Posts Tagged ‘Vision’
Vision and Perception
~ Quotations and Sutra Sayings
“In the ultimate stillness
Light penetrates the whole realm;
In the still illumination,
There pervades pure emptiness.
When I look back on the
Phenomenal world,
Everything is just like a dream.”
~ Han-shan Te-Ch’ing
“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream Within a Dream
“We are such stuff As dreams are made on,
and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.”
~ William Shakespeare
Vision and Perception Quotations and Sutra Sayings
“If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
~ William Blake
“Your vision will become clear
only when you look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams.
Who looks inside, awakens.”
~ Carl Jung
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
~ Jonathan Swift
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“Seeing the Invisible is Knowing the Ineffable.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Nothing’s impossible for the Invisible.”
Our greatest challenges foreshadow our greatest possibilities.
Everything’s possible when nothing’s inevitable.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“The Master observes the world,
but trusts his inner vision.
He allows things to come and go.
His heart is as open as the sky.”
~ Lao Tzu
“Perception is a mirror, not a fact.
And what I look on is my state of mind,
reflected outward.”
~ A Course In Miracles [ACIM]
“I saw the angel in the marble
and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“Where there is no vision, people perish.”
~ Proverbs 29:18
“True vision is insight, not eyesight.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“The eyes of the soul of the multitudes
are unable to endure the vision of the Divine.”
~ Plato
“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
”We are immersed in beauty,
but our eyes have no clear vision.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
”Shut your eyes so the heart may become your eye,
and with that vision look upon another world.”
~ Rumi
“Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision
to recognize it as such.”
~ Henry Miller
“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision
for the limits of the world.”
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
“The most pathetic person in the world
is someone who has sight,
but has no vision.”
~ Helen Keller
“Let the waters settle,
you will see stars and moon
mirrored in your Being.”
~ Rumi
“Every beauty which is seen here by persons of perception
resembles more than anything else
that celestial source from which we all are come.”
~ Michelangelo
“The question is not what you look at,
but what you see.”
”I begin to see an object
when I cease to understand it.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
“Love and fear represent two different lenses
through which to view the world.
Which I choose to use
will determine what I think I see.”
~ Marianne Williamson
“As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind,
so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
~ Helen Keller
“Truth (satya) implies Love. – – –
Devotion to this Truth is the sole justification for our existence. – –
Without (Love) it is impossible to observe any principles or rules in life.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
”Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees
takes off his shoes.”
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“The eye with which I see God
is the same eye with which God sees me.”
~ Meister Eckhart
“People think that they see,
but they don’t.”
~ Henry Moore
“There are many paths to the top of the mountain,
but the view is always the same.”
~ Chinese Proverb
“As a man is, so he sees.
As the eye is formed, such are its powers.”
~ William Blake
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile
the moment a single man contemplates it,
bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
~ Antoine De Saint-Exupery“
”When the sun rises,
do you not see a round disc of fire
somewhat like a guinea?
O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host
crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”
~ William Blake
“The soul never thinks without a mental picture.”
~ Aristotle
“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed.
An artist is making something exist by observing it.
And his hope for other people is
that they will also make it exist by observing it.
I call it creative observation. Creative viewing.”
~ William S. Burroughs
Vision Quest: From Eyesight to Insight
~ Ron’s Memoirs
“If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
~ William Blake
“True vision is insight, not eyesight.
‘[N]ow we see through a glass darkly’,
but with ever expanding human consciousness and ever deepening insight,
we can and shall ‘see’ more and more –
we can and shall see what we couldn’t see before.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
~ Carl Jung
“The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight,
but has no vision.”
~ Helen Keller
“As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind,
so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
~ Helen Keller
“Perception is a mirror not a fact.
And what I look on is my state of mind, reflected outward.”
~ A Course In Miracles
“Time, space and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen.
In the Absolute there is neither time, space nor causation.”
~ Swami Vivekananda
Introduction.
Dear Friends,
This is the story of how I learned from inner and outer experiences that true vision depends on our state of mind and upon imagination and insight beyond mere eyesight; that even people with no eyesight, like Helen Keller, can be visionaries.
Since childhood I wore eyeglasses for normal eyesight. And until my midlife spiritual awakening, I self-identified only with my physical body. So when diagnosed and told by “expert” eye doctors that I suffered incurably defective vision, requiring corrective lenses I never questioned that diagnosis. Nor did I consider defective eyesight as improvable or curable. Nor did I understand vision as a brain/mind function, or as possibly arising from consciousness beyond the brain.
But those beliefs changed after extraordinary inner and outer post-awakening experiences, which began a still continuing vision quest process from eyesight to insight.
My eyesight history
Early on November 8, 1932, (the day of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first Presidential election), I was traumatically extracted with forceps from my mother’s womb, a breech birth after an exceptionally protracted but incomplete labor period.
At about age three my parents brought me to an ophthalmologist for a misaligned eye. I was diagnosed with astigmatism and far-sightedness and prescribed thick eyeglasses – which I always required, but never liked. Gradually, I was given ever stronger prescriptions.
I became so habitually dependent on eyeglasses that I would grope for them upon awakening every morning, and wore them constantly. Once when I was a pre-teen at a YMCA summer camp, one of my cabin mates, with a distorted sense of humor, hid my glasses for several days. I still remember how lost and miserable I felt without them.
When I was eighteen years old and a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a college friend, who later became a prominent Chicago optometrist, told me about corneal contact lenses, which were then newly developed. And he recommended a Chicago expert who could usually fit them comfortably. Excitedly, I became an early corneal contact lens user.
Thereafter, I continued wearing hard contact lenses for about twenty five years, even though they sometimes irritated my eyes. But eventually I needed reading glasses and couldn’t get bifocal contact lenses. So, reluctantly I resumed using eyeglasses, which I believed necessary until after the extraordinary inner and outer spiritual awakening experiences hereafter recounted.
Ron – age 3 1/2
Out of body visions
At a 1974-5 San Francisco New Year’s Eve party, I had an unprecedented and unforgettable out of body experience (OOB). While lying face down on a bed in a small dark room, “I” floated out of my body and up to the ceiling. And from the ceiling, with my glasses on a bedside table, I beheld my body lying face down on the pillow. For the first time in my life I had 20/20 vision without eyeglasses, and without even using my eyes – or maybe my brain.
The New Year’s OOB experience soon led to a pivotal rebirth epiphany at age forty three, which, opened an emotional/intuitive flood-gate closed since childhood – unleashing for the first time in my adult life numerous synchronistic inner and outer experiences which gradually but radically changed my beliefs about “reality” and self-identity.
After the rebirth experience I had other out of body experiences with perceived visions, as well as innumerable inner visions and insights. Ultimately, I associated inner visions with a mysterious “third eye” associated with the pineal gland – providing apparent perception beyond ordinary eyesight. For example, I took shaktipat initiation from my Hindu master Shri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas only after perceiving his extraordinary silver aura and seeing him in inner visions, one of which was as clear as a color TV picture. And I learned from Guruji that such auric perceptions and inner visions were associated with the kundalini purification process.
Bates Bioenergetic Vision Improvement Method
Shortly before meeting Guruji I attended a San Francisco ‘new age’ exposition where various ‘green’ products were displayed and sold. One of the vendors was selling pin-hole glasses and a book she had written about natural vision improvement, as originally taught in the early 20th century by unconventional ophthalmologist William H. Bates, MD.
Synchronistically she told me that possibly I might improve and perhaps even cure my defective eyesight with natural vision improvement techniques; that pin-hole glasses did not improve vision but afforded an opportunity break the ‘addiction’ to glasses via obligatory squint focus through its small apertures.
Intrigued, I bought the book and the pin-hole glasses and assiduously began learning and experimenting with natural vision relaxation techniques, such as blinking, sunning, swaying, acupressure massage and palming. Experientially, I became persuaded that just as the so-called “placebo effect” could promote healing of physical ailments through optimistic attitude, that a relaxed and positive psychological attitude could also help improve eyesight.
I was encouraged in this belief by reading many eye improvement books, including “The Art of Seeing” by famed author Aldous Huxley, who gratefully affirmed how he improved his vision via Bates techniques. For several years I received vision improvement lessons from Anna Kaye, a former Polish attorney who had emigrated to the United States after World War II unable to see a door, and diagnosed with incurable atrophy of the optic nerve. Four ophthalmologists had recommended she learn Braille. But, unable to accept near blindness, she studied natural vision improvement with a Bates protegee in New York City and regained 20/30 vision in both eyes.
Also, I later met and was inspired by Meir Schneider PhD, a San Francisco healer from Israel whose vision improved from legal blindness and Braille to near normal sight with the Bates Method, supplemented by his own intense regimen of self-massage and movement.
Despite years of effort, I never succeeded in normalizing my vision with Bates techniques. But I’m convinced that (without any intervening eye surgery) Bates methods immensely improved my vision, deterred cataract formation, and taught me much about human body energy systems; that thereby they have contributed to my good health.
Recently, an experienced conventional optometrist told me that a multi-focal prescription from almost thirty years ago was so much stronger than my current much weaker prescriptions, that she could not explain the difference. Two years ago, wearing eyeglasses, I passed the California driver’s license renewal test. And I’m now wondering which will expire first – Ron or his driver’s license.
Ron’s Vision Quest: From Eyesight to Insight
On meeting Guruji, I was amazed not only by his miraculous spiritual powers but also by his extraordinary physical prowess at age one hundred, including his ability to see normally without glasses. Initially, I surmised that Guruji’s miraculous physical condition had resulted from his enlightened state of mind, and his mastery of yogic meditation, mantra, movement, and breathing techniques. So naively I began believing that “enlightenment” required not only a mind free from ego defilements, but also a healthy physical body with normal eyesight. And this belief motivated me more than ever to attempt normalizing my eyesight via Bates bioenergetic techniques.
But, gradually Guruji became physically exhausted and debilitated from his tireless schedule of selflessly helping others in the US. Yet he retained his enlightened state of mind. And soon I learned of other spiritual masters and saints with unhealthy bodies and/or impaired eyesight. So, I learned it was possible to be spiritually elevated, notwithstanding visual and other physical impairments.
For example, I noted that HH The Dalai Lama of Tibet, needed eyeglasses for near-sightedness. And after Guruji returned to India, I met and took kriya empowerments from Paramahamsa Hariharananda Giri, an Indian meditation master who also needed eyeglasses.
Also I learned that beloved Saint Francis of Assisi was almost blind at the time of his death, legendarily because he “cried his eyes out” but actually because of chronic conjunctivitis apparently contracted in Africa during the Crusades.
Thus, though ultimately I accepted my inability to normalize eyesight without glasses, I’ve never lost faith in our evolutionary potential of ever elevating inner vision through mindful identification and diligent purification of mental defilements.
Conclusion
In the Bible (1 Corinthians 13:11-12), St. Paul observes that “now we see through a glass darkly”, but that some day we shall fully know, as we are fully Known now by the Divine.
In our illusory space/time duality world, we view “reality” through the ‘mirror of the mind’, which imperfectly refracts and reflects the unseen light of Eternal Awareness onto the screen of our human consciousness.
But, we can evolve and transform our mind mirror from opacity to translucency to transparency. And thereby, with ever expanding human consciousness and ever deepening insight, we can and shall ‘see’ more and more – we can and shall see what we couldn’t see before.
And so it shall be!
Ron Rattner
Beholding Divinity in a Weeping Willow Tree
~ Ron’s Memoirs
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
~ Jonathan Swift
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“People think that they see, but they don’t.”
~ Henry Moore
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“True Vision is insight, not eyesight.
Eyesight is mind-sight; insight is soul-sight.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see not more.”
~ William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“People think that they see, but they don’t.”
~ Henry Moore
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“True Vision is insight, not eyesight.
Eyesight is mind-sight; insight is soul-sight.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see not more.”
~ William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality
Beholding Divinity in a Weeping Willow Tree
Dear Friends,
In early 1980’s I experienced at Wilbur Hot Springs, an unforgettably revelatory experience of perceiving luminescent Divine light streaming in a weeping willow tree. (*See Footnote) I was attending a week-end Board and staff retreat of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), as Board Chairman.
One morning I awakened early before any scheduled meetings, and meditated on a wooded hill above the lodge level. After descending I walked with a silent mind on a nature trail near the lodge. Whereupon, I discovered and crawled into a tiny cave where I again sat in deep meditation for a while. (Later, I learned that cave had long been considered a sacred place by original indigenous people there.)
On emerging from the cave, and while unknowingly still in an ‘altered’ state of awareness, I walked to the bathhouse, removed my clothes, stepped outside, and immersed my body in a large shallow hot springs pond.
While standing alone in the stilled pond with a stilled mind, I gazed at a beautiful weeping willow tree beside the pond on the side furthest from the bath house. Instead of seeing the tree as it appeared during usual waking consciousness, I beheld it marvelously transfigured as ever streaming lines of white light, more beautiful than any imaginable Christmas tree.
Unaware of my exceptional state of consciousness, I kept gazing at the tree in awe. After a while Tara, a CIIS staff member, entered the pond. Then, innocently I addressed her: “Tara, look at the lights in that tree. Aren’t they beautiful?” Puzzled, Tara responded “What lights?”. And immediately the lights disappeared for me, as I was abruptly returned to my usual state of waking ‘un-consciousness’.
But I can never forget the flowing tree lights, nor the insight which they confirmed: That there is much more to our “reality” than meets the eye; that “Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence”.
Later that day, I recounted my experience to Dr. John Broomfield, then CIIS President, who cited me to this similar experience of author Annie Dillard:
“[O]ne day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The lights of the fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had my whole life been a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
~ Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Like Annie Dillard’s tree vision at Tinker Creek, beholding the transfigured weeping willow at Wilbur Springs was for me an unforgettably inspiring and transformative experience for which I remain ever grateful.
May these and similar stories ever remind us that “Reality’s essence is Divine luminescence”; that we are all Divine beings of light, gradually remembering and co-creating ever more luminous and numinous Earth lives.
And so may it be,
Ron Rattner
Footnote* Other memorable experiences of Divine light, beginning with an epiphany in Yosemite, are recounted elsewhere in these memoirs.
Beholding Divinity in a Crowded Courtroom
~ Ron’s Memoirs
“We are beings of light –
Eternal and bright,
and so shall ever be.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
~ Jonathan Swift
It’s not our longitude
Or our latitude,
But the elevation of our attitude,
That brings beatitude.
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“The goal is not to lose oneself in the Divine Consciousness.
The goal is to let the Divine Consciousness penetrate into Matter and transform it.”
Sri Aurobindo – The Mother 15: p.191
Beholding Divinity in a Crowded Courtroom
Ron’s Introduction
Dear Friends,
After my midlife spiritual awakening, I gradually realized that the common Essence of everything in our phenomenal “reality” is the inner Eternal Light of pure Awareness.
Today’s memoirs story significantly contributed to that realization. It tells of a ‘miraculous’ mystical vision in a crowded San Francisco courtroom which revealed that everyone and everything everywhere is Divine, and that experiencing God depends on our state of mind, rather than our physical environment.
I’m again sharing this story because its mystical revelation (from over forty years ago) is especially important in current “new normal” times, as our world is increasingly troubled, turbulent and politically polarized, with countless people fearfully experiencing poverty, hunger, sickness, and deprivation of basic human rights, while justifiably concerned that a nuclear holocaust or catastrophic climate collapse might soon end life on Earth as we have known it.
So this story is intended to help us live with inner peace and happiness, in an age of extreme mental malaise unprecedented in modern recorded human history.
Background
For two years prior to the revelatory courtroom vision, I’d become profoundly motivated by post-divorce lifestyle changes and spiritual awakening experiences to change my life’s focus from litigation to meditation. But I felt moral and legal obligations to support and nurture my two young children, from whom I had been traumatically separated.
So I was feeling frustration about apparent conflict between an intense desire to retreat to an ashram or other quiet environment, and need to fulfill my worldly obligations.
Whereupon I was synchronistically blessed with an amazing experience, from which I learned that perception of God depends on our state of mind rather than our physical environment. It vividly revealed that I didn’t need to retreat to an ashram, mountain top, cave, or forest – like yogis of bygone eras – but could experience divinely luminous and numinous inner states even while continuing my worldly life as an urban litigation lawyer.
Courtroom Story
It happened in a crowded San Francisco courtroom filled with lawyers, soon after my 1978 shaktipat initiation by my Guruji, who was still then in the Bay Area. By that time, especially after meeting Guruji, I was experiencing an intense longing to return to God, and had been praying fervently for a way to exchange my life of litigation for a life of meditation. But (as a divorced parent) I needed the income from lawyering to help support my young children and a separate dwelling.
Synchronistically, I was then shown that Divinity is immanent in everyone everywhere – even in crafty lawyers in crowded courtrooms; that experiencing nearness to God depends on our state of mind, rather than our physical environment.
This unforgettable revelatory experience happened one morning in the San Francisco Superior Court, Law And Motion department, where all pending civil pre-trial motions were then argued and decided. All lawyers were then required to check-in and be seated by 9 am, though dockets were usually quite long and hearings on scheduled motions took up most of the morning.
That day my motion was docketed toward the end of the calendar, assuring a long wait before it was called. I arrived at 9 am, at the last minute, when the courtroom was already filled with seated lawyers awaiting their turns to present legal arguments. I could see only one remaining vacant seat which synchronistically was next to my adversary, who was seated beside the center isle. He was a very amiable, skilled and prominent lawyer, but we did not then have a friendly rapport.
With ‘righteous indignation’, I had become convinced that he was knowingly representing a dishonest client with an obviously contrived and unjust cause. Moreover, I judgmentally considered his pre-trial tactics in our case to have been ethically questionable.
Reluctantly, I seated myself next to him with my motion papers in a small brief case on my lap. Because of the inevitable long wait before our late calendared motion would be called, I decided to close my eyes and meditate. Whereupon, I inadvertently went into a very deep state of meditation.
When the case was finally called for argument, I could barely hear the bailiff’s distant pronouncement: “Number 34, R______ versus D_____.”
I opened my eyes, but for the first time in my life I was totally sightless (when not asleep), and unable to perceive anyone or anything in that courtroom. Instead of seeing the people and objects in the courtroom, I beheld only an amazingly luminescent and radiant effulgence – like a golden mist or miasma. [*See Aurobindo footnote] However, I could sense my adversary getting up and walking up the aisle to the front of the courtroom.
Sightless, I stood and followed him up the aisle. As I was walking without normal vision, the miraculous gold effulgence began to clarify. Instead of just a golden mist, I began seeing everything and everyone in the courtroom – including my mistrusted adversary – as silhouetted lines of gold light. It was as if a Cosmic artist was sketching in golden outline the shape of every person and every object.
I reached the counsel table, perceiving my adversary (and everything else) only as lines of golden light. And, with considerable concern, I wondered how I could present an important case without being able to view my carefully prepared notes and citations.
Then, just as my adversary and I were asked by the Judge to identify ourselves and the parties for whom we were appearing, my normal eyesight was suddenly restored. It was as if a Divine ‘trickster’ had temporarily blinded me to bestow an enormous insight, and then had waited until the last possible moment before restoring my usual eyesight.
Guruji’s explanation
Soon afterwards, I recounted my courtroom experience to my friend Kusuma, one of Guruji’s translators, who then asked him about it. Guruji told Kusuma that, with elevated awareness, I had perceived everyone and everything in the courtroom from a subtle causal dimension.
Ever since, I have recalled that marvelous experience as an immense blessing which not only revealed and reconfirmed to me that the essence of everyone and everything is the eternal light of Cosmic Consciousness, but which vividly demonstrated that to commune with Divinity I didn’t have to retreat to an ashram, mountain top, cave, or forest – like yogis of bygone eras – but could experience eternal luminosity and numinosity even while continuing my worldly life as a litigation lawyer in a vast urban area; that experiencing God is dependent on our state of mind, rather than our physical environment.
[*Footnote] Sri Aurobindo and Aurobindo’s Mother have written descriptions of the light of Supramental Consciousness as appearing to them like “a warm gold dust” “a multitude of tiny golden points”. These are the only descriptions which I have as yet been able to find in mystical literature and poetry comparable to my marvelous courtroom vision.
Jury Trial Epilogue
The realization that everyone and everything everywhere is Divine and Holy, and that experiencing God is dependent on our state of mind, rather than our physical environment, has transformed my life for over forty years.
It was soon put to its first severe test when the foregoing lawsuit was scheduled for trial at the very same time Guruji was giving a retreat at the ‘paradise’ island of Maui, Hawaii. I intensely wanted to attend that retreat, but instead was obliged to conduct a six week jury trial in San Francisco.
So, rather than being with Guruji in an Hawaiian ‘paradise’ [*See photo below.], I spent a month and a half in a San Francisco courtroom with my crafty opponent, who appeared with two assistants – a young lawyer and a paralegal – to eloquently and skillfully present his client’s ethically questionable case.
I didn’t again perceive my adversary as Divine light. But, constantly remembering pervasive Divinity, I silently recited my Ram mantra whenever he addressed the judge or jury. It was a civil case, so only nine of the twelve jurors’ votes were needed to prevail. But ultimately all twelve jurors voted my client a large cash judgment. So civil justice prevailed in our omnipresent Divine ‘reality’.
*Below is a photo of Guruji taken by my friend Ram Dassi in front of the giant Buddha statue at the Lahaina, Maui Buddhist temple, while I was remembering Rama in a San Francisco courtroom.
Invocation
May this revelatory vision story help us remember that
everyone and everything everywhere is Divine and Holy!
And that the enduring happiness we all (knowingly or unknowingly) seek
is never found in superfluous diversions, possessions or pleasures,
but ever abides within our hearts and souls, as the Eternal light of LOVE.
And so shall it be!
Ron Rattner
True Vision
“If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is,
infinite.”
~ William Blake
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.
What is essential, is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
~ Michelangelo
“Vision is the art of seeing the invisible.”
~ Jonathan Swift
“Nothing’s impossible for the Invisible.”
~ Ron Rattner, Sutra Sayings
“Perception is a mirror, not a fact.
And what I look on is my state of mind,
reflected outward.”
~ A Course In Miracles
“For light I go directly to the Source of light, not to any of the reflections.”
~ Peace Pilgrim
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
~ Carl Jung
True Vision
True vision is insight,
Not eyesight.
Eyesight is mind–sight.
Insight is soul-sight.
Eyesight is from mental movement.
Insight is from mental stillness.
Eyesight is then;
Insight is NOW.
Eyesight sees separation;
Insight reveals unity of Reality.
Enlightened vision is –
Eyesight with Insight.
Ron’s audio recitation of True Vision
Ron’s 2020 “True Vision” Epilogue –
Explanation, Dedication and Invocation
Dear Friends,
Ron’s Vision History.
Soon after my 1932 birth, I learned that “20/20” referred to visual acuity; that if you could discern certain eye chart symbols at a distance of twenty feet your visual acuity was deemed “normal”. Never then, nor until very recently, did I ever imagine living until now as an 87 year old octogenarian, when “20/20” also means the first year of the third decade of the 21st century, during an extraordinarily turbulent era of human history.
At age three, an ophthalmologist, testing a misaligned eye, diagnosed me with astigmatism and farsightedness and prescribed thick eyeglasses – which I’ve always needed, but never liked. Gradually, I grudgingly accepted ever stronger lens prescriptions for correction to “20/20” acuity.
But forty five years ago, on New Year’s Eve, 1974-5, at a San Francisco ‘pot luck’ New Year’s Eve party, I had an unprecedented and unforgettable out of body experience (OOB). While lying face down on a bed in a small dark room, “I” floated out of my body and up to the ceiling. And from the ceiling, with my glasses on a bedside table, I beheld my body lying face down on the pillow. For the first time in my life I experienced 20/20 vision without eyeglasses, and without even using my eyes – or maybe my brain. [See https://sillysutras.com/vision-quest-from-eyesight-to-insight-rons-memoirs/ ]
The New Year’s OOB experience soon led to a pivotal rebirth experience at age forty three, which, opened an emotional/intuitive flood-gate closed since childhood – unleashing for the first time in my adult life numerous synchronistic inner and outer experiences which radically changed my beliefs about “reality”, “self-identity” and “vision”. [See https://sillysutras.com/vision-quest-from-eyesight-to-insight-rons-memoirs/ ]
Thereafter, during a ten year post-retirement reclusive period, I continued to philosophically reflect, pray and sometimes write about my newly awakened world-views.
Today’s post and “20/20”epilogue.
Today I’ve published the above brief poem (composed then) titled: “True Vision”, and the foregoing deeply insightful quotations which encapsulate my transformative discovery of “Vision” as “insight, not eyesight”; insight revealing fundamental unity of “Reality” beyond illusory human perception of our supposed separation.
My recent “Happy New Year” message proposed that we join as a global family to envision, imagine and see our precious planet as we wish and intend it to be, rather than accept this extraordinarily turbulent era of human history merely as supposedly separate powerless perceivers of our “reality”.
Consistent with that recommendation, I’m today supplementing the True Vision poem and quotes with this “20/20” epilogue, explaining and dedicating the poem’s insights for resolving our common crises for our common good.
Invocation.
In the Bible (1 Corinthians 13:11-12), Paul observes that “now we see through a glass darkly”, but that some day we shall fully know, as we are fully Known now by the Divine. Now, we view our “reality” through the ‘mirror of the mind’, which imperfectly refracts and reflects the unseen light of Eternal Awareness onto the screen of our human consciousness.
But, we can and shall evolve and transform our mental mirror from opacity to translucency to transparency. And thereby, with ever expanding human consciousness and ever deepening insight, we shall ‘see’ more and more – we shall see what we couldn’t see before.
Thus, with ultimate insight, may we collectively realize that “Reality” is much more ‘than meets the eye’; that beyond this phenomenal world of ever passing supposedly separated appearances is one changeless Reality – One unseen Source and Essence of all appearances, all phenomena, and all ideas: Infinite Potentiality – our Eternal SELF.
And so it shall be!
Ron Rattner
