Blindness is not beautiful – it is not beautiful not to see the beauty of the world, and yet at other times sightlessness is good, when you are blind to the faults and frailties of others, to shadow or to lack. But when is one blind to beauty? When does he fail to notice the beautiful order of the universe? For the beautiful is good, the good is true, and the true is beautiful as well. The beauty of the universe chases itself, and only the fool stays out of this game of tag, the thinking man joins in, and the playful man perhaps even catches beauty…
And yet, when is one blind to beauty? When something hides this ultimate, universal dimension from him. The world is true, good and beautiful, but if we know only the projection of true reality, only the shadow of right judgement and only the phantom of beauty, then in truth we are blind to primordial beauty. Man has eyes, it is true, but not for seeing – for false seeing. If there is a chance of error, it will most likely come to pass. In the world of the deceivers and the deceived, man takes one side or the other, and becomes either a practitioner of deceit or its victim. False seeing is illusion – not in the sense that it is unreal, but in that it does not let man see reality. It is like drawing a veil… Let us draw a veil over the matter – we say, when we deliberately wish to consign something to the mists of oblivion. This veil drawn over reality masks, covers, confuses. It is not the breath-thin veil that hides beauty and yet hints at it, but the coarse blanket of false seeing. A plaything of illusion, man cannot open his eyes to the beauty of the universe, cannot discover the loveliness that lies hidden everywhere. Thus illusion's second effect, distraction, comes about as well, for in place of universal beauty it is the ugly that moves into focus.
Beauty-blindness, incidentally, is blindness or faulty sight in domestic animals, brought on by disease of the optic nerve or the retina. The name comes from the fact that to the naked eye no abnormal sign other than a dilated pupil can be seen in the animal's eye, whereas examination with the ophthalmoscope reveals various changes in the retina or the optic disc. It may arise from poisoning – which is mostly curable – or, for instance, from injury to the optic nerve – which is almost always incurable, especially when of long standing.
In humans, beauty-blindness takes the form of a dislocated taste, in which the eye opens only to the sight of the ugly and cannot perceive the beautiful. A wounded spiritual optic nerve stands in the way of seeing beauty. Whoever suffers from this grave disease is suspicious even where he could feel safe, and cannot perceive even the most striking beauty, or else sees the beautiful as ugly.
When material ignorance poisons man's intellect, and he therefore loses his spiritual-mystical clarity of sight, this is hard to cure, but the opening of the third eye helps in discovering beauty. The third eye is different from the worldly eye. Where the worldly eye sees only lack and wrongness, the third eye can discover the beautiful and the good even there.
Shiva is usually depicted with three eyes, the third gracing his forehead, set vertically. This strange placing of the eye is no mistake; it signals that what the horizontally set eye sees, examined from a different point of view, gives us another picture. Shiva is, besides, the embodiment of the enlightened state of consciousness, and his third eye is that intuitive faculty which is man's own as well, though, it is true, hidden and vestigial.
Beauty-blindness is also an indicator: a sign of material disease, a symptom of illusion. To this extent it is even useful: its presence confirms the disease, and at the same time makes one a fit candidate for healing.