See God        (face to face)

     Seeing without saying was easy when you were a child. You simply didn’t know the names, the meanings, or the attributes of things. When you looked at them, you only saw the fact and you saw it in ways that were impractical and naïve. Now that you have learned so much about the world, you must learn to see again as you once did, free of the identifications that are instantly superimposed on what you encounter. It is difficult to break the habit of familiarity, but it is necessary if you are interested in seeing truth.

     I consider our shared ideas about life and the world around us to be the cause of a trance in which everything is experienced as its accepted meanings. In other words, the meanings that we assign to things seem more relevant than the things that they pertain to. When I was a professional artist, I would often devise exercises to help me break this pattern so that I could see what was around me more clearly. In one exercise I would pretend that I was an alien scientist experiencing my first day on earth. I imagined that I knew absolutely nothing about this planet, what all of these things were, and what they were capable of. Another exercise was to pretend I was escorting a blind person on a walk and describing everything I saw in sufficient detail to allow them a rich experience of our surroundings. The idea for this exercise came from another artist whose father actually was blind and insisted on endless details during their walks in nature. He told me it could take several minutes to describe a large oak tree to his father’s satisfaction. It was fascinating how the most mundane observations could yield new experiences once the mask of familiarity was removed, and I was no longer in the trance of cliché identity and meaning.

     Although this was a refreshing antidote to the numbing continuum of familiarity, it was also simply replacing one set of identities and meanings with another. I was truly liberated from this societal trance when I discovered how to stop thinking and end the internal voice. The moment I became silent with acute awareness, I was thrust into a new universe; and when I discovered that I could bring my emotional reverberations to perfect stillness, I transcended into an even more incredible experience. Without the distraction of thought or emotion the universe of endless separate elements coalesced into a dynamic singularity and my sense of self and self-interest vanished. More importantly, I experienced all that I observed as nameless facets of the cosmos; it was seen as if for the very first time, in wide-eyed wonder.

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