There Are Ghosts In Your Eyeballs

People comment on stuff like this all the time, and there are about bounty hoobajoobillion stories and parables and sayings about it, so at first I hesitated to blog about it.  But then I figured, what the heck, if it gets said so often it may be that people need to hear it often.  Or the ones saying it needed to remind themselves often; this is my favorite option.  Because I need to remind myself of basic things often as well.  Teaching or speaking on a subject is the most effective way to learn it well.

So I’ve made it through a full paragraph without telling you what I’m talking about.  That’s because people learn to love words rather than what the words say, but that’s a whole different blog.  I’m talking about the ghosts in your eyeballs of course, didn’t you read the title?  We all have lots of ghosts in our eyeballs, and even more in our brains.  They’re not bad, they’re not good, but it is good to recognize they exist and look past them.

Consider the picture above.  Buddha and the frog.  I looked and I saw Buddha.  Then I thought, “gee, he looks like he may be a Southeast Asian Buddha”.  Then I thought the proverbial ten thousand thoughts, all of which boiled down to “I like Buddha. From his teachings he seemed to be pretty close to the Tao.”

Then suddenly I noticed the frog on his shoulder.  Where was it while I was thinking all these things about Buddha?  Behind the ghosts, of course.

I didn’t even notice the beautiful greenery in the background until much later.  I mean, I noticed it but it was just backdrop.  It was for looking at, not for seeing to me.

To most of us, the ghosts don’t even exist.  They are so omnipresent that they are like I imagine water is to a fish.  Everywhere and nowhere.  Everything we perceive is through numberless filters.  What we like, what we dislike.  What we think is right, what we think is wrong.  What we think is ugly, what we think is beautiful.  What the words we often think in mean according to the dictionary.

What we think is important, and what we think is not important.  Even what we think we should not see.

There is a saying in Zen: “Before a person studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are not waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters are waters.”

You can take that all sorts of ways.  This kind of thinking is often cast as anti-intellectual.  It is only anti-intellectual if you make it so.

There is no reason to stop thinking about what you see.  There is no way to banish the ghosts.

But if you are aware of them, you can be aware of how they change your vision.

In time, you may find that you see both the ghosts and the frog exactly as they are.

I have no words to explain any better than that.