Ancient Mystics on the Gaze
It is only a matter of fixing one's thinking on the point that lies exactly between the two eyes. Then all is well. The Light is something extremely mobile. When one fixes the thought on the midpoint between the two eyes, the Light streams in of its own accord. The Secret of the Golden Flower-Ancient Chinese Taoist text~ 8th Century.
Wherever the eye falls, there is the face of God. Ancient Sufi saying.
Therefore in this simple gazing we are one life and one spirit with God —And this I call the seeing life. As soon as we cleave to God through love, we practice the better part; but when we gaze thus into our super-essence, we possess God utterly. John Ruysbroeck, 13th century Christian Mystic.
When you see with your inner eye. Then you realize that you are God and not different from Him. Sai Baba
We need to see emptiness, and that which sees is our cognizant quality… Mind essence in actuality, as it is, is vividly seen the very moment you look. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
The intellect is a light, and if I turn it away from all things and in the direction of God, then, since God is continually overflowing with grace, my intellect becomes illumined and united with love, and therein knows and loves God as He is in Himself. Meister Eckhart.
Seeing into darkness is clarity. Knowing how to yield is strength. Use your own light and return to the source of light. This is called practicing eternity. Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
In the midst of primal becoming, the radiance of the light is the determining thing. In the physical world it is the sun; in man the eye. When both eyes are looking at things of the world it is with vision directed outward. Now if one closes the eyes and, reversing the glance, directs it inward …that is the backward flowing method. The Secret of the Golden Flower~ Ancient Chinese Taoist text~ 8th Century.
After the devotee is able at will to see his astral eye of light and intuition with either closed or open eyes, and to hold it steady indefinitely, he will eventually attain the power to look through it into Eternity; and through the starry gateway he will sail into Omnipresence. Yogananda.
Without the eye can any object be seen? The seeing self is the eye and that eye is the eye of infinity. Ramana Maharsi.
“Listen, my brother! my Lord, who ravishes my eyes, has united Himself with me.” Kabir.
"Early in the morning when the sun was not yet up and the dew on the grass, still in bed, lying quietly, without any thought or movement, there was a seeing, not the superficial seeing with the eyes but seeing through the eyes from behind the head. The eyes and from behind the head were only the instrument through which the immeasurable past was seeing into the immeasurable space that had no time. Krishnamurti.
For in this darkness there shines and is born an incomprehensible light …… in whom one contemplates eternal life. And in this light one becomes seeing. John Ruysbroeck, 12th Century Christian Mystic … more from Ruysbroeck here.
ONE IS to accept Oneself by Oneself—One should train oneself and see the Self in the medulla region through the area between the eyebrows somehow. It is done by practice . Highest bliss lies in remaining aware between the eyebrows. By fixing the attention between the eyebrows. breath (prana) turns into "food" [nourishment] too; Lahiri Mayasaya.
With the attention focused at the point between the eyebrows, the withheld life force becomes concentrated there and, in the cerebrum, illumining the omniscient spiritual eye, the divine gateway to the Infinite. Yogananda.
We are led to believe a lie when we see with, and not through the eye. — William Blake
And in this emptiness of spirit we receive the Incomprehensible Light, Which enfolds and penetrates us as air is penetrated by the light of the sun; And this Light is naught else but a fathomless gazing and seeing. What we are, that we gaze at; and what we gaze at, that we are. John Ruysbroeck.
We ought not even to say that he will see, but he will be that which he sees, if indeed it is possible any longer to distinguish between seer and seen, and not boldly to affirm that the two are one. PLOTINUS