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God’s Eye
 

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

-- Meister Eckhart

At various times in my life I have experienced periods of pristine awareness that Jewish kabbalists call ayin, or nothingness. At such times, the person I normally thought of as me was nowhere to be found. There were still thoughts noodling away in my mind, but they didn’t appear to belong to anyone. In place of the person who usually occupied the premises and laid claim to my thoughts, there was nothing, a kind of pregnant emptiness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a similar situation, wrote that he had become a “transparent eyeball,” a “part or particle of God.” I understood what Emerson meant by transparent, since any trace of a self was quite invisible to me in this frame of mind, at least as seen from the inside. The God part was a bit of a surprise, since you might normally associate God with a presence rather than an absence.

The Hebrew letter ayin looks like an English “Y,” but in ancient texts it resembled an eye, from which it takes its meaning. The state of ayin that the kabbalists described is primarily about seeing – but not seeing in the ordinary sense. It is seeing as a newborn might, as if for the first time, unencumbered by any knowing. “The light of the body is the eye,” Jesus once said. “If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” By “single,” as rendered in the King James Bible, you could say simple or clear: if thine eye be clear, thy whole body shall be full of light.

According to kabbalist tradition, the world exists because God wished to know himself. In his primordial state, God had no essence or attributes: he was ayin, literally no-thing. It was out of his own no-thingness that everything came to be. But how does God come to know himself in his own creation? In the absence of some gigantic eye in the sky, he must rely on the creatures he made in his own image for exactly this purpose. It is through our eyes that God beholds himself. Or as physicist John Wheeler put it, "We are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself.”

In quantum theory, the elementary particles that make up everything in the universe exist in an indeterminate state until they are observed. In other words, the universe requires an audience in order to put on its show; moreover, it is a show that requires active audience participation. We become collaborators in what Wheeler called the “genesis of observership.” The universe is reborn at every moment through the action of human consciousness.

In seeking God, we are often led astray in making him the object of our search. Our attention is habitually directed outward, rather than within. And if we do turn inward, there is nothing to see, no essence or attribute signaling the divine. We don’t realize that God is only to be found in the act of seeing itself – not seeing in the ordinary sense but seeing from the depths of ayin. We discover, as Meister Eckhart pointed out long ago, that our eye and God’s eye are one and the same.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
Matthew 6:22

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