Who is looking out from our eyes at the world? Our true spiritual self looks out and sees itself, or what you may say is Love, everywhere. The ego or temporary self that seeks to protect itself from a dangerous world looks out and sees separate beings. This sense of separation and the fear that comes with it is at the core of the violence and misery perpetrated upon animals, the earth, and people. When one looks at animals in zoos, laboratories, farms, etc. there is a cultural encouragement to gaze at them from a platform of arrogance as if their very confinement proves their inferiority and our right to possess, use and abuse them.

G.A. Bradshaw writes "The presumption of visual possession is the first step toward legitimizing physical possession." In her book Elephants on the Edge she quotes Andre Malraux in his discussion of colonial cultures' tendency to objectify others. It is "a mode of thinking.wherein the world is radically transformed into an object of possession.The gaze is never innocent or pure, .always in some sense colonizing the landscape, mastering and proportionalizing, fixing zones and poles, arranging and deepening the scene as the object of desire."

So while we teach about kindness, nonviolence, and respect for all life, let us also teach ourselves and others, at an even deeper level, how to truly see, not with human eyes that objectify and dominate, but rather with the loving gaze of our true nature. This is a gaze that gives and does not take, a gaze that, when enough people on earth adopt it, can unite all living beings.

Thank you for reading this with your eyes of Love and for being a beacon of hope for all life.