A simple blind spot demonstration reveals the scotoma, a patch of pristine sightlessness where the optic nerve joins the retina, at the very center of our field of vision.

Most people will walk away from the demonstration excited to have discovered that the object occulted by blindness was actually there all along, hidden, now revealed. The revelation is the image.

Some will be astonished at the ground of revelation: the nothingness from which a concealed image could be revealed, ex nihilo. Precisely because nothing was present, nothing was missing.

It is out of this same nothingness that moral shocks issue.

It is like this: I am absolutely right, and my wrongness is inconceivable. Then a word or gesture or expression strikes me, and a judgment is issued, directly from the scotoma at the heart of my soul — precisely where my one finite self conjoins with infinite One. My guilt, my repentance and my spontaneous urgency to atone conceive themselves ex nihilo.

And now comes an ontological aftershock: A new world is given: a world where nothingness is the furthest thing from dead absence, but living, omnipresent more-than-everything, vibrant with anticipation of inconceivable surprise from an inexhaustible source.

Astonished at this nothingness — this nihiltude from which more revelations can irrupt any moment ex nihilo — we are unable to take nothingness as dead absence, but rather as nihilitude, eternally pregnant with unborn possibility.

This can happen to anyone at any moment.

The scotoma at the heart of sight is the navel of perception, and the optic nerve is the umbilical cord. This a navel worthy of eternal gazing.

(To say it in Kabbalah: where Chokhmah penetrates Binah is an unseen infinitude, which can, nonetheless be seen, and this seen unseeing is called Chesed.)

I will be letterpress printing scotoma revelation cards very soon.