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.
"Light has the ability to reveal the many layers, the myriad faces contained in each form. Most often, we tend to see just the surface of a subject. We name it, identify it, and forget about it. And we stop seeing. Yet when the light changes, the subject changes, and what the subject has to show us changes. Unless we are ready to be patient and sit with our subjects, allowing the light to transform them, we see little more than their superficial aspects, and our lives reflect that shallowness. If we are patient, letting go of thoughts, and letting the mind settle down, then the hidden faces rise to the surface, and subtlety and richness return. A shift takes place, resonance appears. This allows for real intimacy with the subject."
