Looking & Seeing
It is much better to believe in no God—because to do this opens up a new kind of beauty in the world before you. It is not beauty from the heart, nor beauty from the head; it is beauty from the eyes. There is no emotion of the heart in it, and no thinking of the head—you only rest your body on your bones, let your consciousness slide down low in your head, and look.
There is the thing we call the blue sky above over there—it’s just blue. There is a white mark of sorts high up thereon—a piece we call the white half moon, the day moon. There is the tree sticking its many pieces we call twigs into the place before the sky, next there to the moon—they are twigs of ash and grey and clear, small ends.
But when we look we do not see—we don’t mean to see—if seeing is what is done by putting our consciousness to looking. We don’t want to translate things into thoughts, or pieces into relationships and concepts. We don’t want to see with knowledge, which, necessarily, seeing with the mind and seeing with the heart is. We want to see with our own eyes, and only our eyes. There is a beauty in this. It is out there in what we see.
We do not have to acknowledge it, or note it, or try to finger it figuratively: this does no good. It is different from seeing the sky as an etheral thing, a transcending sign of God or Creator; this is seeing the Creator in what you look at, imposing your will on what is before you. It is different, but not so much, from the sky as pre-industrial men may have seen it—if one gets anything at all from those early landscapes: the stark path and trees, the dark, dull colors—they seemed to have had a sense of how a thing was just looked at. But then there must have been the security and surety of the Church and of Christ on the Cross as a driving, directing force half behind the sky and half forward in the dark mass of clouds.
So it is different than that, with the pervading sense of knowledge that one sensed from Jesus and the Church. But even so, this was not the determinate intellectual and factual knowledge bombarding us today, that closes our eyes from mere looking, and jams us open to the seeing and searching of our thinking minds. Today, we are so jammed with this we cannot think to stop; we cannot even begin, because we don’t see just what it is we are to begin, we don’t see how to do it; and when we try, we turn it simply into a looking with the eyes that is preconceived by certain philosophies or feelings we have, and tainted like the rose glass, or we make it a looking that we later articulate and define in a very subverting way, in order to fit the plans and schemes our heads have endeared.
