The physical eyes need great care. Please read more in Mindfulness and Eye Care. This article is more about the spiritual aspects of seeing–Inner Eye Care. You may not know much about this, but mindful practice is the first step, and that leads to meditation.
What is the inner eye and how does it work?
Incoming information
It’s impressive that four-fifths of all the information the brain receives enters through the eyes. This forces us to constantly:
- classify
- select
- reject
- compare
- respond.
Our Senses and Inner Eye Care
For most of us, our intellectual minds are frantically busy for most of our waking hours. This is especially so when WFH — working from home.
The visual sense tends to dominate our perceptions of the outside world. This leaves our other 6 senses— hearing, listening, tasting, smelling, and our kinesthetic sense of movement and body awareness—weakening. Multi-tasking is often necessary, too.
It is necessary for our mental health that we keep the other senses stimulated at least a little every day. This will help us care for our eyes and ways of seeing inside.
Everyday Mindfulness Tips
When drinking anything, e.g. tea, coffee, juice, etc., close your eyes and only drink. Shut your busy, obsessive thoughts down. Do nothing except drink. Be 100% mindful for several minutes of these 4 points:
- The taste
- The temperature
- The smell, and the effect of what you are drinking.
- Be mindful as you take it into your mouth and swallow it.
When you eat anything, e.g. meals, snacks, fruit, vegetables, etc., close your eyes and only eat. Close your busy obsessive thoughts down. Do nothing except eat. Be 100% mindful for several minutes of the above. Then, gently chew and swallow it.
Notice how the liquid and food substances make you feel. Be aware of the signals they send to your body:
- the feeling of satisfaction
- fullness
- freshness
- sourness
And remember to eat slowly and thoughtfully.
This will greatly improve your inner eye care wherever you are and whatever you do for a living.
These Thai novice monks are sitting in front of their begging bowls.
They contain the food donated by the community for the entire day.
They eat and drink in complete silence because they are practising to have gratitude for every mouthful they swallow.
“Our motivation for everything we do and think in our lives is important. In this way we can become watchful and really get to know our minds.”
Inner Eye Care WFH: seeing with our hands
Writing/Typing Tips:
To save energy at the keyboard, it helps occasionally to put a coin on the back of each hand. The challenge is to avoid it falling off by minimizing all movements.
Also, use a minimum of keyboard strokes. You can set ‘keyboard shortcuts’ when you want to improve your inner eye care WFH.
When we are children, we gradually learn to make meaning from what we see. But we see with our hands until our visual acuity and brain functions develop.
Contact through sensitive body areas with the brain is another way of seeing and taking inner eye care.
Especially when using your keyboard, remember from time to time to feel your fingertips as they lightly touch each key. And how your hands, led by your wrist, move around economically.
If we lose awareness of this susceptible hand-and-eye-coordination, we may lose synchronicity, making more typos than usual. In addition, we will likely use too much energy to depress the keys.
Check to see if you can hear your keyboard. It should be fairly silent if you are using the correct amount of weight.
When it comes to mindfulness and movement, less is more. In other words, the less effort we exert, the greater the change and improvement and the more we can be mindful.
If you would like to know more about how to conserve your energy while moving visit this site.
Mindfulness when Writing
To save energy when using a pen or pencil, be mindful of how you hold your writing instrument. In other words, make your grip soft and use a pen/pencil that suits you. Then, you can let gravity help you by imagining using a quill pen, which is literally as light as a feather as you can see in the image.
Move your hand to the minimum as you write. And it helps to take a moment to have the thought of it being soft and supple before you start to write.
Insights into Inner Eyes Care
Seeing and looking are very different.
Seeing is natural, and we do it whether asleep or awake. It is a constant in the human condition. It is not human-made or influenced by the intellectual mind.
Looking is deliberate and prejudiced. We use the visual sense to execute an idea when looking for something. For example, we might say we are looking for the truth. But this is an artificial way of using the eyes. We are not open, so our eyes are corrupted.
Sight and seeing are connected to your pure existence.
In the other article about eye care Mindfulness and Eye Care, I mentioned that we spend most of our time in the modern world looking out into the world. So much so that we often lose contact with our inner being and our seeing.
Seeing inside is natural because there we are connected with the universe and the invisible world. ‘Looking’ inside is pointless because we cannot do it with the intellectual mind. This is an important consideration when arranging our inner eye care.
“Seeing us just clarity—open eyes, open mind, open heart. When we look, the intellectual mind is active: whereas when we see, the intellectual mind is passive.”
Osho, The Perfect Way p9
The Story of the Jewel in the Coat
To help people resist using their intellectual minds to think or force themselves to ‘see’ inside, stories have been told to awaken something in the unconscious mind for thousands of years. This is a very famous story told in various versions by the leaders of all spiritual traditions: this is my version.
……Once, a poor family in the south depended on the father to work to earn a pitiful income. He worked so hard in searing heat but was forced to do hard labour from dawn till dusk because he was unskilled. Even so, he couldn’t earn very much.
Every day, he grew thinner and weaker, but still, he couldn’t meet all the family expenses. The most pressing was the forthcoming marriage of his three daughters. So, after talking with his wife, they decided he should leave home and try to find better work in another region.
He was sad to leave wearing his ragged coat, carrying a small bundle of food and water and his spade over his shoulder. His family also were heartbroken to see him go and afraid that he may never return.
He walked miles through severe heat and cold to a rich, fertile area in the north. Here, he quickly found work that paid much better than at home. Because the weather was colder, he soon regained his weight and became healthy and strong again.
He was so happy to send some money back to his family at the end of every month and suddenly had hope for their lives. He continued to work hard daily and was soon promoted because of his reliability and diligence. The months went by, and he was promoted to a senior position, so he lived in reasonable accommodation while looking after his new Master.
In time, he became very comfortable with his new lifestyle. He took to drinking alcohol every night with his Master and gambling with the local people. He took greater and greater risks when he gambled. Then, one day, he realized he had gambled away all his earnings and had nothing to send to his poor family.
His condition deteriorated as a result of drinking too much. So, he started to make mistakes in his work. This forced his Master to scold him and eventually to ask him to leave. Destitute, his fine clothes all sold to buy more alcohol and a little food, he was forced to wear the rags he had arrived in.
His reputation as an unreliable drunkard and gambler meant he was refused no matter where he tried to find even the lowest work. Eventually, he was chased out of the region and started to go back home. He felt even more hopeless than before he left home and dreaded what his family would say when they saw him.
At last, thin and exhausted, he arrived home again, and to his surprise, his wife and children were overjoyed to have him back home. They bathed and fed him and let him rest in a comfortable bed until he regained strength.
Once he was well again, he looked back at some of the letters he had received while away. One was from his mother, who had passed away just after he had left. He was sad that he hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to her and settled down to read her letter.
His mother wrote how dear her only son was to her and how proud she was of him for trying so hard to provide for his family. Then, as he read the end of her letter, he became amazed;
she wrote:
“My darling son, I should tell you that before you left home, I secretly sowed our family fortune into the lining of your coat. You see, I wasn’t sure if I would ever see you again.”
He rushed to bring his tattered coat and eagerly felt around the lining. And there, he felt something hard and rounded. He took his knife and cut the stitching, holding it in place, and he could hardly believe what he found there. A large, perfect diamond.
He called his wife and his children, and they celebrated wildly. They were no longer poor, and he realized that they never were.
If he had stayed in the bosom of his family, his mother would have naturally handed the family riches to him when she died. They would have lived happily ever after.
Your Awakening
This story should filter into your unconscious mind, your deep mind below the surface.
This is where fundamental changes always take place.
It will be of great help with your inner eye care.
The poor man had everything he needed if only he had seen more clearly inside himself. If only he had not gone outside, questing and worrying about the future. If he had stayed watchful, here and now, everything would have been fine.
Everything we can ever need is right here and now if we only see inside and know ourselves.
Meditation for Your Inner Eye Care
Stories and meditations will help you reconnect with your inner world, heart, and the Earth.
Unfortunately, many of us have turned our backs on the Earth in the name of progress.
They will also promote your inner eye care.