What We Notice Before We Understand What We Are Seeing
There is an observation that has stayed with me for years, partly because I have never been entirely satisfied with any explanation of it. From time to time, I have encountered people who were clearly psychotic, and I have encountered contemplative practitioners whose lives were deeply shaped by meditation, inquiry, and inner work. The two groups could not have been more different in their capacity to navigate reality, yet occasionally I would notice something remarkably similar in their eyes.
The resemblance was never strong enough to confuse one for the other. After spending even a few minutes with them, the differences became obvious. Still, the similarity was there, and it raises an interesting question. What exactly are we perceiving when we experience that sense of recognition?
Looking Through a Self
Most of us move through life looking at the world through a highly organized framework of assumptions, memories, preferences, fears, hopes, and interpretations. We rarely notice this because it is the water we swim in. Our attention is constantly evaluating what is happening, deciding what it means, comparing it to past experience, and organizing it around a sense of self that sits at the center of the story. We call this normal because it is familiar.
As a result, we become accustomed to seeing a particular quality in one another’s eyes. There is usually a feeling that someone is managing themselves. Sometimes they are trying to appear intelligent. Sometimes they are trying to appear kind, confident, spiritual, successful, wounded, or misunderstood. Even when we are being genuine, there is often a subtle layer of self-reference operating in the background; the personality is actively participating in the perception of the world and in its presentation.
Occasionally, that familiar quality appears diminished.
The Eyes That Raise the Question
When I have encountered someone in the midst of psychosis, there can be an unusual openness in their gaze; the normal social filters seem less active. The person may look at you with extraordinary intensity or directness, and for a moment, there can be a sense that you are encountering something unmediated. Yet as the interaction unfolds, another quality becomes apparent; their relationship with experience is unstable. Meanings shift rapidly, connections are made that others cannot follow, and attention struggles to remain anchored in what is actually occurring.
The openness is real. What becomes difficult is the person’s ability to organize and relate to what is being perceived.
Years later, while sitting with long-time contemplative practitioners, I occasionally noticed a similar reduction in self-consciousness. The eyes could carry that same sense of directness, as though the usual machinery of self-presentation had quieted. Yet the overall experience was entirely different. Their attention remained connected to the conversation, the environment, and the people around them. They could track what was happening and could respond appropriately. They were not lost in the experience of perception.
What Remains Organized
This distinction strikes me as important because discussions about enlightenment often become abstract very quickly. Words such as awakening, realization, transcendence, and liberation are used so frequently that they can begin to obscure the very thing they are attempting to describe.
What I am pointing to is much simpler.
There appears to be a difference between the loosening of self-reference and the loss of organization or coherence.
A person experiencing psychosis may no longer be orienting from the familiar structures of identity, yet their capacity to maintain a coherent relationship with experience has also been compromised. A contemplative practitioner may also experience a loosening of self-reference, but their capacity to remain present to experience has often become stronger rather than weaker.
From the outside, both situations can create the impression that the ordinary personality has stepped into the background, but from the inside, and in the practical realities of daily life, the consequences are profoundly different.
Perhaps this is why spiritual traditions have repeatedly cautioned against equating unusual states with realization. The fact that the ordinary sense of self becomes less dominant tells us very little by itself. What matters is what happens to awareness when that occurs. Does awareness become more capable of relating to reality, or less capable? Does it become more responsive to what is actually happening, or more absorbed in internally generated experience?
These questions may lack the romance often associated with spiritual discussion, but they have the advantage of being observable.
- Can the person remain in contact with what is happening?
- Can they recognize the difference between perception and interpretation?
- Can they sustain a relationship with the people and circumstances around them?
- Can they function within a shared world?
Those questions do not resolve the mystery, but they do provide a way of investigating it.
What continues to interest me is that both madness and enlightenment seem capable of exposing something most of us rarely notice: they reveal how much of our ordinary experience is organized around a sense of self we typically take for granted. When that organization changes, whether through psychological disturbance or contemplative development, something different appears in the eyes.
The similarity may not be telling us that madness and enlightenment are close cousins; it may simply be revealing that both involve a departure from what most people consider normal. We recognize that departure immediately, even if we cannot explain it. We see it before we can name it.
The question that remains is not whether the eyes look similar. The more interesting question is what, exactly, we are recognizing when they do.