Until we experience awakening, we’re blind to truth in our hearts

By David McElroy · July 24, 2020

We spend most of our lives wandering blindly.

We see the rooms where we live. We see the streets where we walk. We see buildings and people and cars and cities. For most of us, our physical eyes faithfully show us the world around us.

But our real eyes — our spiritual eyes, emotional eyes, metaphysical eyes, call them what you prefer — are closed and blind. We don’t even know they exist. The physical world is only a tiny fraction of reality, but our spiritual blindness limits us. We are just as blind as a sightless man is in our physical world.

All sorts of truth is written in our hearts. Every now and then, we glimpse that. Ever so often, the inner light is so bright that we can’t ignore it. Those are the times when we simply know things, even when they don’t make sense to anybody else.

I spent most of my life blind to what my heart already knew. But as I’ve slowly started awakening, I often feel overwhelmed with what I know. And once a truth is seen, it can’t be unseen.

Imagine living in a world where everybody is physically blind. Imagine that people in that world deal with everything by sound and touch and smell. Then imagine that you suddenly gained sight. You could suddenly see light and colors and shapes. You could see faces and sunsets and every beautiful thing that your blind body had always hidden from you.

You would suddenly know things about people that others didn’t know. You could read their faces. You could learn to see deceit and love and lust and anger and a million other things that others couldn’t see.

This would open an entirely new world to you.

Opening your spiritual eyes is even more powerful and more dramatic than that. Everything changes. You simply know things that are beyond your rational ability to understand or explain.

My first experiences with this phenomenon were somehow seeing or experiencing something in other people’s hearts that I couldn’t explain. Even before I understood what was going on, I saw something in a very few other people that marked them as “one of us.”

If you imagine that a very few people have a light inside their hearts that glow in a pattern that somehow matches something that feels familiar to me, you’ll get a glimpse. Imagine that you walk around the world and you experience — very rarely — something like a pulsating light from within a person. It’s not really like that, but imagine it.

And imagine that other people don’t seem to see this pulsating light in these people, but you come to trust over time that every time you see that, there is something special about this person — something that matches you. Something that means you need to know that person and be close to that person.

Even though I don’t see any pulsating light, I experience something that’s just as powerful. Every now and then, when I first encounter a person, I can know that person needs to be in my life. Sometimes the reason isn’t immediately clear. Other times, I never get the chance to know the person and the tides of life sweep him or her away. In such cases, I know I’ve missed something.

I’ve experienced this very few times in my life. I’m not sure how many. A dozen? Fewer? It would take me awhile to figure it out.

Every time I have ever fallen in love with a woman, I had that experience upon first encountering her. With others — and in the case of all the men about whom I’ve experienced it — I’ve had peculiar premonitions that I needed to get to know someone who might be important to my development or might be a partner in a way I don’t understand.

Something of this nature might seem like a parlor trick or a useless premonition or mere delusion to others. It doesn’t really matter. I finally feel as though I’m experiencing minor glimpses of additional awakenings that go beyond this. I feel like a spiritual child who’s just barely seen anything at all yet.

I find myself understanding that I come from a Christian tradition which is so head-centered that we’ve mostly lost touch with the spiritual vision which seems to have been common for seekers in the past who were open and willing to see what was already written in the heart. My own religious tradition has been so afraid of false prophets and delusions that we closed our eyes to pretty much everything that can’t be explained in terms of our rational systematic theology.

All of this is virtually impossible to explain to people who are so attached to a materialist view of the world that they scoff at anything they can’t measure and define. But I would ask them to consider — in a concession to my own fear of being irrational — that nothing about quantum physics is rational by the terms of how humans have always understood the physical world.

My heart is strongly attuned to this tonight because I feel attached to someone at this moment in a way that would make no sense to anyone else. I could use metaphors to explain it, but it’s really beyond my understanding. I just know that there’s something like a silver thread — a “philotic connection,” to use a metaphor from science fiction — that binds me in a way that’s stronger than iron chains could do.

And the person to whom I feel this strongly drawn to on this late night is one of those dozen or fewer about whom I’ve instantly known was “one of us.”

I see all of the so dimly at this point. I’m still so blind about most things. I’m painfully slow to learn more of the things I need to see. I’m slow to open my eyes to so much truth that’s in my heart. But when I get a glimpse of it again — and it pulls me in a powerful way that I find impossible to understand — I can’t turn away and I can’t pretend I don’t see it.

Most people will remain blind to such things for their entire lives. There will be rare people in whom I see something inexplicable who will remain blind to what I see. For such people, I can’t take a textbook and say, “See? This is how sight works. This is how you open your eyes and see what I see.” Until and unless they experience their own awakening, it makes no difference what I see.

I realize this feels more like a stream of consciousness than a direct effort to make a point from A to B to C. I realize it will be gibberish to most. Foolishness to others. Complete nonsense to some.

But I have a spiritual light that shines in my own heart. I cover it at times. I lose track of it at times. I let my human pride and even rationality hide it sometimes. Even so, I have to believe that there are a few people who can see what I see, maybe not fully. Maybe faintly. Maybe you can see what I see.

I am slowly experiencing awakenings that are taking me further and further away from the world which seemed so important to me in my earliest years. I’ve learned that truth is already written in my heart if I can just figure out how to open my eyes enough to read it. I’ve learned that life can be full of joy and love and hope and peace when I can live in that Divine Truth.

If you’re one of those people with the same sort of light — or if you can experience something indefinable in a few other people — maybe you’re one of us.

Maybe you’ve had some form of awakening that will allow you to start seeing something beyond what your physical eyes can see.

But once you’ve seen this sort of truth, you can’t unsee it. Once you’ve seen these connections, you have to follow them — no matter what cost you might be afraid of paying.

Share on Social Networks

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Related Posts