This Life's Riches
When the eyes are open, all of Creation is reduced to surfaces… imagine the poverty in a world of surfaces. As though all that an ocean offered us was its waves! As soon as the eyes open, the interiors begin to close, the interiors of everything that sight obscures from us, the interior of our selves as well.
Eyesight is the sense of abstractions and of interpretation; we interact with the world at a distance, when our other and more proximate senses cannot give us their information. To close the eyes, one is taught, is to live in darkness; but to close the eyes with awareness, to be listening with your being, invites light – so much more than one can imagine.
It takes practice. What I mean by practice, is that it takes repetition, and possibly a guide, to walk a path which seems obscure, long enough to begin to notice the moonlight and starlight that reflect the way. But it is worth the journey, it’s worth the travel sooner or later, so that you don’t spend your entire life believing that the cars and the lovers and the foods and the games are what it is to be alive. It’s well worth the little bit of effort required to climb a hill, to see above the trees to other places.
To live only within what the eyes see is like watching a travel program on the television. While to live beyond the surfaces to what lies within everything… that is travel itself.