The Eye Sees Only What The Soul Wants To See
The path your present follows depends on how you measure the burden of your soul.
Saturday, I participated in the half-marathon in Cluj-Napoca. Next to me, almost shoulder to shoulder, a young runner, very well rated, guided me along the entire route, especially through the places not marked by the organizers. Our meeting represented the absolute form of an “entre deux” (between Self and Other) that defines, so perfectly, the space and time in which the Universe “arranged” for two exceptional runners to meet, on the same wavelength.
A rainy weather. There was a lot of mud, making the ground slippery. We helped each other when it came to steep slopes and difficult climbs, dangerous curves, but also smooth roads.
Yes, I faced all the challenges, but until a moment of crossroads. We had covered the distance of 18.7 km, and we reached a steep valley, very slippery, with many paths. Having a bigger step than hers, and thanks to the immeasurable momentum, I succeeded in a much faster descent, reaching the illusory free will of an environment that does not impose constraints, experiencing a horizon of reality from the space of books full of deeds of bravery.
Does your vision of yourself and the persistence with which you aim to translate some images into facts lead to a segmentation of the continuum of a background limitation?
And so I got lost among the unknown and unmarked paths, this fact representing a spiral deeply wrapped in the abyss of self-finitude, a segmentation of the continuum of a background limitation. Or rather, entering a kind of background of unfriendly nature, I disowned my self-eye, as a demented atheist disowns his faith, until I realized that, in fact, nature showed me a side of me that I have always neglected, and that I can no longer hide.
The steep and slippery valley took me to a highway. Yes, I was lost. But my colleague, nowhere, although I was still transfixed by the vision of a “halfway” meeting. I didn’t hear anything, I didn’t see any movement in the forest. It was impossible to turn back, the mud and the slippery hill did not allow me to return. Intuition told me to run forward, not to stop, not to get cold, to catch up with the time lost in an ambiguous wandering. Finally, I reached the finish line.
But my colleague, nowhere. Where was she? Was she still running through the woods? More and more runners were arriving at the finish line, but I couldn’t see her. Half an hour, an hour, two hours, she still didn’t show up. The “tragic” feeling was by no means excluded by the vision of an accident, a gloomy scenario, but it was also not confused with the truce made between nature and human will. The combination of the vision and the tragic seemed to be more fully operated in a gloomy engraving by Ion Panaitescu, with the title “Letea Forest”, which accentuates the chiaroscuro of an entrance into a setting too strange to be remembered.
Can you maintain full awareness of your soul essence if you construct an image whose reality can only be rendered by a double comparison?
My participation in this scenario was complete, according to an exceedingly disturbing expectation. As for the fundamental limitation I was facing, continuously and without any spark of hope lighting up in my heart oppressed by the burden of guilt I attributed to myself, this constituted a denial of my soul essence, in the sense that what I it troubled me enormously, discouraged me completely, demobilized me, overwhelmed me, hardened me.
A double comparison put my soul to the test: the way I felt at the beginning and during the race, VERSUS the way I felt now. The runner’s disappearance was a total mystery.
From a comfortable inner soul, suddenly a restless spirit is born. My mind was assailed with anxieties and questions, testing my faith springing from an Espersuthar Certrhis Serchomis, the awareness of a soul wound, the vibration of a positive emotion of the “host” soul. It was a gloomy picture, a fact that tortured my imagination with all kinds of possibilities. It was the same state of silent suffering that a character in the novel Daniel Martin, written by John Fowles, addressed:
“I wanted to hear her voice, and her voice to remind me of a simpler, less oppressive present. Somehow, to draw an unprejudiced parallel between prevention and finding the consequences. That must have been my great dilemma: the fear of not once more seeing my own feelings and judgments deceived. As if the feelings I had attributed to her, and my own feelings had taken on contradictory forms by virtue of a double comparison: on the one hand I was tempted by the mystery, on the other I was too tense, touched by an unknown guilt. Yet I saw a resemblance there, at that moment, between the two separate experiences, hers and mine. Strange, like an invisible hand, reaching out and yet soothing me.”
Does the image that breaks your heart make you ignore the finitude of your self because of a chiaroscuro that more strongly than ever suggests “freezing” in an acute present?
The possibility of conjugation with the tragic feeling, like a bullet just out of the barrel, existed in my mind and made its way into an image that I had never imagined as real. Or was it just a trick that life uses to chloroform clean consciences, those that refuse to close their eyes to attempts to unify all contrasts on a unitary axiomatic foundation? I say this because my very face had become a mask of suffering and regret, oriented towards the guilt of not having been strong enough to quell my ambition to always be ahead.
Remorse is a deadly poison to the soul, especially if the soul is not comforted by good news. And I, myself being the alternative of a world where the story seems forbidden, I, the one for whom a single heart knocked at the door of consciousness, leaving room for it to enter the prayer addressed to the guardian angel, causing a small bleeding at the spirit level, yes, I reproached myself for not being sufficiently prudent.
No one knew what was happening in my soul, because no one sees what the soul experiences in a chiaroscuro that suggests more meaningfully than ever the “freezing” in an acute present.
The runner’s friends had already notified the competition organizers of her strange and unexpected disappearance. In the end, I understood that she got lost like me, on the other side of the freeway that led to the center of the city. She reached her relatives safely. Two days have passed since then. I haven’t heard anything from her. But I still got a message this morning, the palpable present appearing before me again, making me feel the vibration of a distant but unforgettable emotion: “I'm sorry we didn’t cross the finish line together. We’ll see each other again at the competition in April.”
The finitude of the self is a detachment from your previous positive versions, an annulment of the attachment to the past, to the exterior, the course of your present no longer having those creative virtues whose summation represents a beautiful character.
The Eye Sees Only What The Soul Wants To See when you are in the ambiguous situation of choosing between what is known as opposed to what is unknown, or between the reproach that conscience brings you and the real sharing of feelings.
Don’t forget: The path your present follows depends on how you measure your soul’s burden.
