Spiritual Sight
Before they were called prophets or Christ (anointed one) or buddha (awakened one) or jnani (knowing one), or arhat (worthy one) they were called seers. The Hebrew Scriptures say that was the term used in the time of the prophet Samuel. It reads, “the prophet of today was formerly called the seer.” Such people were able to see with spiritual eyes what could not be seen with physical eyes.
Jesus called this being “born again.” He said, “unless one is born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” This spiritual sight is what I am talking about today. In this episode I am looking at a story found in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John. It is the story of Jesus healing a man born blind. On the surface it is about physical sight and physical healing, but Jesus makes it clear that it is really about spiritual sight and spiritual healing. It is not about being visually impaired but being spiritually impaired.
The first thing this story addresses is psychological barriers to seeing the Kingdom of God. Seeing the Kingdom of God, of course, is just another term for spiritual awakening or enlightenment or liberation or salvation. Seekers can become very frustrated with the fact that they just don’t seem to be able to see this nondual Reality. They may have been on a spiritual journey for years – perhaps all their lives – and still don’t see it. Jesus addresses that issue first.
Jesus encounters a man who had been physically blind from birth. His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Do you hear the guilt in the question? The disciples are trying to find someone to blame for the condition of this man – either the man himself or his parents. Likewise today there is a lot of blame going around in religion, especially in Christianity. There is a lot of guilt. I have heard Christianity called a guilt management system. It is not just in Christianity. The Indian idea of karma and reincarnation blames a person’s past conduct in previous lives for their present condition. That is just a variation of “blame the victim” game.
Guilt is a psychological obstacle to spiritual realization. Jesus does not hesitate to refute the guilt trip. Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” He says it is was not this man’s fault that he was born physically blind and it is not our fault that we cannot spiritually see the Kingdom of God. He says we need to stop dwelling on the past and see the opportunity in the present. He says, “It was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
The Buddha said a similar sort of thing when people came to him wanting to know the reason for human suffering. He said that was like a man being struck with an arrow wanting to know all about the arrow. What kind of wood it was made of, what kind of feathers on it, what type of bow used to shoot it, who shot it and why, etc. Buddha said, “Forget all that! You will be dead before you have all the answers. Just take the arrow out!” That was the Buddha’s way of cutting through the theoretical and getting to the practical.
Jesus says that the solution to the man’s blindness is “I AM.” Jesus gives one of his I AM statements here. He says, “While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world.” Jesus had just said in the previous chapter, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” I AM statements, as I have said before in this series, are about Jesus’ eternal nature and identity and our eternal nature and identity. Here Jesus says he is the light of the world. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, "You are the Light of the world. … let your light shine.” Christ’s true nature and our true nature is the cure for spiritual blindness.
The next issue that Jesus deals with is spiritual practices. That is another obstacle to spiritual sight. People feel like they need to do something in order to be able to spiritually see what Jesus could see. The same today. Christians think they have to follow a bunch of moral laws or believe a bunch of theological doctrines. In Eastern spiritual traditions they think they need to practice the right spiritual disciplines or have the right spiritual teacher or meditate using the right technique. So they do all the right things and then wonder why it doesn’t work.
Some people believe in spiritual techniques. Apparently the man in the story did. So that is what Jesus gives him. Jesus spit on the ground, and made mud from the saliva, and applied the mud to his eyes, and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.” So the man did as he was told. He left and washed, and came back seeing. Jesus didn’t need to do those things, and neither did the man. Jesus had done many other healings without any such theatrics. It was not about magic mud or sacred spit or holy water. It was about the Light of the World.
When it comes to spiritual awakening, it is not about techniques. When it comes to salvation it is not about beliefs. It is about identity. That is why this story moves from the healing to focus on the identity of Jesus. The rest of the chapter is all about religious leaders questioning the man about who healed him and who exactly Jesus is. The answer is already given before the miracle happened. “I am the Light of the World.”
The man ends up becoming a follower of Jesus. And we are told that the religious leaders decided to excommunicate from the synagogue any followers of Jesus. This is the way that traditional religious leaders think. They are threatened by anything that does not fit their religious system. In the story Jesus has a discussion about this with the religious leaders. Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” The Pharisees said to Him, “We are blind then?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now that you maintain, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
This is an indictment of traditional religion – what we might call today the institutional church or organized religion - which is represented by the Pharisees in this story. These are people who are convinced they have it all figured out. They knew the truth and everyone else are lost or heretics. That king of closemindedness is dangerous. That is the greatest obstacle to spiritual sight.
Such spiritual pride and arrogance keep people from seeing the Kingdom of God. I see this present in my own religion of Christianity, especially in more rigid forms of it, like fundamentalism, evangelicalism and other conservative forms of Christianity, although liberals and progressive can be very closeminded too in their own way. Like the Pharisees they say, “we see” yet according to Jesus, they are blind. As the Tao Te Ching says, “Those who speak do not know. Those who know do not speak.”
So where does that leave the spiritual seeker today? It leaves us with grace. First of all, put down the guilt. Guilt and shame are spiritual poison. Run from any religious leader that piles on the guilt and then says they can sell you the cure for your guilt. They are just snake oil salesmen. It is not your fault, so don’t beat yourself up any longer. When it comes to spiritual practices, there is nothing you can do or not do. Relax. Simply rest in the grace of God. It is not about doing the right things the right way. It is not about belonging to the right group or holding the right beliefs. Those are spiritual dead ends.
It is about identity - spiritual identity: Christ’s identity and our identity. That is what this story teaches. When we see what we are, we see who Christ is and God is. That is awakening. That is Self-realization. We see that Jesus is the Light of the world and that we are the Light of the world, and we see everything else in that light. We see the world as it is and not as the illusion it appears to be. We see Reality. That is what it means to see the Kingdom of God and to enter the Kingdom of God.
There is no trick to seeing this. The truth is that we already see this at some level. We can already see. This is who we are. It is just that we have ignored it, which is what ignorance means. The Pharisees knew it, but they refused to see it. That is why Jesus called them blind – willfully spiritually blind. He calls them elsewhere blind leaders - the blind leading the blind. Jesus came into the world so that all may see. That was his mission. He said, “I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” He came that we might see that we are the light of the world by which the world sees.