Cataracts: emotional and spiritual meaning

What cataracts are

A cataract is a clouding of the lens, the clear disc behind the pupil. Sight slowly veils, colours dull, and glare at night gets worse. Left alone, the cloud can go as far as severe loss of vision. Ageing is the usual reason. Injury, some medicines, and diabetes are others. Surgery takes the cloudy lens out and puts a clear one in. It is one of the most reliable operations in medicine. A younger person with cataracts needs a proper search for the cause. The cloud is protein in the lens. It is not a veil you chose in order to be safe.

The emotional meaning of cataracts

The spiritual interpretation places the cloud at a time when you no longer want to see, inwardly, what is happening in front of you, what is coming, or what might change the decisions you would have to take. The sentences are "I cannot believe my eyes" and "I so want things to stay as they are." The future is seen through a dark, veiled eye, without joy. Energy, in this language, is said to have left the eye. Take that as a picture of interest withdrawn from what is ahead. The lens still clouds for physical reasons.

One attitude named here is seeing life only in your own way, with other people's reality left out, sometimes with a sense of being above them. Events and people are refused in their transparency. The cataract is felt as a withdrawal from the present and from the surrounding world. The world looks like a threat. You feel isolated. You need other people, and you are afraid of how they would react if you felt anything in front of them. Veiling their faces puts a distance in place, and the distance feels like protection.

The lens stops light reaching the retina. The sun is taken, in this reading, as an image of the father, and the question is whether you fear him, or fear the gaze of a judging God. That is a question about a gaze you grew up under. It is not why the protein changed. Cataracts usually come late, when the fear of ageing and of becoming helpless has arrived. Doors seem to be closing. The wish not to see a future image of yourself, in case you dislike it, is acknowledged. So is the wish to slow an event that feels inevitable. Children may be felt as ungrateful. That feeling can be looked at. It is not a fact about them, and it did not cloud the lens.

Rigidity stops you seeing the other side. Unable to watch today clearly, you are pushed back onto a past you call the good old days and do not want to leave. The mind is less supple. Recent events are forgotten. Imagination has a harder time picturing a future. the spiritual interpretation's invitation, especially if the cataracts have come early, is to look inward and to let life bring what is needed, practically and inwardly. Surgery remains how the light gets back to the retina.

A gentler way to hold it

• Name one future scene you have been refusing to look at. Look at it for a minute.
• Ask whose gaze you are still hiding from.
• Book the eye examination. A clear lens and a clearer look at your life can both be wanted.