Sunday, October 06, 2013

Looking at God in the Eyes--PART 1 (C)

As God comes to see the pilgrim with both Eyes, so when the pilgrim comes to appear before God, he must be able to see with both eyes.
                                                                     --Talmud, Chagigah

I entered there and saw, with an eye of some sort of my soul, an eye above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light.
                                                                    --Augustine, Confessions

Have We not given him two eyes…and shown him the two paths? Yet he would not scale the Height.

                                                                     --Koran, 90



And maybe that's what it means to see Him with two eyes. 

It is easy to look at Him in His pristine Infinity with one eye and at the versatile, detailed world around us with the other.

But that is to not see Him in totality. That is failing to scale the Height and to perceive His unchangeable Light that remains One in the myriad aspects of the mundane. And hence, a one-eyed view does not illuminate our "airy region," the empirical reality that we experience. We must strive to make a full pilgrimage to Paradise while alive, to keep our eyes in Heaven as we look at all the beauty and goodness on Earth.


Her eyes in heaven
Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.
                                            
                                        --William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet








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