The Single Eye

An Experiment

Here is an interesting experiment, one which the majority of sighted people can carry out quite easily.

Place the first fingers of each hand about 10 cm in front of your face, pointing upwards... one in line with each eye (a uniform background is preferred).

Now try moving your fingers slightly further apart, then closer again. You should be able to find a position at which what you see is three fingers, or maybe only one. This impression is created through an optical illusion which arises because of the fact that you have two eyes.

You are not seeing what is really there: there are not three fingers, nor one. But try closing one eye. It is only when you look with a single eye that your sight becomes trustworthy. Now you see what is really there. You see two fingers.

The Single Eye in the Gospels

When you look with two eyes, what you see is either one finger or three. Here is an analogy for the tradition of Christianity... where one god is presented as three persons.

But look with a single eye, and now you see what is really there. Here by analogy is the Gnostic tradition... in which two gods coexist, and it is vital to tell them apart.

So how to discover the truth? All you have to do is "Pluck out one eye".

The authors of the gospels could easily have performed the experiment described above. And this is what they wrote [Mt.18:9; equiv. at Mk.9:47]:

"If your eye scandalises you, take it out and throw [it away] from you.

It is good for you to enter into life one-eyed, rather than having two eyes to be thrown into the Gehenna of fire".

Those who retain two eyes 'merge' the bad god in scripture with the good one. Failing to distinguish the two gods, they see only one.

According to scripture's theme, those who embrace Satan in this way as their 'god' - even though they do so unwittingly - risk ending up in 'Gehenna' (ie. hell).

The Single Eye in Philosophy

Here is one expression of the Neoplatonist idea about the 'single eye':

"Neoplatonism asserts consistently that the world as seen by the spiritual man is a very different world from that which is seen by the carnal man. Spiritual things are spiritually discerned; and the whole world, to him who can see it as it is, is irradiated by Spirit.

A sober trust in religious experience, when that experience has been earned, is an essential factor in Platonic faith. Our vision is clarified by the conquest of fleshly lusts, by steady concentration of the thoughts, will, and affections on things that are good and true and lovely; by disinterestedness, which thinks of no reward, and by that progressive unification of our nature which in the Gospels is called the single eye."

   William Ralph Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus

The single eye encompasses all that there is to see.  It is the pure and single eye of reason:

"Take first scholarship - the thing, perhaps the first thing, a University is designed to promote and to train its members to acquire. And by scholarship I do not mean the qualities demanded of the student of letters rather than of the student of the sciences; for true scholarship, in its essential character, is the same in both; only the spheres of its activity or application are different. It means undivided attention to the evidence; keen, discriminating, sensitive; and the drawing of the conclusions which that evidence, and not some other thing, requires.

Ignorance, at every stage, is in some degree inevitable, and it makes some errors unavoidable. But the most frequent errors, and those that propagate a crop of further errors, are not the consequence of ignorance, but just of the lack of the single eye - of prejudice, of the desire to maintain a preconceived opinion, to refute some other opinion, to save yourself trouble, or to prove yourself right. And for these there is only one cure : the single eye."

   John Sandwith Boys Smith, Sermons