Seeing with the Inward Eye

Transcending the Material for the Spiritual

An Insight’s Presumed Source

You can look it up, the English romantic poet William Wordsworth’s phrase flashes upon the inward eye in his poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. He was describing an impression that bright spring daffodils made on his imagination, drawing presumably from treasured memories, fueled from a romantic’s heart. That’s what we do, reducing our insights to online search phrases to link with others’ thoughts as the algorithm presents them. And maybe that’s all I’m doing here, borrowing another’s insight or the algorithm’s characterization of it.

An Insight’s True Source

But I wasn’t thinking of Wordsworth or of memories or impressions drawn from the heart. I was instead thinking of a presence. As I mounted the cemetery’s hill, looking up at the backdrop of mostly brown trees, mixed with late Fall’s few remaining golds, I was thinking of how I don’t see trees anymore, nor their rustling brown leaves as material indications of a late Fall. I instead see with an inward eye, the moving glory of my Lord. Wordsworth might have buried his phrase deep in my subconscious to tumble out at a glance up the last of the long cemetery hill, but I think not. The presence was instead its source.

Words as Intermediation

As my post last Friday shared, I am seeing constructs more and more as entities. To put it another way, as is the intention of this post, I am removing words from mind and sight, removing words from their intermediation between the thing, which is to say the entity, and me. I want to experience my Lord directly, as much as he permits and deems wise, as little as my fallen and dissipated state can stand. He isn’t out there as a thing for me to regard. He is proximate, even within, as I am within him. The first word from which I seek intermediation, even a word so grand but tired as glory, draws the first veil across him.

Opening the Inward Eye

And so, I open the inward eye, not to see as an outward eye sees but to participate with him, in him. As I look out with the natural eye, my spirit turns in, so that I no longer see the material world or no longer see the world as a materialist sees it but see only within, seeing more of him, sensing more of his proximity, more of myself within him. I see in the trees, stripped of their leaves and seeds, and falling dormant for a long winter, the life I must also lead, letting my own constantly failing vitality fall on the chaos of the earth, to draw from it whatever beautiful order will rise from the concentrated seed I leave. I let my rustling leaves go so that my frame alone stands, like the stripped trees, pointing to the heaven from which the cosmic seed falls.

The Presence Unmediated

And as I crest the cemetery hill to walk down its back side toward home, thoughts and their words dissipate, along with sight and its impressions, until I walk beside my dying and rising Lord. He is within me and I within him. His kingdom is so near that I walk through it, its order and structure and meaning more visible and evident than what my natural outward eye would see, if his breath and life and pattern had not informed the inward eye through which I see. Oh Lord, help me to see what I do not see. Remove the veil so that your face is evident to me.