"The lamp of your body is the eye. When your eyes are sound, you have light for your whole body; but when the eyes are bad, you are in darkness.
"See to it, then, that the light you have is not darkness. If you have light for your whole body with no trace of darkness, it will all be as bright as when a lamp flashes its rays upon you."
3 comments:
Here is a text before my eyes and telling me through them that a fractionable part of me is all. Or pretty close to as good as that. That I am whole. I see because I want to see it this way -- that it was not really a darkness for Samuel Clemens to see God as an insane character and Mysterious Stranger. It was catharsis. A cleansing away of a certain set of expectations for how to see. Piqued by personal tragedies. And observations of imperialism enslaving people all around. Under Christian missionary witness. Though I don’t share his sentiments as final conclusions – I go through these cleansings of expectations for how to see. Like now. I’m thinking on occasion that fashioning blessings through legal word-smithery is really a bit second rate. Compared to paying attention to jumping frogs in Calaveras County. And describing them with some simple pleasure for all to ‘see.’
Okay, I think it's best to look at this the same way you'd read the bit about plucking out an eye that leads you astray... not a physical (or even an astral) organ. A faculty. If the way you look at things makes everything seem dark... you need to take your head out of whatever dark place you've put it in.
(I didn't say it was that dark place, one's "black hole" as the Russians used to call it-- making our astronomical concept very funny to Russian speakers at first...)
Mark Twain had an intuition of how the world is really created... but got unnecessarily individualistic about it. I found his idea pretty terrifying-- though intriguing-- at first. But we get a little closer with Raymond Smullyan's "collective solipsism" or some of Borge's notions.
I used to read Matthew's version of this, and see in that: "If you couldn't trust your own intuition, this would be a pretty dark world, wouldn't it? So trust your sense of truth; it wasn't given you to fool you."
This looks slightly different, more like: "When you've found your true vision, what you see won't be at all as scary as it may look at the moment."
.. more like: "When you've found your true vision, what you see won't be at all as scary as it may look at the moment."
I needed this. I’ve not seen it in this text. It feels just right. Something’s brewing. More on this later.
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