Eye floaters can range from being a scary sight to seeming almost unimportant. In most cases it is simply annoying when they interfere with your vision while focusing on a particular object. But floaters do not just exist in your eyes, there are many other places where they can occur.
Eye floaters are suspended matter (cells and debris, for instance) that are caught in the vitreous humor (the jelly-like substance in the middle of the eye). There’s nothing to be alarmed about because they’re as common as staining on your teeth. However, they can be annoying. They can block part of your vision and they can shift shape and change size.
Eye floaters are a spiritual sign. They can be interpreted as the divine, or even God, communicating with you and letting you know that they are watching over you.
When we see eye floaters, it’s important to remember that we’re not alone. Even when things feel hard, God is still here for us, and He wants us to trust in Him and know that He’s got our back.
You might also notice that eye floaters appear more frequently in times of stress or anxiety. This is no coincidence—it’s because your body is trying to tell you that something isn’t right! Take the time to listen to your body, and find out what it needs from you.
Spiritual Meaning Of Eye Floaters
Eye floaters can be a frustrating, sometimes disorienting experience. But they are also a sign of spiritual growth.
Floaters are actually tiny clumps of protein that have become detached from the retina and float around in the eye. When you see them, they can appear as dots or cobwebs, depending on their shape and size. They are harmless, but they can be distracting and annoying.
But if you take the time to understand what these floaters mean, you’ll find that they’re actually a sign of spiritual growth and enlightenment. Floaters represent the physical body’s separation from its spirit; when we see them, it means our soul is trying to connect with us again. It’s trying to remind us that our physical bodies aren’t who we really are—that we’re more than just these bodies that house our souls.
When you see floaters in your vision, look at them closely—close enough so that they blur out into a haze of white light. And then let yourself be reminded: You’re more than just this body; there’s something much bigger going on here!
Spiritual Meanings of Floaters:
- Separation from the Physical Body: Floaters represent the physical body’s separation from its spirit. When we see floaters, it is a reminder that we are more than just our physical bodies.
- Connection with the Soul: Seeing floaters can be a sign that our soul is trying to connect with us again. It is a gentle reminder to pay attention to our spiritual well-being.
- Reminder of Divine Presence: Floaters can also signify the presence of divine energy or higher beings trying to communicate with us.
- Symbol of Enlightenment: Floaters can be seen as a symbol of spiritual enlightenment, reminding us to look beyond the material world and focus on our inner growth.
One Bible verse that relates to the concept of connecting with the soul is found in 2 Corinthians 4:18: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” This verse reminds us to focus on the eternal aspects of our being, rather than getting caught up in the temporary distractions of the physical world.
To further illustrate the spiritual meaning of floaters, we can look to the story of Moses and the burning bush in the Bible. When Moses saw the burning bush, he was reminded of the presence of God and was called to a higher purpose. Similarly, when we see floaters, we are being called to reconnect with our spiritual essence and pursue a higher level of consciousness.
| Physical Body | Spiritual Essence |
|---|---|
| Temporary | Eternal |
| Mortal | Divine |
Meditation For Eye Floaters
“Eye floaters” (mouches volantes or muscae volitantes in French and German ophthalmology) is a collective term used in ophthalmology for all possible opacities in the vitreous. Many of them can be traced to physiological disorders like retina detachment, diabetic vitreoretinophaty, as well as Marfan’s, Ehlers-Danlos, and Stickler’s syndromes.
The floaters at issue, though–which are also the most experienced floater type–are considered as “idiopathic,” i.e. without pathological cause. They are seen as mobile and scattered semi-transparent dots and strands in the visual field, best perceived in bright light conditions (fig. 1).
These dots and strands float according to the eye movements, which makes them hard to focus on. The explanations vary between remaining embryonic stem cells, cell debris between the retina and the vitreous, and hyaluronic vitreous fibrills clumped together due to vitreous liquefaction and posterior vitreous detachment (Trick, 2007; Sendrowski/Bronstein, 2010).
Nestor and the Inner Sense
Nestor’s statements about eye floaters differ significantly from the ophthalmologic explanation: for Nestor, we see these spheres and strings not with our eyes but with an “inner sense” or the “third eye.” He characterizes this inner sense as an eye that gradually opens up through the withdrawal of the external senses as experienced in concentration exercises.
Therefore, he explains the initial symptoms of floaters as an indication of the third eye beginning to open. The fact that many people see floaters in our contemporary Western societies means, according to Nestor, that many people already have a connection to their inner sense, even if they don’t work with it consciously.
Any activity that increases the attentiveness of a human being is understood by Nestor as “spiritual” in nature.
With such statements, Nestor ascribes an extraordinary meaning to the visual phenomena called “floaters”: they are a spiritual phenomenon, and thus a directly perceptible starting point for our own spiritual development, for the realization of our “true selves.”
But what made Nestor utter such claims? According to him, these propositions are deduced from his own seeing. It is important to understand that his description of the spheres and strings differs from the one of most others. He doesn’t see scattered small dots and strings that drift away permanently, but large, bright spheres and tubes which he is able to hold in suspension and, therefore, to see clearly.
To be more precise, Nestor pleads to have observed the “lighting up” and “zooming in” of floaters; former transparent tiny dots and strands are now seen as large spheres and tubes full of light.
Floaters and Entoptic Phenomena
In the past 150 years, modern science has provided concepts to understand the physiological aspects of at least some of the extraordinary subjective visual phenomena.
For example, many of the abstract geometric figures in indigenous art or in shamans’ or yogis’ ritually induced visions can be understood as “entoptic phenomena” (Thurston, 1997). Entoptic phenomena are colored or bright moving geometric shapes and patterns in the visual field, caused by certain conditions of the human visual nervous system.
An example is the archaeological controversy about a neuropsychological interpretation of the rock and cave art of the later Paleolithic era (about 40,000 to 10,000 B.C.). Ever since the discovery of the European Paleolithic caves, archaeologists have been wondering about the importance and meaning of such geometric representations, accompanying the vivid depictions of animals.
In 1988, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson brought forward the original thesis that Paleolithic art is inspired by entoptic phenomena (or, more specifically, “form constants”), seen and depicted by shamans or spiritual men and women during altered states of consciousness.
Towards a New Ophthalmological Interpretation of Eye Floaters
Thus, while scholars acknowledge that the visual experience of so-called entoptic phenomena can have a cultural or spiritual relevance to their observers under certain conditions, eye floaters are tacitly excluded from this line of thinking.
In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this. First, eye floaters are an ordinary phenomenon, perceived by a lot of people in everyday consciousness. And second, floaters are explained as idiopathic opacities in the vitreous, i.e. “entophthalmic” rather than “entoptic” phenomena–eye rubbish, so to speak.
Both reasons seem to mock the idea that they could have a positive, spiritual meaning. However, I would like to reconsider these points drawing on Nestor’s and my own visual experience with floaters.
While eye floaters do show up in ordinary consciousness states, they also constantly look different–which is, in my opinion, pointing to the fact that there is no “ordinary,” but a constantly changing consciousness. Anybody taking the time to carefully observe her or his floaters, recognizes that they constantly change size, brightness, and velocity.
A closer inspection reveals that this alteration depends on a number of factors, some of which are outer conditions like the brightness and color of the background against which floaters are viewed. Others may be called “inner” or “psychic” conditions, like attention span, mood, degree of concentration, stress and the like.
It’s not by accident that vision improvement schools propose to influence floaters through relaxation practices–their goal, however, is to get rid of them (Tausin, 2009b).
As I have demonstrated above, Nestor is making the same claim, differing only in the degree of psychophysical abilities like concentration, calmness, “energy metabolism,” et cetera. Thus, it is perfectly conceivable that a human’s perception of floaters could change to the extent explained above, revealing certain features that are experienced as “meaningful” or “spiritual.”
In my opinion, there is no reason to accept today’s ophthalmological explanation, since it fails to explain some of the more subtle floater characteristics that can be revealed through careful observation (Tausin, 2009d).
For example, the morphological regularity of eye floaters. Floater spheres are perfectly circular and concentric and show a core and a surround. Two contrasting types of spheres can be distinguished: one has a bright rim and dark core, and the other has a dark rim and bright core. It is questionable if this morphological regularity really represents hyaluronic fibrills or cells clumped together.
Floaters seem to change size depending on a person’s level of concentration.
They also seem to change size. For simplicity, I distinguish between a “relaxed” (big) state and a “concentrated” (small) state. Generally, it seems as if most eye floaters were, at first, bigger, nearer, and more transparent. With increasing time of observation, however, they change into a concentrated state. After abandoning concentration the spheres and strands change into the state of relaxation again; a quick glance to somewhere else may suffice.
Eye debris, in contrast, is not supposed to change size in that regular manner. Nor is it supposed to light up.
Also, the sinking of the dots and strands is worth considering: Eye floaters react sensitive to eye movements. It seems as if they would always move in the direction in which we look. But as soon as we keep the eyes still and observe the floaters from the angle of vision, we recognize that they sink–sometimes faster, sometimes slower. This sinking may be taken as evidence for the debris nature of floaters, debris floating in the vitreous and sinking due to the force of gravity. However, this argument is disqualified if we recall that the image of the visual world on the retina is inverted–which means that any sinking down of floaters as seen by the observer would require the corresponding particles in the vitreous to ascend.
In this case, too, careful observation reveals that the sinking rather seems to be related to the consciousness state. It tends to slow down in states in which floaters are seen big and shiny.
All of this suggests that the type of floaters at discussion should be reconsidered by ophthalmology or physiology. With the concepts at hand, and based on my subjective experiences and experiments with floaters, I strongly suspect them to be an entoptic rather than entophthalmic phenomenon.
Yet, does this also indicate a “spiritual” nature of floaters? As is the case with entoptics, it depends on the definition of “spirituality.” The case of Nestor demonstrated that floaters, too, can have an extraordinary meaning for human beings.