Being
In your moment of being trapped in the dark spot under the lamp of cognition, unable to see your own reality
Scripture
The eye is window and wall; being sees and being is veiled.
The core of light keeps burning; the blind spot is traced by records.
Cling to one and forsake ten thousand; wanting to see all is blindness.
In light and in dark, each is the other’s screen.
Wiping is also staining; the seeing of not-seeing.
Wenzi · On Being
You open your eyes wide, yet cannot see yourself. You have dissected ten thousand things, but the moment your gaze turns to itself, it falls into a familiar darkness. You are like someone standing under the brightest lamp, while at your feet lies an indistinguishable shadow.
The scripture first dismantles what you thought was “seeing”: “The eye is window and wall; being sees and being is veiled.” The eye is at once the window through which the world is seen and a wall cutting you off from truth. While it sees, it veils—it can only see the images light reflects, but cannot see the light itself; it habitually focuses on objects, yet is powerless to turn itself into an object to be observed. The very tool you rely on has become your obstacle.
Then it reveals how the blind spot forms: “The core of light keeps burning; the blind spot is traced by records.” That luminous core which can cognize, can perceive, has always been burning inside you. But your “blind spot” is precisely delimited by the memory and records you rely on most (the storage and sorting of past experience). You light up the unknown with the map of the known: what the map lights you call “seeing,” and what lies beyond the map you call the “blind spot.” Your “seeing” is in fact reviewing memory.
And so the fundamental error of cognition is pointed out: “Cling to one and forsake ten thousand; wanting to see all is blindness.” You cling to seeing “some one” point, some one trait, some one story—and to see it clearly, you must discard and ignore ten thousand other possibilities.
When you try to see the “all,” you find it an impossible task—because the very act of “seeing” requires focus, and focus means choosing and excluding.
So the pursuit of “seeing everything” is methodologically doomed to blindness. The harder you try to see clearly, the more your blind spot is reinforced by your effort.
Then the relation of light and dark is reweighed: “In light and in dark, each is the other’s screen.” The brightness you believe in (your cognitive focus) and the darkness you believe in (your cognitive blind spot) are not enemies. They are two faces of one body—mutually dependent, and each becoming the other’s screen. The bright zone reassures you, and thereby blocks you from entering the dark; the dark zone frightens you, and thereby blocks you from discovering the light it may hold. You are trapped in the game light and dark set for themselves.
At last the paradoxical way out surfaces: “Wiping is also staining; the seeing of not-seeing.” Now, give up the effort to “see yourself clearly.” Instead, with total attention, notice the whole process of “wanting to see clearly yet never quite seeing”—that urgency, that frustration, that futility. Turn your consciousness, like a lamp, onto this very state of “seeking sight and not getting it.” The instant you abide in this illumination, you will find: that which is “illuminating” is the “core of light” itself; and that “illuminated state” is the truest you. This is “the seeing of not-seeing.”
You want to wipe your eyes, wipe your heart, to see clearly—but every wipe may leave new wiping-marks (concepts, methods, expectations), and this itself is a kind of staining.
Then perhaps the true “seeing” is not increasing the effort of looking, but stopping that “looking” based on memory and expectation.
When you no longer try to “see” some anticipated image, when you accept that state of “not-seeing”—that pure awareness projecting no concepts—that is itself the clearest “seeing.”
By “not-seeing,” you have seen that awareness-itself which is always there. Being-Blindness is not a defect of vision—it is the humility of cognition. When you admit, and abide in, that “darkness” no concept can illuminate, the true “core of light”—that self-evident awareness—will, in its own way, illuminate everything, including itself. That “seeing of not-seeing” is awareness illuminating awareness, existence recognizing existence. And true seeing begins only at the moment you admit you “cannot see.”