True Eye!

To see the truth we must stop looking by the light of the sun. We have to split the light from the trees, unzip the radiance from the grass, peel the glamour from the world. Because our eyes do not show us what is real. Desire is what gives things their real and present shape, and only love has the light to show this and bring everything into true reality.

I’m not saying there’s a different physical reality in things. If you look at a tree it really is sixty feet tall, it really has green leaves, it really has brown bark. Nevertheless, to see these things does not mean you’re really, truly seeing the tree. Why? Because human beings cannot see a tree without also seeing the signs that make up a tree, i.e. “tall,” “green,” “brown,” “on this land,” “good for timber” etc., and all these signs are permeated by desire. Try separating your vision from your active (signifying/desiring) mind. It just can’t be done. Michael Hardin teaches something he calls a “fox walk” and “wide angle vision” as you walk across a field, for example. You tread very deliberately, heel and toe, and you refuse to focus on one thing but let everything around you impact you directly. This is as close an approximation to being totally “in nature” as possible. But your active mind is still there, proven by the fact it can switch on and focus in an instant. And because of that everything is still experienced as sign: i.e. the back of your mind is saying “yes this is what I’m doing, the ‘fox walk’ and ‘wide angle vision.’”

The same goes for Buddhists. A long-practiced monk may reach enlightenment but there is a whole panoply of signs to put him there, the robe, the bell, the master, the scriptures etc. etc. And there is a sign for the state itself, i.e. “enlightenment” or “Nirvana” which must somehow always be there playing in the back of the mind, as are the signs for the rest of the world. If not the monk could never say to himself I need to stop meditating right now and go get my dinner: i.e. the world of objects and the signs that communicate them is never dissolved.

This is not to devalue any technique of awareness or the devotional practice of meditation overcoming destructive desire. What it does mean is that it is impossible to escape the human system of signs and the desire they mediate—does not the Buddhist still in fact desire “enlightenment” and “an enlightened world?”

Meanwhile our actual Western commodified world is exploding with signs of desire, signs filled with desire. It’s the engine which makes everything work and nothing can stand in its way. Hey, you’re Islamic and you like your Shariah law. Out of the way for these signs of ours filled with desire! Hey, you’re an indigenous person, living in your rain forest, and you like your traditional way of life. Out of the way for these signs mediating desire! Hey, you’re a Christian and believe in Jesus, well heaven is the greatest of all signs of desire, the last payoff of a prosperity gospel. Get right on board with your very own Christian signs mediating desire!

Heaven as the absolute reward (infinite flying miles earned) is a recent twist on the Christian tradition which always said that the world we see is not the real world, but did so by framing it within a Platonic division of heaven and earth. To get between the sun and the earth was a first move of Plato’s philosophy, telling us that there was an ideal world up there and what’s down here is a poor inferior copy. Meanwhile the ideal world can be accessed by the intellectual self which is the immortal soul. It was far too tempting for Christian consciousness, following Plato, to switch the false world of desire to the world of the material senses as such, and then transfer the real world to one above, not to an earth transformed by love. For example, the following: how easy is it to read the passage as earth below (bad) / heaven above (good)?

If therefore ye have been raised with the Christ, seek the things which are above, where the Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God: have your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth; for ye have died, and your life is hid with the Christ in God. When the Christ is manifested who is our life, then shall ye also be manifested with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1-4)

But really the words “raised” and “above” are just metaphors for the radical separation between the way the world is now and the way it will be. Everything hinges on “when” and “manifested”, meaning that the real issue is something happening in time and it will be a “showing forth” of a different way of life and living; and then all of us will “show forth” (and also see) in exactly the same way.

Heaven as an object of desire makes it today part of the present order where our “showing forth”, i.e. our signs, are based in desire and the violence of desire. The character of signs based in violence is a critical argument from Girardan anthropology, something that has been mentioned frequently in these blogs and is necessarily supposed here.* The Buddhist attempt to get away from signs of desire into enlightenment or emptiness is indirect proof of this problem—they know something is very wrong. (Their technical doctrine is called “dependent co-arising” and illustrated in Indra’s net where you realize “everything is everything” and so you become free of any individual sign.) They are entirely right in their instinct. But as I suggest they just can’t get rid of the sign and so the actual world remains rooted everywhere in desire and violence.

But what if another sign should arise in the world, one entirely without violence and capable of changing every sign into its own nonviolence? In the New Testament this absolutely new, trans-originating sign, the Alpha and Omega, is the cross and resurrection. This sign goes to the very ground-zero of meaning and signification and begins it over. And it can do so because it works not at the level of sight or intellect but of our whole nervous system in its blindest and most unconscious mode of operation which is to build up a world out of desire and murder. The sign of the cross and resurrection constantly works at this level to reprogram our most primordial gesture of meaning—which could be summarized as “you’re out and we’re in,” into something wonderfully different—“you’re out and I’m out there with you.” Here is the good news, a sign that means the world, a new world, a new creation. When you truly meet the sign of the cross and resurrection your deepest neural self is reprogrammed to love.

So true “seeing” comes with the transformation of desire not sight. To loosely paraphrase Paul we change from the body of death to the body of love. And this overcomes every sign rooted in violence, slowly, amazingly changing every significance into the new significance of love. How beautiful to see everything around us with the eyes of love! Not the eyes of anger or power, not the eyes of indifference or boredom, and, yes, neither the eyes of ignorance and blindness. To see with true eyes. Or as Jesus puts it, the single eye, the eye not divided by violent desire, but gazing out with total love. True eye!

(* For origin of signs see Girard’s Evolution and Conversion, 103-09)