Isaiah 42:7 Meaning To Open the Blind Eyes

The blindness spoken of is not in the eyes. It is the trance of thought, the mind so busy interpreting the world that it never actually sees it. To have your eyes opened is to become present, to look at what is in front of you without the veil of judgment and memory, so that reality appears fresh and alive again.

And the prison is the same trance from the inside. You sit in the dark of your own thinking, walled in by a story of who you are and what has happened to you, believing those walls are real. Nothing forces you to stay. The moment awareness turns and sees the story as merely a story, the door stands open, and you walk out into the light of the present moment, which was there all along.

Most cages are built from the inside. A person sits in the dark because he has stopped looking, gone blind to the door standing open behind him, and called his paralysis fate. The deepest imprisonment is the one a man no longer notices, because he has mistaken the walls for the whole world.

To open eyes is the first act of any real rescue. Sight comes before escape. Someone has to name the dark as dark before the prisoner will stand and walk toward the light. Freedom begins the moment a person admits he has been sitting in a room he was always able to leave.

Blindness has nothing to do with the eyes. It is the conditioning layered over a man since childhood, so that he looks at a tree and sees the word tree, looks at a face and sees his opinion of it, and never once meets what stands in front of him.

The dungeon is his own construction too, built of the past he keeps carrying and the future he keeps rehearsing. Nobody arrives to break the lock, because there is no lock. Opening happens when a man sits quietly and watches the walls being manufactured, and watching, stops adding a single brick.