Eyes on Fire

I have been meditating a lot lately. It has changed my life. It has forced me to rethink what is important and has curtailed my anxiety.

They say you should journal after meditating. I never really do, so I guess what is written below serves as a journal entry of sorts. It is shaped in the forge of a flow state that the meditations always bring.

I have flames where my eyes used to be.

Lambent fires of warm understanding and stern self-judgment occupy my eye sockets. When I close my eyelids to go inward, smoke seeps out from the sides.

But let us speak of ladders left unclimbed, and of the phoenix that forgot how. I call forth talismans that fetishize everyday life. If nothing is sacred and everything is permitted, then what was I waiting for?

To be happy again was the thing of a recidivist, a convicted felon turned loose upon respectable society to once more unleash his joy upon those who deserved it more than he. I am that felon, heaved out from the penitentiary of self-introspection, a bundle of not-so-fresh clothes tucked under one arm and a tattered copy of some forgotten swami under the other.

I had earlier propitiated the prison god of shanks to gouge out my third eye. Thus the scar across my forehead arching over my two remaining ones that have bestowed stereoscopic vision upon me since birth. It boggles me to this day that few deem the stereoscopic vision a great gift. We need not envy flies, who have so many perspectives to choose from that it's a sort of analysis-paralysis that leads them to live for so few days.

Yet no one can deny the great power that is sight, so much more grand than those of smell and taste—powers that get us more into trouble than out of it.

When we reach the point that working with three dimensions has become insufficient, we take sight to be a power long misused. This may be true, but shutting it down for remodification may be in order.

20/20 insight is rare if at all possible. Great masters profess to possess it, but we can never know for sure. It is an ideal to be sought after, sure, as spiritual glaucoma is as contagious as pink eye—and in the kingdom of the blind, the three-eyed are absolute rockstars.

Taking our perceptions in for repairs is the only way to even begin achieving any desired clarity. Some choose ayahuasca, others cannabis. Some overdose on beauty, others shut themselves up in their rooms and boycott it.

Closing one's eyes helps a lot. You starve your rods and cones and you hack your optic nerves for the very next time that you welcome the color wheel back into experience.

How many bad decisions do we make based on faulty assumptions of what we see every day? The red box twenty feet away from you isn't red so much as the light allowing you to see it is red. My, we have a grudging relationship with light. We want it to be there like a reliable uncle on holidays, but we never ask, “Blue, how ya been?”

Blue is blue, after all. It carries the cross for the rest of us and our hyperboles about how we feel. Who ever stopped to ask how Blue feels? While we're at it, who ever stopped to ask how Sadness itself is holding up? Doubtful it's ecstatic. Its load-bearing walls look to be in dire need of fresh mortar.

We pinball from one emotion to the next, our hopes based on an algorithm that we want to chart out our fulfillment but likely spells our doom. We don't want to sit with suboptimal feelings because we think it our birthright to be perpetually elated. The code of all colors is not a code to be cracked; it is not a cryptological nightmare begging decipherment.

Everything we take seriously we take for granted, including color and the depth perception that comes along with it. Mayhem is never forever, so why not sign your name in its bottom right corner and try to auction it off to the highest bidder?

There appears to be no rhyme or reason to how we wield our optical machetes or how we hack our way through our three-dimensional visual jungles, why we snag our gazes on what we do, other than we assume it to be important to our current or future states. I say leave most of it undeciphered, like species of beetles whose classification adds nothing to our overall interpretation of things as we sprint through the overgrowth on our way to dethrone the Demiurge.

Or you can take it the other way:

Everything around us is an omen. No, not a harbinger of some idealized future, but a reminder of now. And that's it. We keep spit-shining our anchors, hoping for that one day when we call the waveless ocean Just Right to pitch them overboard so that we can finally be still. But we can be still now. Pitch that damn anchor, Cap'n.

So I state again:

I have flames where my eyes used to be.

Lambent fires of warm understanding and stern self-judgment occupy my eye sockets. When I close my eyelids to go inward, smoke seeps out from the sides. All the world’s worries smoulder like embers doused with the water of blindness.

So if nothing is true and everything is permitted, as told us by Hassan i-Sabbah then the Chaos Magicians, then the very tints and textures themselves are smeared across the pallet that also serves as the canvas, ready to be assembled like so much utility fog into whatever scene we so wish to behold, needing only a slight tilt of the head—and a smile—to make it all a masterpiece.

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

My current novel Crushed Trachea Blues is a fun, literary murder mystery featuring suicide by jiu-jitsu, an AI Charles Manson, and lots of tacos. It is available in ebook and paperback.

Its follow-up The Sisterhood of the Wick will be out in November.