The Greater Miracle

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each others eyes for an instant?” - Henry David Thoreau

It’s a difficult moment, that time when you realize that you completely misread another’s words or actions. We’re taken aback, uncertain of our next move and somehow unwilling to admit to the world that our senses betrayed us.

Oh, to be able to cross that gap that separates man from man and woman from woman. Oh, to know what you are thinking and what you expect of me. Oh, to be able to have walked down your streets, lived with your clans, and drank and supped and felt as you have felt. Oh, to have done those things. What a wondrous gift that would be, and what a mystery that consciousness, that gift of human kind, is so boxed in and confounded. Is it some kind of test that God instilled in our being, or is it something we must work to correct? Can we in any way train ourselves to be able to see through another's eyes?

The only solution to our self-only knowledge is to go to those lands we have never mentally considered before. We can read Thoreau, or the Bible, or Joseph Campbell or Rumi, or the Sufi Prophets and gain new dimension to our thoughts. We can flesh out one idea with another and another and another – a fountain of different thoughts flowing out from a central theme. We will never understand all that the Other believes and carries in that wondrous mind of theirs, but we can begin to see the breadth of all thought, and through the process, our ethical, moral, and social senses will expand and grow.

“It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensive, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.” - Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim