FROM OUTER GAZE TO KNOWING ONESELF

This post provides additional insight into the passage "Expansion of Corporeal and Erotic Consciousness" taken from the post "Darkness as a Tool for Reconnection."

Few gestures are as fundamental, and yet as laden with reluctance, as the simple act of holding another's gaze. Maintaining this eye contact, this confrontation of depths, beyond a few fleeting seconds, becomes an ordeal, a challenge thrown at our most intimate defenses. Why this discomfort when light forces us to see, and to be seen?

Eyes are like mirrors polished by time, reflecting not only the world, but above all, the essence of the one who bears them. Looking into someone else's eyes is literally seeing your own light reflected in a space that suddenly seems limitless. It is an experience that dismantles our armor, exposing us to radical vulnerability. In a society that erects strength and impassivity as virtues, that conspires to tell us that sensitivity is a weakness, it prepares us poorly for this. For, in seeing our own brilliance reflected back, we are confronted with everything we have consciously denied, repressed, ignored. Everything we refuse to see in ourselves, and we project it onto the world.

Every exchanged gaze carries within it the crystallized memory of our lived experience. Our eyes are the archives of our abyssal sorrows, of all the traumas that have marked our existence, and of everything we have methodically hidden behind our reassuring facades. To truly begin to apprehend and accept what we perceive of the world, we must dare to undertake an inner journey. We must dare to confront those recesses of our psyche that we have, out of fear or habit, refused to illuminate. These are the secrets buried in our genetics, the whispers of our soul that aspire to be heard, the sensations forgotten in the folds of our body. What we have seen and not liked, what we constantly look away from, all of this constitutes a part of ourselves demanding to be recognized.

True gazing is an endeavor quite distinct from simply staring at someone. Truly seeing demands an engagement that elevates the gaze to the rank of a primary mode of connection, relegating physical contact to a mere support, an earthly anchor in the service of a communion that transcends matter. If this gaze is not sustained, if it lacks a continuous and mutual intention of connection, it inexorably tends to fall back into its most superficial form: a quick scan, a distracted analysis that keeps us in the flow of analytical thoughts, cutting us off from the profound richness of feeling and presence.

The Veil of Perception

The simple act of seeing is far from being a direct and transparent access to reality. Its very etymology reveals this to us: the Spanish verb "ver," linked to our French "voir," finds its deep roots in the Indo-European "weid." This proto-word does not evoke the substance of things, but rather their image, their appearance. From the outset, language carries within it the fundamental distinction between the object itself and its reflection, its representation. What we perceive is never the thing as it is in itself, but always an emanation filtered through our own receptor systems.

Perception, for its part, from the Latin "per" (through, completely) and "capere" (to capture), followed by the suffix "tio" marking the action, is literally defined as "the action of capturing a set of things." It is an active seizure, a taking possession of the external world through the intermediary of our senses. A constant negotiation between what is outside and our capacity to receive it. The same goes for English "sight," which derives from "see," itself from the Indo-European "sekw," meaning "to pursue, to follow something." Vision thus becomes a quest, an incessant movement of pursuit to intercept and detain what presents itself to us.

Fundamentally, seeing is therefore akin to the pursuit of appearances, a subtle hunt for the sensible manifestations that we try to apprehend. The eye does not perceive light directly as a simple entity. It records its distortion, its variations, its frequencies. Photons, the elementary particles of light, travel through the environment, crossing interatomic spaces, colliding with other particles, bouncing back tirelessly. These interactions modify their speed and trajectory, creating an incessant kaleidoscope of data. When these photons finally reach the photoreceptor cells of our eyes, their energy is transmuted, interpreted by our brain, and we perceive it as a color, a shape, an intensity.

It is here that the paradox lies: we are incapable of perceiving an individual photon. Yet, from the juxtaposition and orchestration of billions of these invisible units, our differentiated perception is born. We only see the invisible through its symphonies of quantum interactions that sketch the world within our field of consciousness.

Two eyes are necessary for us to anchor our perception in a stable, three-dimensional reality: they enable focusing, the stereoscopic vision essential for appreciating depths and distances. And these two eyes do not work in isolated parallel; they are intimately linked to the opposite hemispheres of our brain. The right eye sends its information to the left hemisphere, the dominion of logic, mathematics, analysis. Conversely, the left eye transmits its data to the right hemisphere, the seat of creativity, intuition, flexibility. Our two eyes, therefore, apprehend the world from distinct angles, bringing different but complementary perspectives.

This duality is the foundation of integrated vision. Nature endowed us with two gazes to allow us to navigate between clear and detailed perception, focal vision, and the more diffuse awareness of our environment, peripheral vision. It is this balance between what is directly in front of us and what surrounds us that allows us to maintain a centered direction, to keep our balance in the constant flow of the world.

However, if the external gaze is a master in capturing appearances, there exists another dimension of vision, a deeper, more intimate perception, that opens up when we choose to turn our gaze away from the external world and close our eyes. Even in the darkness of our closed eyelids, we continue to see. What we experience then no longer responds to the logic of external pursuit; these are dreams, images, memories rising to the surface, the projections of our inner world that bear witness to a gaze that no longer seeks to capture outside, but explores and reveals our innermost self.

It is within this inner garden that the concept of the "third eye" takes source, often associated with the pineal gland. This gland, nestled in the core of our brain, is often considered the seat of an omnidirectional inner vision, a source of 360-degree perception. It does not "see" in the same way our physical eyes interact with light, but it operates on another register, that of expanded consciousness. Its state of wakefulness or sleep, its expansion or contraction, is linked to our body's cycles, to the sleep-wake rhythms. Deep rest, meditative relaxation, are essential conditions for its development and full blossoming. The third eye is this faculty of inner vision, capable of discerning what the two physical eyes cannot apprehend.

In reality, the two eyes capture images, ideas, sensory information that cross our field of consciousness. They constitute a filter that interprets the external world. But the raw data, the finest nuances of our experience, what our conscious mind cannot always explicitly process, are often stored by our subconscious. This infinite reservoir takes charge of transforming this information into a complex database, an internal language that helps us interpret our reality, our inner world as much as the outer world. It is from this subconscious alchemy that the strangest but above all the most revealing dreams are born.

In this perspective, dreams are a privileged form of communication between the mind, the soul, and the body. During sleep, our mind and soul use the data accumulated by the body, what we have unconsciously seen and experienced, and transform them into a symbolic code. Dreams are thus the manifestation of a perception that goes beyond the visible, the language of our interiority that speaks through the images, sensations, and narratives that unfold in the silence of the night. At night, when the veil of superficial consciousness dissipates, the world redefines itself. In our dreams, we perceive vibrant colors, abstract forms, scenarios that defy all earthly logic. Dream vision is a laboratory of perception, a striking demonstration that our capacity to "see" goes far beyond the simple pursuit of something outside. It is an active exploration of our inner world, an immersion into the landscape of our subconscious and unconscious. Dreams are proof that the reality we construct with our open eyes is only one facet of a much vaster and more complex reality. They show us that vision is a concept that encompasses the capacity to explore, create, and understand, not only external objects, but also our own depths.

That is why the notion of the "Third Eye" resonates so strongly; it evokes this capacity to perceive what the other two confine to the realm of appearance. It is the one that, potentially, gives true and deep meaning to the images that our physical eyes reflect back to us. Because, ultimately, if everything our eyes see is only a perception, a simple "appearance," then the two eyes are the tools for seizing, for recording ideas and images of the external world, but never of ultimate reality. The Third Eye, inner vision, is the receptacle that illuminates what remains veiled in the light of day, revealing the complexity woven between the external world, our inner world, and thus, the incessant dialogue between consciousness and the unconscious.

Beyond the visible

Must we give up seeing in order to finally perceive?

In the annals of ancient mythologies, the figure of the one-eyed being often emerges. This missing eye represents the arduous yet sublime quest for an inner path, a vision that transcends flesh and the temporal. The absence of a physical eye then manifests as the key defining the nature of the work to be accomplished, an initiation into another form of knowledge. Major deities, pillars of formerly venerated pantheons, voluntarily made this sacrifice. Odin offered his eye in exchange for a draught from Mimir's well, the fountain of wisdom, thus acquiring an omniscient perception embracing past, present, and future. Similarly, Horus, the Egyptian god, lost his eye in his titanic struggle against Seth, an eye that was later restored by Thoth, but whose initial loss symbolized the purifying suffering necessary for ascension and celestial vision. These mythical narratives are not merely simple tales; they are archetypes engraved in the collective consciousness, teaching us that true vision often requires sacrifices, a certain readiness to abandon the known to explore the unknown.

The Proto-Indo-European word "weid," meaning "to see," "image," or "appearance," is at the root of numerous terms carrying within them a gravitation towards understanding. Witness the English word "wise" and its nominalization "wisdom." In these acceptations, seeing is not simply passively registering an image, but rather an act of intuition. In certain ancestral cultures, it was the blind person, the one deprived of physical perception of the world, who held the gift of guiding human souls through the ethereal veil of the spirit world. They were the medium, capable of predicting the future, discerning omens hidden in the invisible currents of existence, and thus perceiving the divine where others saw only nothingness. It is here that blindness ceases to be a deficiency, to become a rare and powerful quality. The divine itself, the original and creative essence, is often represented by a single eye, such as the All-Seeing Eye of the Vesica Piscis, a symbol of a vision that embraces all dimensions, without limiting itself to the contingency of the visible.

However, our daily relationship with the world is all too often distorted by a blind trust in our own perceptual apparatus. What we perceive with our physical eyes, the totality of what we apprehend during our waking hours, is in reality only an interpretation, a sophisticated construction orchestrated by our brain. This interpretation can therefore emanate from various strata of our psyche: from the subconscious, bearer of the imprints of our past experiences and acquired conditionings; from the unconscious, that unfathomable ocean of drives, instincts, and ancestral memories; or again from the conscious mind, our agent of daily analysis and logic. Normally, we let the first two levels (the subconscious and the unconscious) process the vast majority of sensory data, often considering with a programmed naivety that the principle of "if I see it, I believe it" is an absolute truth. This dogma, deeply anchored in our culture, assumes that the things we contemplate are the ultimate and indisputable reality. This supposition forgets this fundamental detail: what we see, what we hear, what we touch, is always filtered and processed by the brain, this complex network of nerve cells that never see the light itself, but interpret it through electrical and chemical signals. Light cannot be perceived directly by the brain; it is an energy transformed into visual information by the photoreceptors of the retina, then decoded by the visual cortex. Thus, our experience of the self and the world is a neuronal fabrication, a subjective reality.

For millions of years of evolution, we have biologically, genetically transmitted this specific way of interpreting the world. The neuronal mechanisms that allow us to process sensory information have been shaped by natural selection to optimize our survival in given environments. From generation to generation, we have naturalized and integrated the idea that what our brain perceives is the only valid reality, the only "real" reality. This habituation to the primacy of external perception has led us to delegate, more or less, 90% of what we are and what we perceive to the vast domain of the subconscious and the unconscious. Our inner world is thus constructed by preconceptions, inherited beliefs, social conditionings, and projections of what we think we perceive from the external world. We create an internal map of the territory based not on the territory itself, but on our interpretation of it.

The direct consequence of this perceptual mechanics is a perpetual wandering. We have taken the habit, guided by this interpretation of reality, of carelessly chasing after things outside ourselves. These "things" are often ideals, possessions, statuses, relationships, experiences, that our subconscious mind has labeled as sources of happiness or wholeness. This external quest becomes a frantic race, a perpetual movement that distances us from our own center. But in this movement, yet another paradox emerges: the same force that pushes us outward pushes us inward, but this time, with apprehension. Today, we fear what resides within us. We dread our own inner world, the dark recesses of our unresolved emotions, ancestral fears, repressed desires. We fear the richness and complexity of our psyche, because we have for too long neglected its exploration.

And yet, the key to our deepest truth, 90% of what we truly are, lies hidden not in the physical eye that observes the world, but in this inner eye, this gaze of the soul, of intuition, of pure consciousness. We have denied the existence and power of this inner eye by the age-old habit of believing that the only concrete thing, the only thing worthy of faith, is what we perceive when we open our eyes. So, we have closed the door to our own innate wisdom, to our capacity to understand the world at a level that transcends simple factual observation.

Embarking on the path of the inner eye means accepting that our physical perception is a filtering lens, and not a perfect mirror of reality. It means recognizing that wisdom resides not solely in the acquisition of external knowledge, but rather in the deployment of our capacity to interpret the world through an expanded consciousness. Contemplative practices, meditation, or even the simple act of reconnecting with our dreams, are all open doors to this dormant inner eye. By cultivating this non-physical vision, we rediscover a form of wisdom that has been transmitted to us by those same ancient myths: the wisdom of the one who sees beyond appearances, who understands that the deepest truth is not always the one that offers itself most easily to the physical gaze, but the one that awaits discovery in the inner silence, there where the eye that does not see is the greatest of seers.

The example of the one-eyed gods reminds us that the sacrifice of one form of perception is often the prelude to the acquisition of a vaster understanding. The dismantling of our habitual "knowledge," of our certainties based on the visible, is the first step towards inner clarity. Blindness, in its mythical and spiritual essence, becomes a metaphor for the necessity of transcending sensory limitations to access a vaster reality, a reality where the inner eye, nourished by intuition, imagination, and deep connection to our being, becomes our most reliable guide. It is in this inner light that we can truly begin to understand, and no longer merely, to simply see.

Closing the eyes to awaken

How to find one's truth in a world that overwhelms us?

As has already been mentioned, we evolve today within a sensory ecosystem of unprecedented density. Screens, pervasively present, diffuse an incessant flow of images, sounds, and information. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, 24-hour news channels, omnipresent advertisements, constitute a permanent bombardment intended to capture our attention, to insinuate themselves into our subconscious before our critical mind can even fully grasp them. This visual and informational submersion accustoms us to a form of passive acceptance, to the naturalization of certain realities and, paradoxically, to the denial of others. Our perception becomes the reflection of a will, the will to see what we have been conditioned to seek, or what others, skilled manipulators, desire us to look at. The brain chooses its palettes from the ambient deluge, painting a reality that is often fragmented, preconceived, and far removed from any nuanced objectivity.

In this context, the very notion of truth is assailed. Media platforms, political discourse, conspiracy theories, and even certain forms of entertainment, present themselves as the self-appointed guardians of this truth. They assure us that they reveal to us what we absolutely must know, what we should not ignore. Yet, reality is often much more subtle and insidious: what is presented to us is only a mosaic of distorted, individual truths, of selected facts, of biased interpretations. The uniqueness of truth, the one that would reside deep within us, inner truth, remains inaccessible, veiled by the artificial brilliance of external representations.

The crux of the problem lies in our inability to apprehend these semi-truths externally with discernment because our internal foundations lack coherence. How can we evaluate the reliability of external information when our own inner landscape is a chaos of unexamined beliefs, unrecognized prejudices, unavowed desires? In acting thus, we cede our most fundamental power of interpretation, the one that should allow us to navigate the world with intelligence and clear-sightedness.

The quest for discernment and intelligence, therefore, does not begin with increased contemplation of the external world, but with a resolute gaze turned inward. By momentarily withdrawing from the cacophony of external stimuli, to better apprehend our own place within it, we can begin to cease living in confusion. This pause is a recentering strategy, essential to escape the dictatorship of a perception entirely dictated from the outside.

This process obviously requires learning, a voluntary deactivation of the incessant flow of visual information that dominates our consciousness. It is not simply about closing one's eyes for a moment, but about acquiring the capacity to suspend the empire of the exocentric gaze. This is the whole meaning of a metaphorical practice, a meditative ritual, such as that of wearing a mask during massage. This mask symbolizes a temporary renunciation of constant visual engagement, an act that creates a protected space where the other senses can finally emerge and be heard. It is in this inner calm, in this controlled reduction of the external flow, that our inner world regains its power and clarity.

There exists a depth that does not call for a fall, but rather for a voluntary immersion, a deliberate plunge into the heart of what normally eludes us. When we finally allow ourselves to venture into this inner abyss, the dark and unexplored ocean that resides within each of us, a change occurs. It is not so much a disappearance of the self as a metamorphosis, an expansion that transcends the familiar limits of our perception.

We then cease to perceive the world as a set of isolated points floating on the horizon of our consciousness. We shed that gaze which seeks the single landmark, the distant signifier lost in an apparently empty expanse. The nature of our being modifies itself, since we become the ocean itself. Every parcel of our skin, every fiber of our being, becomes sensitive not to the distance of a point, but to the infinite expanse that constitutes us.

Then we can henceforth simply feel the kilometers on every parcel of our skin.

It is through the maelstrom of the subconscious that this discovery takes on its full meaning. The subconscious is no longer a stagnant pool of repressed emotions or dormant memories, but reveals itself to be the network that connects the abyssal depths to the shifting reflections of the surface, the place where the pressure of water masses translates into premonitions, into intuitions, into a latent knowledge that precedes analytical thought.

We then discover, through this connection to the subconscious, that we develop the capacity to feel more deeply, more broadly. Every emotional wave, every current of thought, every whisper of the unconscious becomes palpable information, an element that composes this new inner reality.

The fear of the abyss, often, is that of losing control or of disconnection. Yet, it is by letting go into this depth that we find a connection of an amplitude that abolishes all comparison. The limited self, the one that defines itself by its possessions, its social roles, or its clearly defined objectives, dissolves to make way for a vaster, more fluid consciousness. This is proof of a fundamental connection to ourselves, a connection so vast that it encompasses everything that composes us, the conscious as well as the unconscious, the visible as well as the invisible.

This journey inward teaches us that true expanse is not that which we traverse in the external world, but that which we are capable of inhabiting within ourselves. The inner ocean is a universe in itself, rich with potentialities. By consenting to plunge into it, we do not merely explore ourselves; we recreate ourselves. We become that entity that no longer sees a distant point, but that feels the world with the totality of its being. We become the inner cosmos, capable of truly feeling, the infinite echo of existence in the depth of our own substance.