The Second Gaze

Seeing a bigger picture

(For the audio version, click above)

Hi Everyone,

NOTE:  As we begin our Opening the Aperture series, this Tuesday (the 15^th) from 5:30-6:30 MT, Elizabeth and I will host a Zoom call focused on five ways we miss- perceive reality and the problems it causes.  You’ll find the Zoom link for it at the end of this post and on my Substack page in the section for paid subscribers (called the Cairn Circle).  I think it’s going to be an interesting hour and I hope you’ll join us.

The Second Gaze

Seeing a bigger picture

We look out at a world that seems obvious enough.  Right now, as I sit on my back porch, I see our little white terrier-mix racing through the yard.  I hear a squirrel voicing his unhappiness at this fact.  I feel the cool metal of the computer on my lap.  I smell hints of dinner cooking inside.

But this is a tiny fraction of what is really happening around me.  The flowers in our garden would be offended by how few of their true colors I perceive.  There are spiders close by that I can’t see (gladly), picking up vibrations I can’t feel.  There are birds overhead guided by a magnetic field I am completely oblivious to.  And those are just some of the things I’m aware that I’m unaware of.

To perceive.  From an old French word combining a prefix meaning ‘thoroughly’ with a root meaning ‘to take.’  But no creature on earth takes all of this in thoroughly.   Every being has unique perceptual talents.  And every being has their blind spots.  The difference between humans and other creatures is that we have the capacity to comprehend just how limited our perception is.  Though we seldom do.

It’s just too hard for us to imagine there could be more going on than we perceive.  It goes against every ego-centric bone in our body.   And this is true at the physical level, and at the spiritual. 

Today, I want to share one of the most helpful ideas I’ve come across in my own spiritual growth.  It’s called the ‘Second Gaze.’   Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation used it in a reflection years ago.  He described the second gaze this way:

“Even after fifty years of practicing contemplation, my immediate response to most situations includes attachment, defensiveness, judgment, control, and analysis. I am better at calculating than contemplating…The false self seems to have the “first gaze” at almost everything…It has taken me much of my life to begin to get to the second gaze… (but) it is well worth waiting for, because only the second gaze sees fully and truthfully. It sees itself, the other, and even God with God’s own eyes, the eyes of compassion…”

When I first read this, a light went on.  Until then, I thought my usual way of perceiving the world - that of discriminating, critiquing, comparing and judging (the first gaze) - gave me a truer, fuller picture of things.  And I thought that being a “good person” or a “good Christian” was about ignoring parts of this fuller picture and agreeing to view others in a more limited, rather naïve way…in the name of compassion.