The eyes. An interesting part of being alive and in a body, for all animals, human or not.
In religious and/or spiritual thought the eyes are, perhaps, the most symbolic of our sensory organs. And we are extremely fond, as humans, of attaching meaning to our organs, curious creatures that we are.
For all of us, the endless idioms and figurative expressions we use about the eyes are illustrative of how our ability to see is intertwined, in a huge variety of ways, in our thinking, to how we experience our lives. We attach all kinds of meaning to the organ with which we most attribute the majority of our ability to perceive.
… from being ‘the apple of’ someone’s eye to ‘having an eye for…’ whatever it may be, to ‘not believing’ our eyes when we see a particularly baffling Reel on Instagram… we mention our eyes a lot, in the average day, if you pay attention to it.
In religion and spirituality, the eye, quite reasonably one may concur, is generally considered the organ of perception.
Of course, what we perceive involves, for all of us, more than physical sight, but eyes and sight are often used figuratively to indicate understanding or ignorance.
In Christianity, the eyes are often written about in relation to light (knowledge) and dark (ignorance).
Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” Matthew 6:22
Readings on this will often speak of the healthy eye means not only see well, but also perceive well. It is not only what we see, but how we perceive what we see that distinguishes godliness from ungodliness and light and darkness.
In the Qur’an the eyes are mentioned 40 times in 38 verses, including
(5:83)
تَرَىٰ أَعْيُنَهُمْ تَفِيضُ مِنَ الدَّمْعِ
“And when they hear what has been revealed to the Messenger, you see their eyes overflowing with tears because of what they have recognised of the truth. They say, “Our Lord, we have believed, so register us among the witnesses.”
In Hinduism, the word eye may cause you to think immediately about the concept of the third eye but, in fact, the eyes themselves are a fascinating topic here, beyond that. One concept within that being relative to an emphasis on visual interactions in Hinduism between deity and worshipper… as this extremely interesting paper states… “Devotees wish to see and be seen by the gods, and believe they will be benefitted by doing so.”
Windows to the soul?
We could write on this for a long time, for there is much to say and it is a fascinating topic, but the point is that the eyes are important for us all, and hugely symbolic for most human beings.
The eyes can represent the omniscience of God, the gateway into the soul… in both religious and secular thought they are often associated with everything from intelligence to light, to our moral consciousness to truth.
The value we place on the eyes and sight goes beyond our relationship to the Divine of our understanding. We often value eye contact, done ‘right,’ as a marker for both intimacy and honesty with others… at least in the West. In other cultural contexts the concealment of the eyes can be a marker for respect.
Many would say that the eyes are a ‘giveaway’ for what we think and how we feel. Research has even been done to suggest that our eyes may also be indicator of our personality type.
This study, whilst interesting, seems to be more about how the behaviour of our eyes can be a marker for our emotional state of being.
“Close your eyes if you can”
Such study may not be so easy to conduct In Kundalini Global classes, where you are invited, much of the time, to have the eyes closed. The thinking behind this invitation, in part, comes back to our core purpose: to show you how you can take yourself out of stress/overwhelm/anxiety.
In closing the eyes during our practice, we hope to close down contact checking. We hope to build trust in ourselves. Of course… some, most, in fact, when they first arrive in a class… will always need to check what is going on in the room. And that’s no problem. None at all. But to pay attention to your need to open the eyes can become an interesting marker, on the mat, for your relationship to yourself.
How you attribute that relative to ‘godliness’ or ‘ungodliness’, ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ ‘truth’ and ‘ignorance…’ or any other symbolism relative to your sight… that is entirely down to you.
For those who move through the world in states of being such as stress, anxiety, addiction, overwhelm… it is highly likely that the eyes are deceiving… seeing things as they appear to be, through the lens of a specific state of hyper-being, rather than how they are.
The illusion of our lives…
How we feel about ourselves, and our lives, can come entirely from this illusion.
Many people come to practises such as yoga, breath-work, meditation… because they ‘sense’ or ‘feel’ there ‘must be something more.’
They, perhaps, have some fascination or curiosity with things that they can’t see rather than only with things that they can. Perhaps even because what they can see displeases them. What can happen, in this, is that, as the practise works to transform our relationship to ourselves, as we begin to realise that we can change how we think by changing how we feel, it appears that we are proved right… we can see differently now… we have some secret kind of ’truth’ or ‘light’ but… actually, we could just say we have shifted our perception by releases contractions in our body and mind to be able to see things from a place of presence.
Eye Gazes and Eye Yoga
The eyes come into class in other ways too. In breath practises and meditation we will often work with different form of gaze for different effects… in postures we will sometimes work with eye gazes too, as an aspect of imbuing a posture with intention (the focused gaze in a Warrior comes immediately to mind as we set a forward projection for our aim, goal, ambition…)
Beyond Kundalini Global, if you’re ‘into’ the eyes, or are exploring working with the eyes for some other reason, you could even take up ‘Eye Yoga’. It’s a real thing…
Eye Yoga is about movements aiming to strengthen muscles in and around the eyes. It’s often sold as a practise to help with vision, dry eyes, to decrease eyestrain, that kind of thing. Not a huge amount of evidence-based research has been done on this, to date, but you can read more about it online quite easily… even Specsavers have an article on it on their website (spoiler alert, they say it doesn’t work.)
The eyes… they are a fascination, that’s for sure. If they aren’t something you would usually give much thought to then we hope this post may have awakened an awareness in you to notice your own eyes more often, your own gaze, how safe you feel with your eyes closed… or your relationship to your eyes, and the eyes on you, relative to your own belief system.
The eyes upon you…
The eyes upon you… we have not touched so much on that, today… it is a specialism of our founder, Carolyn Cowan, and something she often brings into her teaching, workshops and writing. You can find out more about what Carolyn currently has on offer here:
