We Make Reality Inaccessible

Excerpt from The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating your artistic life by John Daido Loori:

"Whole body and mind seeing," as Master Dogen refers to it, is the total merging of subject and object, of seer and seen, of self and other. This is, essentially, the experience of enlightenment. In "seeing with the whole body and mind" one goes blind. In "hearing with the whole body and mind" one goes deaf. And there is no way to describe this state of consciousness.

...All creatures experience the universe through the senses. And at every moment, a different universe is being created by each being. A spider, for example, feels the universe through its legs, which touch the key strands of its web. It knows when it's raining, or when food is available. It doesn't think to itself, "That's not a fly on the web. That's rain." Yet it knows. The spider doesn't deliberate about what kind of fly it would like to eat or criticize the rain for trying to deceive it. A spider just does what it does, effortlessly and spontaneously.

For most of us, however, our habitual way of perceiving is not so simple. Our universe is filled with internal dialogue, analysis, evaluation, classification. We choose knowing over direct experience. Yet, in knowing, we kill reality, or, at least, we make it inaccessible. We live and create out of our ideas, out of the apparent comfort of certainty that they offer.