seeing and letting go

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.
When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied... But I can't
go out and try to see this way. I'll fail, I'll go mad. All I can do
is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless
interior babble…The effort is really a discipline requiring a
lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints
and monks of every order East and West…

The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally

 that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow 

of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, 

and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort 

that might lead to madness. 

Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded

 in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights;

 you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence

 without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real

 where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.





~ Annie Dillard 

from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
art by Van Gogh