Knowlege’s Eyes

On my walk today, I invited the experience of seeing with knowledge eyes, or knowledge’s eyes.  I was walking the same familiar route, but seeing the path in the act of being known, I found my eyes drawn at first to tiny, usually ignored details.  There was the sense of vision zooming in to the crooked curl of a leaf, a tiny bird hidden in the branches of a tree, the glistening trail of a snail across the ground.  As I continued walking, I found myself slipping in and out of “fresh looking” — pulled by the gravity of the familiar, then finding vision clarified again, opened newly to “being being known.”  At some point, I became aware of a subtle distancing still present, with the way I was holding “knowledge eyes” still reinforcing a subject-object split.  I let my eyes become “knowledge’s eyes,” and then let my body become knowledge’s body and for a few moments experienced everything around me with a sense of decentered intimacy … each thing at once “being known.”  My body/self was included in this field, and was one of the strongest points, but it didn’t feel like the “source” of the knowing, or the bestower of the intimacy.