Seeing
by Dr. Frederick Lenz, RamaInsight
“Seeing is the ability to tell what really is. There are many different forms of seeing. Some forms of seeing involve apprehending that which is occurring in the world. Other forms of seeing are more esoteric, and they involve the perception of perception itself. Without seeing, it’s very difficult to practice self-discovery. You’re quite blind. Most people, of course, think of seeing as the thing that we do with our eyesight.”
“We’re using the word “seeing” not in that sense at all, but as a metaphor, almost a mixed metaphor, for knowing. Perhaps “knowing” is a better word. It’s a little bit of both.”
Considerations
“The first step then that you really need to take is to see beyond the description, or, if you prefer, maybe a more Buddhist approach is to see the limitations of a particular description that you may have. If you find, for example, that the description of existence that you have, the way you see life now, engenders pain and suffering and if you don’t like pain and suffering but it is definitely in the description that you now have, there’s no way around it, then that could motivate you to go beyond the description that you have. Or you might take, I suppose, a positive approach. The positive approach would be to feel that one could experience more light, more love, freedom, abandonment, awareness. Not simply in an intellectual sense — that I’m going to have more ideas, I’m going to read a book and learn something new — but that I am going to become something other than human. Much more, let’s say. Much, much more…”
These are direct quotes from the talk Seeing by Rama Dr. Frederick Lenz.
All quotes are reprinted or included here with permission from The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism