A FB friend encountered an “evil eye” in a Walmart parking lot. A man stared at her with the “evil look” and created the terror of a sinkhole in her mind.
I want to look at this from a different angle. The Evil Eye. People going to NYC are often warned to not make eye contact with strangers. Sustained eye contact can activate a vortex of terror. It’s ironic, but sustained eye contact can also activate love. Fighters stares at each other as a measure of who is going to win the fight. The Evil Eye is even in nature where butterflies and fish will evolves eyes to ward off potential enemies.

Rather than focus on the fear of continues threat and how to protect yourself from this “imagined” threat, become curious about how the mind is dealing with the Evil Eye. Why does this create such terror? The threat is not out there, but in the way our consciousness works. When another looks at you and you look back, what is going on? You are seeing yourself through the eyes of another, so there is a split in the sense of a whole self. One is suddenly divided, wounded by the Other. Where is my center when my subject I is both in me and in the eye of the other. This creates a vortex like a mike put next to an amplifier. It’s effect don’t stop with the event.

The event you describe is like stepping through a hole in the ice of the known reality (everything normal) and suddenly your ground is pulled from beneath the conscious mind and one is falling, falling into this void where there is no center called ME.

The LOOK is in reality our own Subject looking back at us. Supposed you looked in a mirror and saw, not the usual image, a reflection of you, but someone else looking back at you. This could go into terror or intense love. You experience what Satre described in “Hell is other people.” You was the terrifying Other that is actually our own self. We are not who we think we are.

I  look on this event “from my safe harbor” from an different angle (which may be helpful to you). This is like a psychic sink hole that suddenly opened up in a very normal neighborhood. Disconnect from the form, from the historical circumstance which you describe, the details of the events, and just look into the abyss itself. There is nothing in there. The “look” opened up this abyss of the unknown. We carry this “sink hole” around with us all the time, as if we are walking over it on a thin sheet of opaque ice. At any moment we can fall through, but we are not bothered because we can’t see it. Only when it opens  up do we feel the terror.

When it does open we feel the “wound” of ambiguity—the loss of certainty and our fixed sense of self—and thinking comes rushing as in First Responder to seal the sink hole. But it can’t.

So what you can observer here is how this sink hole of Uncertainty (who was this guy and what did this mean?) cannot be paved over by thought. The sink hole can become a hub to an ongoing monologue of thinking, consuming random thinking like a whirlpool draws in flotsam.

This feeling that you are not safe is not caused by this guy but by the sink hole the look opened up. This sink hold is in all of us. At any moment we can step into one, but thinking keeps our mind properly asphalted. Great wisdom lies in the sink hole, if one dares to stay with it and not try to fill it in with thought.

Notice what thought is trying to do. It goes back and tries to redo the event. And the less successful it is—you can’t redo the past—the more frantic it gets. Go into the eye of the hurricane. It is peaceful there. This is the only way you can stay clear of the circular force of thinking.

There is a “peace that passes understanding” in that sink hole. It’s all about you. This “guy” is just an instrument, just a trigger to reveal this Sink Hole that lies beneath our everyday superficial thinking. Flip the whole drama. Thank this guy for giving  you the opportunity to peer into the heart of your own existence, for there hidden in the darkness is a great light, a great beating heart of life itself.

Go there like a child coming home, like a lover to her beloved. God dwells within us as us, but He hides from us in a sink hole.

I am looking for an the Idea from my Zen Live at  8, and I’ll use this sink hole (not mentioning names of course) as my metaphor for the day. GOD HIDES IN A SINKHOLE.

Yes…the sink hole is a metaphor for what we avoid looking into. Like a land whirlpool is sucks everything into it. We pour food into it believing that food will fill it up and stop the vortex in my heart, this feeling that I need more. The irony is that we fill the sinkhole up by not trying to fill it up. It’s like a grave digger who thinks his shovel is filling in the hold but it is really digging the hole. The more we try to fill the sinkhole, the deeper it gets.

Thought cannot fill the sinkhole. Thought is language, the abstraction of reality. Thought is imaginary dirt. You can’t fill a hole with imaginary dirt. When we stop trying to fill it (which is digging it), we suddenly SEE that the sinkhole is not even there, and never was there. There cannot be a hole in reality. Can you tear air? Can you rip a hole in water?