Observations placeholder
Dahl, Roald - The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - The Inner sense of sight
Identifier
001318
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The following is fiction, but I chose the quote because it describes extremely well what the mind is capable of – if they just shut their eyes and try to ‘see’ with the mind and not the eyes. Furthermore Roald Dahl tended to write about what he knew....
A description of the experience
Roald Dahl – The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
It is a very slight ability, just a queer little feeling that when I close my eyes and look at something hard, with fierce concentration, then I can see the outline of the object I am looking at.
'Slowly I am beginning to develop my inner sense of sight.
You ask me what I mean by that. I will explain it to you exactly as the yogi of Hardwar explained it to me. All of us you see, have two senses of sight, just as we have two senses of smell and taste and hearing. There is the outer sense, the highly developed one which we all use, and there is the inner one also. If we could only develop these inner senses of ours, then we could smell without our noses, taste without our tongues, hear without our ears and see without our eyes. Do you not understand? Do you not see that our noses and tongues and ears are only …. how shall I say it?.... are only instruments which assist in conveying the sensation itself to the brain.
And so it is that I am all the time striving to develop my inner senses of sight. Each night now I perform my usual exercises with the candle flame and my brother's face. After that I rest a little while. I drink a cup of coffee. Then I blindfold myself and sit in my chair trying to visualise, trying to see, not just to imagine, but actually to see without my eyes every object in the room.