Heart Blindness

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

The following is written while outside an office I wait on courageous, emotionally devastated friends who two nights ago suddenly found themselves immersed in an incomprehensible tsunami of shocking, life-wrenching tragedies involving suicide, coroners, lawyers, custody, hospitals, court hearings, and God only knows what more.

Such madness besets this poor blinded humanity! Dear God, such madness! This surely testifies to there being far more to existence than mere reductionist physical and mechanical forms. Such madness contradicts the principles of evolution. No species would ever evolve into such madness. How evident it is that we must be blind, yet we know not to what we are blind. It is so painfully evident that we have lost contact with something critically important.  Such mad chaos in sentient beings, such impassioned conflict and self-destruction and self-delusion cannot be explained by evolution. That seems as preposterous as claiming that a loving God makes all these horrors happen.

 Along with the horror and grief and loss, one of the cruelest aspects of situations of violent loss of a loved one is the utter, abject lack of understanding. Our soul knows it is all nonsensical. What we experience simply cannot be, but we are forced to accept it, and those who do not accept it are doomed to madness.

It is tragedy induced by and compounded by some sort of blindness, blindness to a reality that lies not hidden but out in plain sight, but plain sight of our heart, not our eyes.

 “She cannot be dead!” our heart cries, and it is right. But our eyes and all senses of the world would tell us otherwise. So we struggle to subsume our heart’s vision and reconcile our intellect with undeniable physical reality.

 It is tragedy upon tragedy, this blindness that leaves us gasping in shock at each ripped discontinuity in our worldly experience, each shock that cannot possibly be.

 Only with a view to the Greater do we begin to see the continuity and wholeness of the seemingly torn fabric of life. In that view we recognize that our worldly experience is only the view we get of a moment and place, not the view of the River flowing into and out of the moment and place. In our worldly vision the precious drop of life hurtled out of the flow in the crashing rapids is lost to our sight.

Not understanding the great flow, seeing only the current flowing past our location, not seeing upstream or downstream, we do not understand even what the River is. But we are of the River, and it is of us. If we comprehended that, our madness would to at least some degree abate. If we understood the flow of the River, the sudden losses and tragedies would still hurt, but we would have hope and understanding, knowing that all losses are temporary and even illusory, illusion induced by our blindness.

 Our madness arises from blindness, but it is blindness of too much vision, worldly vision that is. Our hearts are not blind, just caged and unused. We are reduced to listening to our hearts only when they cry out in pain. Let us bring them out into the Light, that we may see foundations, that we may discern flows eternal, that we may put aside blind madness and the grief and sorrow it brings.

Copyright 2016 Don Ray