Your eye is caught by the flashing fireflies floating at the edge of a forest, and you stand there, gazing at the sight with no thought of anything else. You have no idea how long it is before you move to go back inside, because you’ve lost track of everything else. You have been dazzled.
To be dazzled is to be stunned by the impact a glittering display. The emotional experience of being dazzled is so powerful that it overcomes our humanity with raw animal sensation. When we are dazzled, we become like deer frozen in the middle of the road by the approaching headlights of an oncoming car. It’s as if our consciousness disappears, replaced by the perceptual overload before our eyes.
It doesn’t have to be a literal shining light that dazzles us, of course. We can feel dazzled by a beautiful object, by a well-crafted argument, or a seductive idea.
When we are dazzled, we let go of the illusion that we are the rational masters of our conscious minds. We are transfixed, and relinquish control to be washed in pure subjective feeling.
It feels like magic, but it’s not supernatural at all. In a daze, we become reacquainted with the nature within us that always exists, regardless of what we think about it.
