh, a bringing together of Heaven and Earth, a living into the Kingdom of Heaven while on earth (cf. Luke 17:21 , “the kingdom of God is in your midst”). We look toward God so that the radiance we absorb can reflect into our vision of life below. While the earth seems unlikely ever to hold the fullness of Divine Justice or Love or Peace, by moving through the Imaginal World, we may be able to sustain good work. While God remains Beyond, my dealings with darkness in the world (e.g., involving injustice, hatred, and suffering) may be lightened by turning into the barzakh.

“Ibn al-‘Arabi and his followers … were concerned to find the roots of all qualities present in the cosmos in the divine reality, as that reality is described by God’s own Word. These qualities depend upon the relationships that exist between God and the creatures. . . these relationships are precisely God’s attributes or names.” Tao of Islam, p. 162

     If we are to find the treasure of the imaginal world, we may wish to retreat into a time that  believes in spirit. Now is a good time for such retreats, especially as it’s the only time we are given and therein time can be malleable. The “now” may have to be re-created by letting go of the false security of fact and the shallow fascination with busy-ness and material possession. The contemporary imaginal world of celebrities and superstars can be substantially surrendered to an imaginal world devoted to spiritual realization. We can allow words and images to reshape by shifting focus from one world to another. 

     Perhaps we can practice by seeing in our imagination (with the help of mixing photographic images) the presence of one season within another. The play shown above with the golden leaves remembers the lush summer even in the almost leafless winter. In the image shown here

 when I look at the iris garden in snowfall, I can also move into the gorgeous shape and color of springtime.

     Murata draws from Ch 11 of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Futuhat when she says: 

“Among created things, spirits are the most closely akin to the divine. They are more or less identical with the ‘divine breath’ blown into Adam. For Ibn al-‘Arabi and many others, the qualities of spirits stand at the antipodes of bodily qualities. Between bodies and spirits stand the souls (nufus), which partake of the characteristics of both sides. Hence souls are ‘imaginal,’ since they are both luminous and dark, intelligent and ignorant, high and low, and so on. . .The soul is, as it were, simply the face of the spirit turned toward the world of lowness and density. If the soul turns back upon itself it will see its own identity with the spirit. This is the path of spiritual realization and human perfection.” Tao of Islam, p. 144.