"Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call
my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it. 
It is, as Ruskin says, "not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear 
sense of the word, unseen...."
"But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. 
When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied... But I can't 
go out and try to see this way. I'll fail, I'll go mad. All I can do 
is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless 
interior babble…The effort is really a discipline requiring a 
lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints 
and monks of every order East and West… The world's spiritual 
geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, 
this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash cannot be dammed, and 
that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. 
Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the 
dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look 
along it, mildly, 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."

Annie Dillard ~ Pilgrim at Tinker Creek