2 Kings 6:17 · World English Bible
Elisha prayed, and said, “Yahweh, please open his eyes, that he may see.” Yahweh opened the young man’s eyes; and he saw: and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire around Elisha.
Praying for open eyes is more practical than praying for fewer enemies, because the enemy was never what set your state. A body reacts to the portion of reality a man is looking at and never to the whole of it.
From the Self-Help reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SELF-HELP
Praying for open eyes is more practical than praying for fewer enemies, because the enemy was never what set your state.
A body reacts to the portion of reality a man is looking at and never to the whole of it. Attention runs like a supply line, feeding whatever it aims at until that thing grows in size and in feeling, while everything left outside the frame gets no vote in what he does next.
What changed on that mountain was the frame and nothing else. The frame sets the state, the state sets the emotion, and the emotion decides whether a servant holds his ground or bolts long before he has consciously chosen either. Anyone who never asks God for the wider frame spends a life making decisions inside a panic that the full picture would have cancelled.
Self-Help lens
Am I asking for fewer enemies, when what I need is a wider view of the same ground?
When the finger points at the moon, the fool studies the finger. Where you aim decides what you get to see, and the rest of the sky is still there.
He practiced stepping back to view his troubles from above, from the size of the whole world and the whole of time. The circumstances did not change, the frame did.
Return to stillness and things take their proper size. Seen whole, the thing that filled the view turns out to be one part of it.
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Self-Help