I’m revisiting some past entries on this site, that mean a lot to me. Here’s a particularly beautiful one:

Most of our spiritual traditions tell us that, as humans, we are miniature reflections of God and that we have been created in God’s image. If this is so, then it would follow that a more direct way to look upon the face of God would be to sit and gaze at an actual person, a real flesh-and-blood human. If he or she will sit and hold your gaze in return, something begins to transpire between the two of you. If you can truly see another and be seen by the other, you begin to see that he or she is an embodiment of the Divine, and you begin to feel that you are as well.

In India, darshan often occurs in formal settings between teachers and their students. Teachers may sit at the front of a room, perhaps on a slightly raised dais so that no one’s view will be obstructed. They may sit silently, pouring out their gazing, inviting students to meet their eyes and to hold contact with their gaze. This contact allows the Divine to enter their students’ awareness. In the words of Ramana Maharshi, one of the great Indian teachers of the twentieth century and one of the great givers of darshan, “When the eyes of the student meet the gaze of the teacher, words of instruction are no longer necessary.”

Why gazing at another person and having him or her hold your gaze in return can open both participants to a direct experience of the Divine is a mystery. All of us, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, know about this practice from a very early age. School children will often enter into staring contests during which their conventional experience of self is momentarily suspended to accommodate the new and unusual energies that the visual contact between them generates. A common response to the dramatic shift in awareness that prolonged eye contact triggers is to burst into laughter, and so the contest ends with both of the children being the true winners, with smiles on their faces.

As we mature and need to become strong individuals, separate from the whole, we tend to avoid eye contact when we speak to others, for if we did hold the other’s gaze we might find it difficult to remain focused on the information that we’re trying to convey, melting instead into a shared sense of wordless union with the person to whom we’re speaking. Only when real love forms the basis of our communication with another do we find it more natural to hold and soften into our partner’s gaze.

Because the eyes are universally acknowledged to be the windows to the soul, when we hold the gaze of another, we hold and cradle his or her soul. This most intimate of acts is reserved as a privilege for people who love and trust one another. Newborn children are natural adepts at the practice and are often able to draw their parents into gazing at them for long periods of time. People newly in love may find that they automatically fall into gazing at each other as a natural expression of the love that they feel. In fact, this unintentional and spontaneous dissolving into the eyes of the other is often the signal that, at long last, they have finally found the beloved for whom they’ve been searching. When describing this newfound love, people will often rejoice that, finally, they have met someone who truly sees them as they are.

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