Regularly seeking wisdom helps you to see yourself and others more clearly.
“Why do you wear glasses or contacts?”
If you do, that’s an easy question to answer.
Whether you’re nearsighted or farsighted, it’s to see the world around you more clearly.
Seeing better is almost always the reason for wearing corrective lenses. Otherwise, if wearing the lenses is for looks, you can wear the non-corrective variety.
While seeing the exterior world is valuable, there’s an inner world to consider, too.
The inner world is a place we can’t see but can feel. It’s where we think, understand, and learn about ourselves. It’s where our courage comes from, our willpower, and our beliefs. It’s where we weigh the merits of different actions and make our decisions.
It’s a place of thought and emotion.
The inner world affects our body, mind, and spirit. You see it through inner sight, also called introspection.
Smudged lenses
Thinking about the lenses for our eyes, we’ve all experienced how they get dirty and smeared. Sometimes the cause is dust floating around the atmosphere that has settled on the lens, and sometimes it’s from skin oils. Smudges can’t be helped.
Carrying the analogy further, even if you don’t wear prescription lenses, your eyes get dirty with mucus, sand, and whatnot. This affects your ability to see, and it feels good to take a wet washcloth and dab this matter away.
Why wouldn’t the means through which you perceive your inner self get smeared?
Yet you can’t pick up this inner lens and look at it the way you can look at a pair of glasses or contacts.
If you physically can’t do that, you can’t see when they’ve become smeared.
You might hear the term “third eye.” That’s referring to this inner self-perception with the additional idea that you’re perceiving more than that: higher consciousness and inner realms. It’s related to the physical pineal gland, a small pinecone-shape gland behind the nose in the brain.
The idea of the third eye is beyond the scope of what we’re talking about. While it is the same thing in some cases, the inner self is something everyone has and that everyone should be aware of. Forget about the part of the world you can’t see that lies beyond yourself.
Smeared inner lenses that nobody else can see: could that account for some of the crazy stuff people think?
Dreamlens
The lens through which you perceive yourself and your experiences needs to have a name. The lenses are there, if only metaphorically. When you categorize and sort experiences, you do so by looking through a dreamlens. When you’re sleeping, your mind wanders through these memories.
“Self-image” doesn’t quite cover it, though the dreamlens certainly influences one’s self-image. That’s what the dreamlens is looking at, after all. Self-image, your biochemistry, the events of the day, and your sleeping environment all converge to shape your dreams. All of these factors combine to make your dreamlens.
Various spirits can influence our dreams as well, especially if we seek to have lucid or guided dreams.
Dreams, according to some, are trivial, unimportant. These people don’t seem to ask why they dreamed about what they did. Yet there’s a reason; there’s always a reason. It can be helpful to uncover and, when you do, you clean off and polish your dreamlens.
Your dreamlens is the internal lens through which you see yourself.
An “algorithm” for polishing your dreamlens
So much of our world is influenced by algorithms. These decision-making trees allow modern commerce and influence decision-making in healthcare and in other areas.
Your way of helping yourself to see yourself needs polishing and needs regular, if not daily cleaning. If you ignore that, you’re not going to see yourself accurately.
How best to do that? Spiritual reading? Listening to sermons or speeches by wise people? Journaling? Praying? Meditation? Thinking while you exercise? Shooting baskets while contemplating the state of the world? Going for a walk and thinking? A good process for doing this will allow you to express compassion for others and yourself. It will give you insight and perspective on what you do during the day and what you’ve done before.
There are a lot of ways to accomplish this. One of them fits your personality and needs.
For further reading:
Compare yourself to others the right way
Vaccinate yourself against psychosomatic illness
Here’s why you think you’re not dreaming
James Cobb RN, MSN is the founder of the Dream Recovery System.
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