14 Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 6 Conclusion This study has suggested that the eye as understood by mystics across many different traditions may be deemed to function as a symbolic mediation between duality and the non-dual horizon of spirituality; this despite the many other differences within the accounts noted above. Across these traditions, the eye points to the extreme reach of the perception of unity from within duality, a self-evident, indescribable, experience that reduces the human self to the status of a pure contemplative witness, as exemplified by the ultimate vision of the Prophet Muhammad at the limit of the Lote-tree. Beyond this contemplative limit lies non-duality – which cancels out any beyond within its all-inclusive fold, the only Witness, or Merrell-Wolff’s “consciousness without an object” (Merrell-Wolff 1983, 1) – a consciousness that is not split between a subject and an object but within which subject and object are but one. At this stage the witness includes the witnessed in a way that transcends any sense of duality between the two. For the eye can be approached either under its aspect of contemplative distance from the seen or as it “contains” what it sees. Thus, it can be the symbolic crystallization of a reversal whereby the initial human “seer” becomes ultimately the “seen” and the Divine “seen”, the ultimate “seer”; albeit this reversal needs be theologically qualified as still entailing differentiation within some of the traditions discussed. Yet across Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam and even in Platonism we find that the inward gaze of the mystic tends to lead to the discovery that God’s eye (broadly defined) is the only site of true vision, the unknowable certainty which Ramana Maharshi brings home with a striking analogy: “Can you say that you do not know the Self? Though you cannot see your own eyes and though not provided with a mirror to look in, do you deny the existence of your eyes? Similarly, you are aware of the Self even though the Self is not objectified.” (Ramana Maharshi 2001, 275).
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