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See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

W.H. Auden

If you’ve delved far into the Deeper Understanding section of this site, you’ll be aware, by now, of how we see the world in symbols, and are no longer able to see ‘reality’. The implication is that we look around us and don’t see the real world at all – just our symbolic ideas of the world. It’s as if we look at each ‘object’, and instead of seeing the object, we see only our idea of it!

This can be difficult to accept. We look around us and see what we see, right?

This article takes a closer look at what it means to see things symbolically.

Can You Read This?

Take a look at this sentence. The real, honest truth is that you are looking at black markings on a white page or screen. But can you look at any of the sentences here and see only black markings on a white page?

Probably not. Your eyes will immediately, without your permission, resolve the markings into letters and words, especially if you are good at reading and writing the English language. Glance at any word, and you’ll find that your mind does it immediately, without effort – it resolves the markings into words. You can’t help it. Any place you look in the above paragraphs, you will find the same thing happening, against your will. There are no longer black markings on a white page, but letters, words, and sentences. Meanings.

We seem unable to see what is really there, and can only see the symbolic meaning we place over the markings.

Of course, it’s a wonderful thing that we can read – that we can resolve the markings into letters and words. But it is significant that we seem to have lost the ability to see the markings as they are, and are unwillingly forced into seeing the symbolic overlay.

Let’s try an experiment–

ע ט Ҹ ج ש פ ئ ث ‡ ₣  ﻼ ﻚ ﺶ ﷲ ﭺ

Now, unless you are versed in more symbols than I counted on, all or most of the above line should look like black marks on a white page. If you recognize one or two, then those will resolve into meaningful symbols (again, quite against your will), while the rest remain black symbols on a white page.

But they all mean something to someone. Right now you have the ability to see them as they are, but if you learned their meanings, and became familiar with those meanings, you’d lose the ability.

Now look around you, wherever you are. Every ‘thing’ you see is the same as these letters on the page. When you were very young, you could see everything around you ‘as it is’, but as you learned names and meanings for each object, you lost the ability. And now you look at something, and quite against your will, your mind imposes the symbol. Just as it does with letters and words.

Part of non-dualism is beginning to cultivate the ability to see things ‘as they are’.

Let’s try another experiment. Choose a word to look at. Let’s use the word ‘a’ in the previous sentence. Stare at it for a while. Maybe thirty seconds, or a minute. Then read on.

If you’ve stared long enough, something quite peculiar should have happened. The word ‘a’ (or the letter ‘a’, if you prefer), began to look quite odd. It’s actually a strangely shaped little thing, and it might have begun to take on an unfamiliar appearance. In fact, after you looked for a while, you should have been able to observe it in the way you observed any of the unfamiliar symbols above. As just a weird little black mark on a white page.

We can do this with a single letter, and we can do it with words and even with the world around us – the non-dualistic mind-set sees the world simultaneously ‘as it is’, and yet retains the ability to recognize the symbolic meaning we’ve placed over things.

This means that we can simultaneously see the world we’ve created out of symbols, but not be confused by a false belief that the symbols are real – because we see them as symbols. A little observing will confirm that everything you see around you right now is seen as a symbol. We imagine that we’re looking at a pine tree, but we’re only seeing a symbol. We imagine that we’re looking at our husband or wife, but we only see a symbol. And we imagine that we know ourselves, but all we know is a symbol. And because symbols are static, the living, vibrant things we’re laying our symbols over will never match up with our symbolic representations of them, creating no end of suffering as we get angry at the world for not meeting our expectations. Or we feel stressed because we are playing an imaginary game where the outer ’symbol-world’ is trying to negatively affect the inner ’symbol-us’.

Seeing through the symbols of the world seems like a lot of work. It wasn’t necessarily easy, after all, to see the ‘a’ as a black mark.

But was it really that difficult? All we had to do was look – softly observe. Perceive, uninterrupted, for a little while.

All of the symbols we’ve placed on the world around us dissolve in the same way – by the application of observation. All we need is awareness. Of course, we’ve placed so many symbols over human beings (our father, let’s say), that it takes a lot more observation to begin to see him un-symbolically, but once again, the only thing that is needed is observation.

Then again, our observation usually isn’t observation at all, but is actually habitual placement of symbols over everything we see. Hence the practice, in many non-dualistically aimed paths, of using different methods to quiet the thinking mind, to cultivate the ability to look around us and see things as they are.

At first we can only do it for a little while, but before long we come to see the world more and more ‘as it is’.

And that is the beginning of living in the ‘real world’, and ceasing to be duped into believing that our imaginary symbol-world is real.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Awakening and Reality. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.