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

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.