Annie Dillard, author of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’, writes about different ways of seeing. She compares the different ways as like seeing with a camera where she walks from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter, and then when walking without a camera – where her own shutter opens and there is more of a letting go that means she can become transfixed and emptied. This way she sees so much more.

‘It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore-log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current, and flash! The sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun-and-olive ground of chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed toward the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale-white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like a water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh flake, feather, bone.

When I see this way, I truly see. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses.’

But it’s not possible to always see like this – as she says, the best that we can do is to try to hush the endless interior noise that keeps us from seeing. The best we can do is follow the example of all the spiritual traditions of East and West which is that to try and damn all the muddy thoughts is impossible but:

Instead, you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mi8ldly, 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. “Launch into the deep, says Jacques Ellul, “and you shall see.”