A spiritual master once gave a hen to each of his two students and said, ‘Take them to a spot where you can kill them without anyone seeing you.’ The first disciple walked out and hiding behind a bush, he looked around and made sure that no one was watching. He then killed the hen and brought it right back to the master. The second disciple didn’t return until sunset. He was tired and weary, and in his arms he carried the hen, which was still alive. With head hung low he handed the hen to his master.
‘Revered master,’ he said, “Though I tried and tried, I could not find a single place where no one would see me; for wherever I went, The hen was always looking at me.’
Likewise, we too are always under the watchful eyes of our God. It would be a sad life if our thoughts and behavior were such that we were always worried about being seen or always under scrutinizing or criticizing eyes. We are only free when we have a clear conscience and our thoughts are busy with life, the positive things in life.
The main villain in the Lord of the Rings series is called Sauron. Sauron has a gigantic tower, at the top he has an ‘all–seeing eye.’ The Eye of Sauron was a symbol adopted by the Dark Lord during the Second Age and the Third Age. It was said that few could endure the eye’s terrible gaze. The Eye was used on armor and banners of Mordor as a symbol of Sauron’s quasi-omnipotence, and was adopted as something of an insignia by Sauron’s forces in general.
In a more positive thought, the Eye of Providence (or the all-seeing eye of God) is a symbol on the one dollar bill showing an eye often surrounded by rays of light or glory and usually enclosed by a triangle. It supposedly represents the eye of God watching over humankind (or divine providence). There is also such an eye placed on the wall of the Holy temple in Salt Lake City.
I like the idea of the eye representing God eye watching over humankind rather than a fiction character such as Sauron representing evil.
There are many things that cause our eyes to dilate or to open, the sun isn’t the only thing orchestrating when the pupils open and shut. Humans’ have an inborn fight or flight response, triggered by the parasympathetic nervous system—that’s one of the jobs of the autonomic nervous system. When fear strikes, as Charles Darwin first proposed in the 1870s, the pupils expand to heightened attention and focus. About a century later, scientists discovered that pupils also moderate as we experience emotions. Ever wonder about the meaning behind the phrase “the look of love”? When you’re gazing into your lover’s eyes, The connection between eyes and love is well-documented in poems, songs and prose since time immemorial, the stuff of whimsical fairy tales and heroic legends.
But while beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, evidence increasingly suggests our brains are hardwired to be affected by visual clues when it comes to a potential love interest.
Eyes can give us clues about how we are perceived by others when we first meet them and may change as we are better known.
Obviously people try to avoid the eyes of others when they have inappropriate thoughts and inappropriate behavior. Like the student who could not complete his assignment because wherever he went, the hen was looking at him. Should we all carry a hen around with us?