Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 13 Patrick Laude 5 Non-Dual Vision or Whose Eyes? Across all the traditions discussed, the mystical motion tends toward an increasingly determining recognition of the primacy of the Divine agency, whether it be through the path of love, or that of knowledge. The utmost outcome of this growing recognition is a radical switch of the location of selfhood and the real subject of perception. 5.1 The Servant’s Eye A most suggestive hadīth is often quoted in Islamic spirituality: My servant draws not near to Me with anything more loved by Me than the religious duties I have enjoined upon him, and My servant continues to draw near to Me with supererogatory works so that I shall love him. When I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees (kuntu basarahu alladhī yubsīru bihi), his hand with which he strikes and his foot with which he walks. This hadith, from the canonical collection of Bukhārī, indicates a connection between worship and Divine immanence to the self (Nawawi 2014, 58). Here servanthood is not only connected to the law but also to love, and love to a union, or even a unity, induced by God’s grace. The path that begins with legal obligations is deepened by supererogatory devotion and fulfilled by God’s bestowing of His love through an inner effusion of grace that amounts to a shift in the worshipper’s center of consciousness. Thus, in the Sufi tradition, the final stage of spiritual perfection is understood as an “exchange” (Ar. tabaddul), or a kind of substitution, whereby God is now the agent as the eye through which the servant sees. God is not the unreachable object of human seeing anymore, but its very subject. We see something comparable at play in the Christian tradition in the writings of Meister Eckhart. 5.2 Seeing God with His Own Eye The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love (Eckhart 2007, 32). The context of Eckhart’s perplexing passage is that of the human perfection in relation to God’s will: “The man who abides in the will of God wills nothing else than what God is, and what He wills.” (Eckhart 2007, 32). As we have seen, it is a common feature of all forms of mysticism discussed that they aim at a complete, perfect, extinction in the object of their love or knowledge. We note, however, that Eckhart does not merely equate this perfection with an utter acceptance of God’s will in human life. The man who has reached perfection is he who “wills nothing else than what God is”. This poverty of the will is akin to a “colorless” vision of the eye for “if my eye is to discern colour, it must itself be free from all colour” (Eckhart 2007, 32). The will is “ontologized”, as it were, in that it coincides with the very being of God (Kelley 2008, 145). Furthermore, the eye is identified with pure light because any color within the eye would amount to an admixture altering the perception of colors as they are. At its utmost level of perfection this objective vision is none other than God’s vision. The eye symbolizes here the resolution of all dualities. That which is a priori the symbol of a relationship between the seer and the seen is ultimately grasped as the merging site, indeed sight, of subject and object in which the very distinction between the two vanishes.
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