I have tried to speak the truth about what must remain a remarkable experience for any human being to undergo. Have I come close to understanding blindness? There is still much I do not know, but the conviction has deepened in me that blindness is a paradoxical world because it is both independent and dependent. It is independent in the sense that it is an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own. Increasingly, I do not think of myself so much as a blind person, which would define me with reference to sighted people and as lacking something, but simply as a whole-body-seer. A blind person is simply someone in whom the specialist function of sight is now devolved upon the whole body, and no longer specialized in a particular organ. Being a WBS is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions. It is a state, like the state of being young, or of being old, of being male or female, it is one of the orders of human being. It is difficult, because of human tribalism and parochialism, for us to make contact across the boundaries of the states. One human order finds it difficult to understand another. The orders arrange themselves in hierarchies of power and prestige, some are on top, others below, some are inside, others are excluded. This book has tried to describe the experience of someone who has crossed over the border, but who wants to retain communion.
Blindness is also dependent. Somewhere along the line, at the end of the road, there is someone with eyes. Like it or not, the blind are weak. Blindness is a little world, authentic and integrated of itself, and yet surrounded by and held within a greater world, the world of the sighted. How shall the little understand the big, without jealousy, and how shall the big understand the little without pity?
Every blind person who creates relationships of mutual respect and intimacy with sighted people will have an individual way of solving this problem. It is obvious to everyone who has read this book that my own way is, in the end, religious. In spite of all its problems, I still believe that there is no better way of speaking about it.
There are many worlds and many states, but God is a trans-world reality.
God is the God of every world, and the Lord of every state.
God is many and yet one, and in God there are many worlds yet one.
God does not abolish darkness; God is the Lord of both light and darkness.
If in God’s light we see light, then in God’s darkness we see darkness.
If a journey into light is a journey into God, then a journey into darkness is a journey into God.
This is why I go on journeying, not through, but into.