A Hundred Days To Happiness: Seeing With The Divine Eye

“The eye through which I see God,” wrote Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, “is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Reality is more than what meets the eye.

Our perspective shapes and limits what we see. Our prevailing mood of the moment, our sensitivity to criticism and our present tolerance for humour all shape how we will receive a light-hearted insult from a friend.

Over time, as couples become too familiar, they talk a little less – and listen a lot less – than they should. They practice mind-reading with varying degrees of accuracy. They assume a lot more than they check out.

No wonder we think the worst of one another when we keep one another waiting, forget something important, toss out the other’s favourite things or unconsciously commit a dozen other infuriating acts.

We stop living happily ever after when being together is a competition of my needs versus your needs or what I give up versus what you give up. We can’t win in a game of who’s right or who does the most.

When we look at one another, we usually do so through the eyes of the ego. From the perspective of our smaller selves – largely concerned with our personal needs, we judge the world by how it might threaten us or satisfy our needs. When we look at others this way, we see only superficially and even them through the filter of our own interests.

The alternative is to see with the divine eye – to see deeply, to see through our own egos, needs and wants. This is the eye of love unconditional.

This is how a parent sees a newborn child – perfect, beautiful and worthy of love. A parent’s vision may be clouded when that child is seen as an extension of his or her own ego or when the egos of parent and child clash. In the battle of our little selves, we become myopic and lose sight of the soul.

To see another with the divine eye is to look directly into the soul, recognize real beauty and feel deep compassion. When we recognize another in this way, how can we not express unconditional love?

An exercise in happiness: How do you see yourself, your life and your relationships today? If you have been looking with the critical, nearsighted eye of your smaller self, take a step back – a really big step back.

Look in the mirror and see yourself as you really are: perfect with your unique and human imperfections, emanating real beauty from your core, and worthy of unconditional love. See – and feel – the divine within you, and live from that higher self.

Look at your own life – past and present – with compassion. Look at the problems of this day from the perspective of a lifetime.

Look at each person you meet today as a newborn baby – your baby: perfect in human imperfection, beautiful as they are and worthy of love.

Which is the greater spiritual experience: to see the divine in another (and experience unconditional love in your own heart) or to have the divine in yourself recognized by the other (and receive unconditional love)?

A Hundred Days To Happiness: In The Face Of Disaster

The biggest news of the week has been the overwhelming devastation of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Everything else seems insignificant in comparison.

That perspective can inform our lives today.

The day before the earthquake was a normal day for the people of Japan. Like you and me today, they were occupied with the business of living: going to school or working, listening to their favourite music or watching popular shows, shopping, working out, dancing, eating out, and engaged in the drama of our relationships.

Like us, they never dreamed that everything that we normally take for granted would change.

Tragedies on any scale give us pause. We question how we have perceived meaning in our lives. We realize how important our friends and family are.

Our daily pursuit of pleasure, comfort and excitement seem insignificant in matters of life and death. Our major and minor conflicts with one another seem less important from the perspective of our relationships themselves.

No life is untouched by tragedy, and every day, there are people in your neighbourhood who are coping with devastating loss: the death of a loved one or a terminal condition in themselves.

My work with patients facing these challenges taught me what matters most to me: living a meaningful life, being fully present each day, expressing love and appreciating what I have today, especially the people in my life.

When my own mom died suddenly almost eight years ago, so many things no longer mattered. Loss – or the reflection of potential loss – can put our lives into perspective and make us reevaluate where we place value.

A patient found that he was becoming very impatient with his wife. He would get irritated with her habit of forgetting to turn off the basement light when she came up the stairs.

I asked him to think about how much he would miss that basement light left on if there was ever a time that she was no longer around. The things about our loved ones that irritate us today may be the ones that we miss the most when they are gone.

Your happiness exercise for today: From the perspective of tragedy and loss, look where you have devoted your time, money, energy and passion this past week. Do you see yourself, your loved ones and your life any differently now?

If all that you took for granted was gone tomorrow, what would you do today? How will you live your life this week?

The Canadian Red Cross is accepting donations for emergency relief efforts in Japan.