Tiresias and the Paradox of Visionary Blindness

This episode of Living Myth is about blindness, both individual and collective, and about the need for genuine visions and visionaries. Western culture, enthralled with the heroic and trapped in the limits of egotism, continues to turn a blind eye to the deeper sense of self and soul that alone can give a renewed sense of vision that can see beyond modern ideas that have come to threaten the future of the Earth.

As long as we see through the lens of the heroic ego, we are likely to remain stuck in the territory of the same old willfulness and predictable blindness that cannot see ways to arrive at a deeper ground of understanding or a greater way to envision the living world. As the philosopher and humanist Erasmus said: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." As the naturalist and poet Thoreau once stated: "I would give all the wealth of the world and all the deeds of all the heroes for one genuine vision."

Genuine change requires that we open our inner eyes and see from a deeper place. For, the new shape of the world only comes into view and becomes conscious to us when a vision arises from the darkness around us and from the unseen depths of our own unconscious. It is this kind of transformative vision that breaks through the blindness that both binds and polarizes us.

Something ancient and knowing is trying to catch up to us. And if our souls can stand deeply enough in the river of time, we can receive lost truths and wisdom from the deep well of memory as well as visions of the mostly unseen future. This combination of imaginative vision and deep memory has been the ongoing source of vitality and renewal that visionaries, seers and wounded healers throughout time have drawn upon to give us our true bearings even when the world itself seems to have lost its way.

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