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

Looking at God in the Eyes--PART 2

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,

Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,

Until the lengthening wings break into fire

At either curvèd point,—what bitter wrong

Can the earth do to us, that we should not long

Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,

The angels would press on us and aspire

To drop some golden orb of perfect song

Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay

Rather on earth, Belovèd,—where the unfit

Contrarious moods of men recoil away

And isolate pure spirits, and permit

A place to stand and love in for a day,  

With darkness and the death-hour rounding it. 

                 --Elizabeth Barret Browning

All actual life is encounter.

                  --Martin Buber

It is never easy to truly see someone. And few blessings in this lifetime can compare with the feeling that one enjoys when truly and completely seen by another.

It is noble to empathize with another person’s pain, joy, or experience. One needs to turn aside from his usual preoccupations, take a step from self, and focus on the other person’s life for a while. But that is still not completely seeing the other and standing in total relation to him. That is sharing your being with his.

The encounter of two people at the deepest level, to the extent of utter communion, is when they truly see each other...see all and unleash all that there is to be seen...see nothing else.

That encounter cannot be reached with a supercilious comfort and casualness. It is the labor of a lifetime; it is the deepest experience of life itself. It is the ability to be submerged in the other, to experience the other fully. Only "pure spirits" willing to lose all sight of any distractions that will hold them back from dissolving into the immediacy of the other and to become exclusively present in the one who they are deeply seeing can "stand up erect and strong/Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher,/Until the lengthening wings break into fire."

One of the greatest humanists of our time, Martin Buber, wrote an entire work about this goal  - I and Thou.

He built an entire philosophy of relations between man and man, and man and God, by explaining that we are constantly faced with the choice of living in two radically different worlds--the "World of Thou" or the "World of It." This is based on his relating to other men and objects with two opposite attitudes. "To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold nature." He can see them as objects to be viewed, observed, and utilized. As "It"s. Or--

"If I confront a human being as my Thou, and say the primary word I-You to him, then he is not a thing among things, and does not consist of things. He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a specific point in space and time within the net of the world; nor is he a condition that can be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless ans seamless, he is You and fills the heavens. This does not mean that nothing exists except him. But all else lives in his light."

"Every actual relationship to another being in the world is exclusive. Its You is freed and steps forth to confront us in its uniqueness."

"I-You can only be spoken with the whole being."

Buber then goes on to explain that in truth, every You experience, every seeing of the other with wholeness and devotion, is essentially an experience of God Himself. 

"Extended, the lines of relationships intersect in the Eternal You. Every single You is a glimpse of that." 


To the extent that even one who "fancies that he is godless--when he addresses with his whole devoted being the You of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God."

And just as when submerged in a terrestrial You, all the rest of life and reality is viewed solely through his light and based on the exclusive relationship with him, so, too, with the Eternal You.

"In the relation to God, unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness are one. He who enters into the absolute relationship, nothing particular retains any importance--neither things nor beings, neither earth nor heaven--but, yet, everything is included in the relationship. For to step into the pure relationship does not involve ignoring everything, but seeing everything in the You, not renouncing the world but to establish it on its true basis. To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence. "Here world, there God" is the language of It; "God in the world" is another language of It ; but leaving out nothing, leaving behind nothing at all, to include the whole world in the You, to give the world its due and its truth, to have nothing besides God but to grasp everything in Him-that is the perfect relationship. 

Men do not find God if they stay in the world. They do not find Him if they leave the world. Whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being, and carries to Him all the being of the world, finds Him who cannot be sought. 

Of course God is the "wholly Other";but He is also the wholly Same, the wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overwhelms; but He is also the mystery of the obvious, nearer to me than my own I."



To live life with intensity and meaning, to stand in exclusive relationship with God by seeing Him in all. To be like the cherubs that always not only face each other, but also see each other, with "lengthening wings [that] break into fire/At either curvèd point." Like two people content to revel in each other's being with devotion and wholeheartedness--to be like that with God, to see the Eternal You as one relates to reality with deliberateness and meaning.

The most important thing is to habituate oneself, to train the thought and mind to recall at all times, that all he sees in the heavens and the earth and all therein are but the outer garments of the King that is enclothed in them.

      

       --Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Tanya 42 

Turn your eyes from me;
    they overwhelm me.

      -- Song of Songs 6

See that caravan of camels

      loaded up with sugar?

His eyes contain that much sweetness.

But don’t look into His eyes

      unless you’re ready to lose all sight of your own.

                             

       --Rumi

Shall We Cultivate a Sense of the Ineffable? [1]

Thus while the days flew by, and years passed on,

From Nature and her overflowing soul,

I had received so much, that all my thoughts

Were steeped in feeling; I was only then

Contented, when with bliss ineffable

 I felt the sentiment of Being spread

O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still;

O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought

And human knowledge, to the human eye

 Invisible, yet liveth to the heart.

                                                       --William Wordsworth

At times, one who thinks deeply reaches a state of wonder, that state which is more precious than any intellectual endeavor, for it is then that he is able to “peek through the cracks of the lattice” (Song of Songs 2:9) that separates the human mind from what lies completely beyond it. During those moments he lives an endless life that reaches beyond all boundaries of time, for he feels that he has ascended above the limits of time and space within which intellect dwells. His soul yearns to leave the confines of his body, for this sense of the ineffable is essentially the Divine Luminary revealing Himself to the person, drawing all the desires and passions of the soul to Him with this revelation of pleasure through wonder.

                          --Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneerson, Previous Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch

We take it for granted that man's mind should be sensitive to nature's loveliness. We take it equally for granted that a person who is not affected by the vision of earth and sky, who has no eyes to see the grandeur of nature and to sense the sublime, however vaguely, is not human.

But why, what does it do for us? The awareness of grandeur does not serve any social or biological purpose; man is very rarely able to portray his appreciation of the sublime to others or to add it to his scientific knowledge…Why then expose ourselves to the disquieting provocation of something that defies our drive to know, to something which may even fill us with fright, melancholy, or resignation? Still we insist that it is unworthy of man not to take notice of the sublime.

Perhaps more significant than the fact of our awareness of the cosmic is our consciousness of having to be aware of it, as if there were an imperative, a compulsion to pay attention to that which lies beyond our grasp.

The power of expression is not the monopoly of man. Expression and communication are, to some degree, something of which animals are capable. What characterizes man is not only his ability to develop words and symbols, but also his being compelled to draw a distinction between the utterable and the unutterable. To be stunned by that which is, but cannot be put into words.

It is the sense of the sublime that we have to regard as the root of man's creative activities in art, thought and noble living. Just as no flora has ever fully displayed the hidden vitality of the earth, so has no work of art ever brought to expression the depth of the unutterable, in the sight of which the souls of saints, poets and philosophers live. The attempt to convey what we see and cannot say is the everlasting theme of mankind's unfinished symphony, a venture in which adequacy is never achieved. Only those who live on borrowed words believe in their gift of expression. A sensitive person knows that the intrinsic, the most essential, is never expressed. Most-and often the best-of what goes on in us is our own secret; we have to wrestle with it ourselves. The stirring in our hearts from watching a star-studded sky is something no language can declare. What smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to convey, but that which lies within our reach but beyond our grasp; not the quantitative aspect of nature, but something qualitative; not what is beyond our range in time and space, but the true meaning, source and end of being, in other words, the ineffable.

                                                 --Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

                                       Opening chapter of Man is Not Alone-The Sense of the Ineffable

                                                          

While living in a world so busy, occupied with a life so full, should one extricate himself from it all to be aware of and cultivate…the sense of the ineffable?

“Why should we philosophers concern ourselves with beauty? That”, said Aristotle, “is a blind man's question”.

But beauty is part of our experience. It enhances whatever we're involved with at any time. The Talmud (Babylonian Talmud, Berachos 57b) asserts that "three things broaden an individual's mind: a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, and beautiful objects."

But…the ineffable? Why concern ourselves with that which is too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words? Why dedicate time to search out that which is too sacred and pristine to be uttered?

That question is asked only by someone that has not yet tasted the light of mysticism. And in truth, by someone that is still unaware of what it means to be truly human.