Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

The camera obscura.

Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.

Blind people are just like seeing people in the dark. The loss of sight does not impair the qualities of mind and heart.

We don’t see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind. We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs set us up for suffering.

Here is my secret. It's quite simple:
One sees clearly only with the heart.
Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything — anything — to defend ourselves against that return.

The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark.

I don’t even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it’s an equal darkness. Or light.

There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?

Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see