Light of the Body

The mind sees a world in crisis. But the crisis is the mind. If we see through a shattered lens, everything appears shattered. Let us heal our sight.

Have you ever meditated on your eyes?

We are always streaming through our eyes. But do we ever take a few moments to rest in our eyes: not flowing outward toward the world, nor inward toward the mind, but resting in the liminal space, where seeing is empty, without seer or seen?

Through the portal of the eye, the energy outside presses in as a dancing chaos of light. Simultaneously, through that same gateway, we project our mind outward, organizing the light we see, superimposing onto its radiant chaos the forms that correspond to our desires, anxieties, and old stories.

The mind exits. The world enters. Yet we never notice the space of the doorway, the transparency of our own eye. We don't linger to look at what is looking.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, "The eye is the light of the body. If your eye is single, at one, your whole body will be filled with light." We like to abstract Jesus' sayings as moral concepts. We make mind-trips out of his words, instead of experiencing their roots in the spiritual heart of matter. But what if we took Jesus' words as instructions for meditation on the body, in the body? What if we became "single and at one" with our own eye?

Now, instead of streaming through your eyes, stop and rest in them. Remain in the space of pure beholding, without beholding any-thing. Sink deeper and deeper into the hollow cavern of your eyeball, neither going outside to form a world, nor upstairs to process light into thought. Let your eye be "single," resting in the clear emptiness of its own window.

Be utterly effortless. Notice the relaxation in the facial muscles, which we unconsciously strain by our seeking. We have been translating this strain into the world we see. Now, resting the eye in its own luminosity, the strain melts away, because no outer form need be imagined. This relaxation spreads through our whole face, creating a natural smile, and then through all the muscles of the body. Are we relaxing our world too?

As we feel this relaxation in our muscles, we feel peace in the mind, because there is no need to form concepts and mental images. As the "single eye," mind melts into its original nature, the pure blue sky of awareness without thought.

On the subtlest level of sensation, where light-waves become photons of flesh, we feel the bliss of an edge-less expansion, permeating the body, vibrating beyond the body. For when light rests in itself, new light is created, sparkling through the vacuum of awakened space.

At the sub-nuclear level of energy, finer than the quark, what is our body actually made of? Particles of bliss. And what are these particles of bliss made of? Pure awareness, ever expanding in stillness.

Awareness itself is the substratum, the continuum, that permeates the cosmos. And awareness effortlessly, ceaselessly expands because, at the finest level, it encounters no boundary or resistance. We are here, and we are everywhere. It is this paradox of dynamic expansion in stillness that we experience as ananda.

A few minutes of meditation relieves much stress, and transforms the way we see the world.

Very light of very light, vast cathedral dome of sight, self-illuminated mosque, starry empyrean of the eyeball: kneel here. Rest awhile. Venture neither out nor in, and every cell of flesh will bow down with you.

Repose in the bliss where seeing blossoms before anything is seen, and your whole body will be filled with light.

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