"In a key discussion of the black of the pupil of the eye, in which he cites Plato's Alcibiades, Al-Ghazzali, Meister Eckhart and the Zen priest Taigen Sofu, Viola argues for the pupil as the first and ideal mirror, one in which not only a reflection of the self may be found, but also the act of ‘seeing seeing’, and in the blackness of the pupil, the void upon which perception, in mystical systems of belief, is founded."