The Eyes Have It: The Optics of Creation and Consciousness

Episode description

Eyes have always held sway over the human imagination — mesmerized us, scared us, inspired us. The windows to the soul, they’ve been called. They’ve been the subject of song and poetry, folklore and myth. Consciousness, in the Indian texts is repeatedly described in relation to eyes. These glorious visions of eyes and consciousness reach their culmination in the 8th century Netra Tantra, the Tantra of the Eye, which opens with a playful question about the nature of eyes and spirals into something far greater — cosmos and consciousness as one great, macrocosmic eye.

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