Single Eye

"There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest heaven. This is the light that shines in our hearts." ~Chandogya Upanishad 3.13.7

"For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ." ~2 Corinthians 4:6

Both the Vedic and Christian traditions make the same astonishing claim: that the divine light embodied by the universe shines from the intimate core of our own hearts, as the light of Consciousness. This radiance is deeper inside us than our mind, yet it is the very energy from which the cosmos is created.

I Am not estranged from the creation around me. I Am never alone. Every blade of grass, every sparrow's feather, every dust mote and star, is composed of who I Am. The stuff of matter is my own awareness, from the wing of a house fly to a stone on Hyperion, Saturn's moon. Distance is illusion. I am wedded to a quasar ten billion light years from here, whose glow is my body. There is no such place as elsewhere.

The world need not be shrouded and estranged by the gray shadow of my thought, my anxiety, or my belief. I know that I Am; that is enough. Freed from the cloud of extraneous thinking, I see through the lens of my Heart, so clearly! The blur of duality is healed by the glory of the Single Eye. Did Jesus not say, in Matthew 6:22, "If your eye be single, your whole body will be filled with light?" 

Seen as it Is, without double vision, the world is astonishingly beautiful. Because the self-luminosity of Consciousness is beauty itself, and mother-matter is made of nothing else.

Chloroplasts in elm leaves, Queen Anne's Lace, atoms of loam and igneous rock, all shimmering like raindrops after a cloudburst on the first Spring day, each bead containing the whole sun, each electron bling of the dancing God. This world is honey, is it not, Christalled from fragrant pollen of self-delight? Energy of matter, light of consciousness, one and the same.

As a spiderweb is pure silk spun from the spider, so the cosmos is woven from what I Am. Every neutrino, every galaxy, a ripple of my oceanic Self. The object is the effulgence of the subject. I love my neighbor as me, because my neighbor is me. Selah.

So Vedantists delare, "Yatha drishti, tatha srishti: As the mind is, so the world appears." You don't merely see the world, you create the world by seeing. To grok this is truly to take your sovereignty back, and exercise your divine birthright.

Don't make the mistake of believing what you perceive to be "objective" and "real." The matter isn't settled; it's a constant negotiation of awareness. The battleground is not an external field of combat, but your personal sentience. If you do not own your vision, believe me, darker powers will own it instead.

Why allow your world to be manufactured by the media, by public opinion, by the "likes" and "dislikes" of your peers? Why is your vision molded and tinted by others? In truth, otherness is illusion. Others are reflections on a mirror which, in the final analysis, is your own mind. They seem to judge you, but you judge yourself.

Now is the time to dissolve the mist of their expectations, and bathe your vision in the bliss of the Single Eye. Let the light that you see "out there" shine forth from within you. Let it flow from the deep well in your spine, up through your pineal gland, which is the portal where the splendor of your heart pours into the world.

Through the transparent innocence of single vision, you behold the world as a stream of miracles, spilling not into you but out of you, overflowing the rim of your hridaya chakra. Here is the real shift, the great reversal of energy and time, that brings a new heaven and a new earth. For by this mere shift of awareness, the Creator dwells no longer above you, or outside you, but at the diamond source of the fountain in your heart.

Expect nothing. Be surprised. Surprise is creation. Overflow from the heart of now. Love has no past. Love needs no story. Love attunes each atom of the world to the unified field of Presence. Love is courage, without a Why. From wonder to wonder, the power of your heart will soften, heal, dissolve All into All, and invite each particular into downy golden entanglement. Out of wonder, you will create the new earth.

Photo: The digital exhibit now playing in Vienna's Votive Cathedral, entitled, "Light Of Creation."