The Spiritual Gaze

The superpower hidden within observation

How do you see the world?

Through the lens of good and bad? Through the horrors you've heard about or witnessed? Most people never stop to ask this question, and that is precisely the problem. Unless you are aware, the way you look at something is not neutral. Your gaze is generative. It doesn't just observe, it participates in creation.

This is the spiritual gaze, and it may be the most underestimated superpower available to you.

The Witness

There's a way I sometimes describe existence to people: imagine your life has already been scripted, and it's playing out on a movie screen. And you are the only person in the theater audience, laughing, crying, shouting at the screen as your life is shown visually. The drama feels utterly real. The pain shared. And you find yourself filled with the desire to change some of the circumstances you are watching.

The truth found within this example is that yes, you are the one watching right now. In this moment, you are the observer to your life. The question isn't whether you can be the witness to your own existence. You can. The question is whether you're willing to remember that you are.

The majority of those walking the earth haven't reached the level of awareness which provides access to this view. They remain as or slip from observer into participant, from the one who watches into the one who reacts. And the moment this occurs, you hand your power over to whatever is on the movie screen.

The Moment You Recognize It

You've felt this already. You probably just didn't have the awareness for it. The tightening in your chest when you hear what is on the news. The stomach drop when a certain name appears on your phone. The way a single sentence from someone can flatten an entire afternoon. 

That is your gaze in motion. 

Unconscious, automatic, creating your experience before you've had a single conscious thought about it. Reaction. The mechanism is off and running. It has always been running. The only question is whether you have made the choice to see it now.

The Power of the Gaze

The bad circumstance you heard about online, at work, or in conversation didn't create your anxiety. You did. That statement may be troubling to hear. You might instinctually push back on that statement. Your intellect will jump in to say that "X" event was real, the pain was real, the world is genuinely difficult. And all of that is true.

This isn't a claim that circumstances don't exist. It's about who holds the power to shape what they mean, and what they become. The discomfort of accepting that fact is part of your reason for being here. It is part of your progression, your awakening.

The way you looked at something, the meaning you assigned, the definition you applied, that is what shaped your experience of it. This is the power of the gaze.

Your gaze within any circumstance can determine whether you are living as a human being or as the awakened infinite self. Whether you are clinging and attached, or free.

The spiritual gaze understands something the intellect cannot: that how it sees, creates.

The intellect, operating from incomplete understanding, shaped by fear, belief, conditioning, is for the most part, always the default lens. We've looked through it so often that we look through it without realizing we're looking through anything at all.

Reflect on that for a moment. If your gaze has been creating your experience without your awareness, then what has been built? What fear-shaped structures have you been living inside, believing they were just reality?

This is not about judging the way you've been walking through life. It is about the incredible possibility that opens the moment you realize that your gaze has been helping to create the reality that you are experiencing.

Two Portals: A Vision from the Other Side

During the second half of my near-death experience, I was shown something that may help you.

While standing in what I call "the void", I found myself watching a rainbow arc of glowing gold symbols and letters moving in a continuous stream toward two openings, two portals, in front of me. The symbols represented the constant flow of inputs we receive every day. Information, events, words, news, experiences. The fire hose is always on, and it's always pointed directly at you.

What I was shown is that with focused attention and intention, I could direct that stream into either portal. One represented awakened understanding. The other represented the incomplete intellectual mind, the default human filter. The inputs themselves arrived neutrally. They carried no inherent meaning. But depending on which opening they fell into, their meaning and their effect on reality, was entirely different.

If I let intention and attention rest, the symbols fell randomly. Meaning was still assigned, but without any awareness. Without any choice.

This is how most people live. Not because they lack the capacity to choose, but because they've forgotten that the choosing is theirs to do.

The observer has always been the one with the power. The movie doesn't change in that moment. But everything about your relationship to it does. You move from reactive participant blind to creation, to awareness in the realized self. And that changes what comes next in the movie.

The Opposition

If the spiritual gaze is this accessible, this available, this powerful, why isn't everyone using it? Why is it so hard to hold onto?

Because there is an opposition. And it is working against you on two fronts simultaneously.

The first is external. The world you live in is not neutral. It is designed, deliberately and precisely, for reaction. Every news cycle, every social media platform, every advertisement is engineered to hijack your gaze before you've had a moment to choose what to do with it. Speed, volume, and outrage are not side effects of modern life. They are features. They keep the fire hose pointed directly at you, and they ensure you never get a hand on it. The system profits from your unconscious participation. A sleeping audience is a captive one. And it has no interest in you waking up.

The second opposition is closer. It lives inside you. The ego has a profound investment in keeping you identified as the reactive participant. It has built its entire existence around the lens you look through, the definitions you carry, the fears you feed. The moment you step back into the witness, the moment awareness begins to take hold, the ego loses its grip. So it generates noise. Doubt. Distraction. Urgency. The sudden overwhelming need to check your phone, to solve a problem, to react to something, anything, that pulls you back out of presence and into the stream before you've had a chance to choose your portal.

This is why it's hard. Not because you're failing. Not because you're not ready or not enough. But because the opposition, both outside and within, is relentless. It doesn't rest. And until now, neither did you.

The spiritual gaze can be an act of awareness. Every time you pause before the label arrives, every time you notice the automatic reach for reaction and choose differently, you are pushing back against forces that have been running unchallenged your entire life. That is everything.

The On Switch

The spiritual gaze has an on switch, and it is made of two things: intention and attention.

Intention is the orientation of your seeing, what you're looking with, not just what you're looking at. Are you seeing through fear? Then you will look for the threat, try to turn away, try to control. Are you seeing through love? Then even a difficult moment can be recognized as an invitation to choose something beyond your conditioning.

Attention is the discipline of staying present enough to notice which portal you're directing experience into. Mindfulness, focus, presence. The mechanics of the gaze.

This is the thing most people miss -  you want to change what you see in the world without realizing that it is your own gaze which has given it permission to exist in that form in the first place.

How to Begin

See without definition. This is harder than it sounds, because the mind is a definition-making and supporting machine. It categorizes, judges, labels, and files everything almost instantly. Good. Bad. Safe. Threatening. 

The spiritual gaze asks you to pause, even briefly, before you decide what something means.

Notice the input arriving. Notice the automatic reach for a label. And in that moment of noticing, choose. Choose which portal you direct it into. Choose what lens you pick up. Choose whether you are looking through fear or through something larger than fear.

Can you experience something without immediately deciding what it is?

Can you let the input arrive and consciously choose which portal to direct it into?

Can you remember, in the middle of the movie, that you are the one in the audience?

The spiritual gaze is an active one. It requires you to show up as the one behind the eyes, not just the eyes themselves.

The gaze is already yours. It has always been yours. The only thing that changes everything is the moment you decide to use it with purpose.

Angelic being from an experience on 10-10-24

What do you see?