The Eye is the Sun it Sees, and the Sun a Shining I

In Yoga and the Jesus Prayer, Matus repeats an old wise crack of Gregory Nazianzen, to the effect that What the sun is for the visible world, God is for the intelligible world. For Symeon, the sun is his "favorite model for the inner illumination."

In the visible world, the sun is "everything." Not only is it the light with which we see, but we also directly assimilate it every time we eat. The mystery of photosynthesis converts photons to the plants that nourish us one way or the other, either directly or indirectly.

Likewise, vision is a subtle form of touch (as are all the senses), in that it involves photons striking the retina, which converts these to signals sent to the visual cortex.

Now, psychopneumatic vision is also a form of touch, even more subtle than biopsychic vision. You might say that (↓) is analogous to physical light, while (¶) is the spiritual eye that sees and transmutes (↓) into intelligible thought, i.e., logosynthesis.

Just as this world would be dark and silent in the absence of the central sun, (¶) too is "empty," so to speak, until illuminated by (↓). In this way, "God's energies... shine in the human spirit," ultimately revealing how "the two spirits, human [↑] and divine [↓], are drawn into union." Only an intelligent world can be an intelligible world, or kosmos neotikos.

Again, (↓) and (↑) are not actually "two," but different sides of the same procession. Maximus Confessor called this the "exitus-reditus," but one could also call it "involution-evolution," or inevotability for short.

For Eckhart, it was a kind of "boiling over" or "flowing forth" in God, followed by a "breaking through" and "flowing back" on the human end. Thus, "God's going-out is his going-in" (Eckhart) -- or, in the words of Marx, "hello I must be going."

Indeed, Eckhart conceived of this absurcular flow "as the fundamental law of reality taught by the Bible," e.g., The rivers return to the place from whence they flowed, so that they may flow again. "The pulse of this universal circle of activity" (McGinn) is what we call "Raccoon central," or O. The enigmatic author of the Lowly Bobble clumsily describes it thus:

Here, prior to thought, by the headwaters of the eternal, the fountain of innocence, the mind shoreless vast and still, absoloved & absorbed in what is always the case, face to face in a sacred space.

Again, for Symeon this neverending deustiny is the alwaysbeginning ground:

The beginning of the race is its end,
and the end its beginning.
Endless is its ending, for
the beginning is already the end.

No, not a koan but an ortho(para)dox, or simultaneously "right speech" and beyond it.

Back to the central sun, the planetary "absolute" around which we revolve. On the biopsychic level it corresponds to the eye, while in the psychopneumatic it corresponds to the intellect.

When you think about the other senses -- hearing, touch, taste, and smell -- they are much more "local," so to speak, and in a way, more "gross." Conversely, vision takes in an infinitely larger field. For example, you can't hear anything beyond a few miles, and you can't touch anything that isn't right next to you (and even then you might get sued).

But (assisted) vision can actually see, for example, the residue of the big bang, i.e., the cosmic background radiation, while unassisted vision can see whole galaxies, not to mention take in light from events that occurred millions of years ago; when you look at a star, you are looking at something from the distant past. In other words,

"Sight alone communicates to us the existence of immeasurably remote heavenly bodies that are perfectly foreign to our vital interests" (Schuon). Thus, vision includes a kind of dispassionate "objectivity" or "disinterestedness" that corresponds to truth.

Analogously, intellect can "see" much more than the local ego, which generally cannot see beyond its self-interested little paradigm, its cultural assumptions, its mind parasites.

As described by Schuon, the latter is always limited by at least four factors: first, we are "creature, not Creator, manifestation and not Principle." Second, we are not angels; we are neither at the top nor the bottom of the vertical hierarchy, but somewhere in the middle, suspended halfway between our better and worse selves. Third, we have essential differences that are not accidental or contingent. This is not a matter of ego but of essential self. And fourth, we are inhabited by "accidental" infirmities or limitations in the form of internalized mind parasites (both individual and collective).

In short, you are 1) creature, 2) a mid-level one, 3) you and not someone else, and 4) a little weird, unlike Bob, who is totally normal.

So "the eye becomes the metaphysical center of the world of which it is at the same time the sun and the heart" (Schuon).

I suppose one could say that intellect sees the light, while the heart feels the warmth (although it is the same divine ray).

But just as the plant metabolizes the sun's rays, "God is at once the Subject and Object, the Knower and Known," and the cosmsos itself "is merely vision or knowledge, in whatever mode it may be realized..., Knowledge and Reality being two complementary aspects of the same divine Cause" (ibid.).

I am the things that are, and those things that are to be, and those that have been.... the fruit which I bore was the sun. --Proclus

My, what big eyes yʘʘ have!