The Darkness That Shines
I feel I owe our regular readers an explanation about why there have been so few postings to The Seer lately. The main reason is that over the past couple of weeks, my eyesight has dwindled to almost nothing. The irony of this happening to the moderator of a blog entitled, The Seer, is not lost on me, but of course, the seeing done by any seer has very little to do with one’s eyesight.
How are you writing this, you may ask, if you can’t see? Well, I’ve been using a program named Zoomtext which magnifies screens for users with limited eyesight and I’ve now got it turned up so that it fits only a couple of words on the screen at a time and, of course, I’m using the high contrast setting — white text against black etc. In the next week or so, I hope to upgrade Zoomtext to the voice version which ’speaks’ the text as it is typed etc.
If you’re curious to know why my eyesight failed so suddenly, the explanation is fairly straight forward. For the past 16 years or so, I’ve been relying on corneal transplants (or grafts) since I injured my eyes in a workplacel accident. My last transplant was done ten years ago and gave me useful sight most of that time, but a few weeks ago, the transplant (in my only good eye) came to the end of it’s life. I’m now on the list to have another transplant which will probably happen in a few months. As much depends on the condition of the recipient eye and the tissue match, it’s hard to predict the outcome of such operations, but when you have only light perception, any improvement is welcome.
Some of you may know that my lovely wife, Pearl, is also legally blind and has had, for the past seven years, the help of a beautiful golden Labrador guide-dog, named Skye. Before my first successful transplant, I was as I am now for many years and over that time had the help of four different guide-dogs. So when my sight went downhill so quickly this time, I wondered if Skye could guide me as my other wonderful dogs had done in the past. With Pearl’s agreement, I took Skye (or she took me) for a spin around the block and found that Skye worked just as well for me as she did for Pearl. So now, Skye is getting a bit of extra walking in which is fine as Pearl has to spend a lot of time at home studying and conducting her counselling work.
We are very blessed to have a caring community of satsang friends around us who are helping with our practical needs in a variety of ways. We have just had a marvellous time with Adyashanti and Mukti who stayed in our home during their visit to Perth. We had good numbers at the satsang talks and the intensive and a host of community members served as volunteers to make sure it all ran smoothly. Adya’s teaching, of course, was breath-takingly clear, lucid, direct, compassionate and immensely profound without being abstract in any way. Our involvement with these and his other Australian events was another reason why The Seer has been on hold these last few weeks.
These recent difficulties wth my eyesight have drawn my attention even more to That which is changeless amid the changefulness of our life experience. Inwardly, there is ever the pure beingness of our essential nature while outwardly, the human form is always becoming and moving from one state or situation to another. The Formless that I am and you are is already and always complete, while the manifestation is always in the process of completion. For me, the inner darkness shines with a beauty and splendour that makes the loss of visual perception trivial by comparison. I have discovered, that losing one’s eyesight certainly matters, but it doesn’t matter absolutely. It’s not that one retreats into the shining darkness, so to speak, but that this shining from the Source transfigures and illuminates every experience of life, pleasant and unpleasant, so that it is all encourntered and felt as the unfolding of the One. From this perspective, it is more adventure than adversity.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. I’ll try to keep you up to date with developments in my situation as often as I can and explore ways to include other items of interest as before.
