Approaches to the Inner Life
Lanza del Vasto
1962

The Clear Eye

You may have noticed that we have a head. I hope you noticed this. And a chest and a belly too.
You will tell me that, yes, indeed, you have noticed this and that you regret having come so far to hear things that everyone knows. Encouraged by this approval we will continue the course of our amazing discoveries.
We will notice the place occupied by these three things: the head is at the top, the chest inbetween and the belly below. We will draw this conclusion from it, a very important one: that the head must be at the top, the heart in the middle, and the belly below.
You may say that everyone knows this, but we meet a lot of people who haven’t noticed anything:
Those, for example, who put their belly at the top. Those who use their intelligence to fill their bellies. Those who reason with their belly, whose intelligence is at the service of their belly. Hey! Those are not exceptions, they aren’t monsters or insane, they aren’t necessarily brutal either. They are the great majority of the people.
They are even very good people; they like good things, they do good business and, on occasion, good deeds. They only have the misfortune of being belly up and upside down.
You might think that the position is inconvenient, but, to compensate for their misfortune, they have another one, which is that they don’t notice it.
If you show them that this is a fallen position, they feel offended; if you pull them up to set them right, they get angry.
“Let’s see! are they shouting, and common sense? You have no sense of Reality! no sense of History! You don’t know that it is the Economy that governs everything!”
By the way, let us look at the spiders. They too are hanging with their bellies in the air and their heads down, and what beautiful nets they make and how they capture the flies!
Spiders and civilizations in fact, beautiful works in reverse! Let’s admire the Eiffel tower, the skyscrapers, the cosmic rockets, vertiginous height!
Vertigo, yes, height, no! They believe they are building and rising, but in truth they are disintegrating and sinking; and if you don’t see it, beware! It is since you yourself look at them upside down.
But let’s go back to the obvious of our first remarks: let’s put our heads up and start here. “Everything,” says the Buddha, “begins in thought. When the thought is wrong, suffering follows as the wheel of the cart follows the hoof of the ox.”
“The eye is the lamp of the body”, says the Gospel: “if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be darkened.”
The eye is made for light, and the intellect is made for truth. If it receives and expresses truth, the intellect fulfills its function and that’s it. But if it is in the dark and in error, it is because it blinds itself or lets itself be blinded by false lights.
The truth is unattainable, people say. I rather think that it is inevitable.
You may be lying, wandering in delirium; you cannot prevent each of the elements of your lie, your error or your dream from being true, to some degree. To be or not to be is not the question. Above, below, inside or outside, that’s the question.
“But if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light.”
Attention to the translation: clear. Which teaches us this: that the truth is a clear thing. For just as the eye is made for light, so is the intelligence for truth.
You are looking for the truth, you say? How? By accumulating notions, by calculating, by combining, by conceiving complicated arguments?
Raise your head and open your eyes to the evidence of the light.

Do you see the light? Or only things and people?
If your sight is constantly fixated on the prey or the obstacle, you will see things and people, but you do not see the light by which you see them.

Don’t forget the shadow either, don’t lose your shadow, the hidden one, the most hidden of all, the one that hides behind your eyes: yourself.
How?
How will you see yourself? Not, of course, with these two eyes of flesh, nor in the light of day. If you see yourself, then with the one eye, your clear eye. Which one?
The one who cannot be seen by any other, the only one, the one which, with a simple glance, knows the inner eye fixated at the exact equally distant center of everything. Where hidden?
In it.
Behind.
Underneath.
The only thing you know from the inside.
The only introduction to the internal, to the mystery, to the substance.
The only thing that makes you know the inside of all things outside.
Yourself: the evidence of being, the witness of truth.

This truth cannot escape you if you seek it. You have it, you are it. It is here that the word of the Gospel shows its fullness: seek, and you will find, ask, and it will be given to you, knock, and you will be opened.
If you don’t know anything about yourself, you don’t know anything about anything or anyone, because it is through you, it is through you alone that you know something else.
If you don’t know anything about yourself, nothing makes any sense to you, your life makes no sense, your intelligence makes no sense, you are senseless.
If you’re senseless in this way, it’s your fault.

When your clear eye has discovered the Self, it will show you the reality of the Other, of the Next: you will see this other self.
Yes, it is both an Other and an I.
Seeing it as an other, your clear eye will teach you the mathematical evidence of respect and of justice.
Seeing it as an I, for it is an I as you are an I, as God is an I who contains us all, there you’ll have the evidence of love.

But the others, tell me, do you see that they are others, or do you think that they are there only for your usage, your advantage or your pleasure?
Do you see that they exist for themselves and for God?
Even your spouse is not there for you, o spouse!
Nor your son for you, o father!
Nor your mother for you, o son!
Nor your friend, o friend!

“Why did I create the crocodile and the wild donkey?” God asks Job.
If you see in all beings your usage, your advantage or your pleasure, the others will remain hidden from you and you will always ignore respect and justice. If you look at them as possessions to be possessed or impediments to be overcome, you will never see them as an I on their own and you will always ignore love.

These three truths, that of the Light, that of the I, that of the You, are only one truth with three dimensions: “So that you may be able to comprehend the length, the width, the height, the depth…” said St. Paul. The clear eye catches this with a glance.

Everything else is false, vain, evil. All other knowledge: notions, definitions, calculations, findings, recipes, combinations, discoveries, systems, doctrines, are either ways of descending to the detail of this truth, or are false, vain and evil.
Evil, because they are a way to distract from the truth and lose it.
This truth must be constantly remembered as the first, as a condition of all truth. The other truths must be understood and ordered by this clear sight which is truth itself. In this fixed sight, everything will have its place, even the most humble thing.
But when missing this sight, even the greatest and most exact thing will be without a reason to exist, without substance and without direction.

The light or truth or God,
The Self or the Inner Life,
The You or respect, justice, charity, non-violence and actively awaiting the Kingdom of Heaven,
In these three points lies our entire teaching. In the first, our religious teaching or rather pre-religious, our introduction to all religious teaching.
In the second, our method of inner life.
In the third, our moral and social doctrine. But it would be wrong to say ours because it is not ours. What are we, if not useless teachers teaching things that have always been known to everyone?