No different than a flower turning towards the light.  So when the mother emits the light from the eye, the eye of the child automatically turns towards it.  That presence, that attentiveness is a natural reflex.  It’s not something that has to be worked at.  It’s a natural reflex. 

The reason I mentioned it is because we’re so connected, through the process you just mentioned about being turned on, the infant with the mother and so on, that connectedness that we know through the eyes is in fact what we call presence.  It’s the foundation of everything, just being the moment.  And then of course on top of that we talk about attention.  We talk about children that don’t have an ability to selectively attend.  How do we know that someone is paying attention to us?  They’re looking at you.  So the aiming mechanism of the eye is in fact what triggers the mechanism of selective attention.  This is why if you close your eyes you all of the sudden become very aware of all the external noises at a much higher volume level.  As soon as the eyes open the external noise dies down and all of the sudden we’re tuned in.  When the eyes aim, which by the way they do by themselves, see we think that we are looking but if you look at an infant, what’s beautiful about it is that when something enters their awareness, when life calls to them if you will, whatever it is that enters their awareness, whatever animates that also animates the child’s eyes to turn without effort towards the source.  No different than a flower turning towards the light.  So when the mother emits the light from the eye, the eye of the child automatically turns towards it.  That presence, that attentiveness is a natural reflex.  It’s not something that has to be worked at.  It’s a natural reflex.  So when you take children for instance and you say oh they have ADD because they won’t pay attention to me in the classroom, but they have no problem paying attention to their favorite t.v. show or to a comic book they like or their Gameboy or a game they’re playing.  They just don’t want to do what I think is important for them to do.  So aiming is a very important mechanism.  The converging of the eyes, turns on the mechanism that allows for selective attention.  And again the effortlessness, the passive aspect, the reflex aspect, I cannot stress that enough because we think it is something we have to do but it’s something that happens without us.  We are drawn to it.  Today we talk about prioritization.   The body has its own prioritization system, something enters our awareness and something within us is drawn automatically to it.  At that moment if we are connected with what is peering through, we are taken down that journey and life takes us wherever.  And if we are at a point in life where we are more connected with all of some different chatter if you will than what is actually going on, we move in a slightly different direction.  Not one being more than the other.  I think we move in different stages depending on different times in our lives because I can remember times in my life where I was very involved in not moving in that direction.   It’s almost like the not moving in that direction was the precursor, the necessary ingredient to have the awareness, the revelation of this river that you spoke about.  So there’s a reflex action.  The eyes aim at something that calls to it.  What calls to it?  The next thing on the agenda of life, the next piece of life that calls.  And then what happens is the moment the aiming occurring is simultaneous to that, the eyes go through what we call focusing which is beyond the optical aspect of focusing, focusing leads to clarity, clarity leads to the revelation oh I see.  So aiming provides the presence and the attentiveness, the focusing which occurs at the same instance of time provides the knowingness, again no effort involved, and then the process of moment to moment presence is the movement of the eyes that we call tracking, and each moment we are taken to the next piece of life that is calling to us.  And then the eyes are doing this together in tandem.  We have a teaming function and because each eye is giving a slightly desperate view we have stereoscopic vision.  Arnold Vizel who as at one time the leading child development expert in the world said that binocular vision or stereopsis was the crown jewel of organic evolution.  It’s an incredibly high function.  It’s like going from black and white television to high definition color.  And not only does it provide stereoscopic vision or three dimensionality, but three dimensionality is very interesting because as I am looking at you I am aware of the lamps and the table and the trees and so on but what is interesting is that the stereoscopic vision, the three dimensional vision allows me to know without thinking about it that you are foreground and everything else is background.  What does that mean?  You’re the priority that life is taking me to at this moment.  Again it relates to that river, taking us and so on.  So vision is a very, very interesting aspect of our lives, the interaction between the eye as being the receptor of light, and we started speaking about light, and all of this dealing with that inner vision of beginning to see that which is invisible if you will.  Beginning to see what is evident and what is not so evident, and then recognizing that the body sees what is evident, but that which is peering through is seeing what is not so evident.  And that’s differentiation that can create a big leap for people.