Splinter

A very famous New Testament passage below:

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter in your brother’s 

Why is this so powerful and maybe so annoyingly true? Why are we so drawn to other people’s mistakes rather than our own, even where a typical inner response or rather inner reflex is even with this quote to think of someone else and say, “Yeah, this is exactly what he’s like”! There’s no mystery as to this so powerful inclination: the pleasures of easy self-righteousness, on the egotistical plane how we are justified or exalted by someone else being beneath us, etc … This is all pretty obvious stuff, but here, and I’ll try to be brief, I’ll try to focus in on how this happens, how this pleasurable mechanism so easily is set in motion, an inclination so strong as to be virtually a biological drive, not just some minor whim, and so receives such strong emphasis from Jesus here.

Well the spiritual and the physical or even simply inner worlds are far from clearly delineated - and so just think about the external world in the visual sense, which is the most obvious way we interact with it, and ourselves. Well, in this natural domain, with obviously the main centre of pull being towards the face, being the face, everyone else can be physically seen by us, and we by them. There is one person excepted though from this visual interaction, and this person is ourselves! We are the one exception. Of course a mirror can be brought into play, but this isn’t really the natural, external life anymore. (This is all besides the point but for one thing, this mirror image is not us externally that we are looking at, so this is something much more odd, artificial and fraught with the possibility of neuroticism.)

So even simply as physical beings, our gaze looks out on the world beyond ourselves, of which we are the exception to the rule in terms of who we see. So simply on the inner sense, it takes some special effort to draw ourselves in, and not dwell “externally”, and be wholly unaware that we are doing so. Then of course  there, there are all the reasons to keep this process seamlessly going, rather than forcibly undertake the ascetic struggle with ourselves, the engine room behind all this wallowing in externality. Of course, this all goes very deep, but just to try to elucidate that one even crude point about the ‘organic’ visual plane and how this relates to our selves, and how we evade our own gaze.