Cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words, and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.
– Dogen Zenji
This is one of the classic quotes from Dogen Zenji, and it’s one of the many quotes from mystics that may seem baffling if we haven’t noticed our nature and seem obvious and simple when we do.
To me, what I am is what my world happens within and as. I am consciousness and the world, as it appears to me, happens within and as that consciousenss.
That’s my original face. It’s all I have ever known.
Here, this body and this psyche drop away as what I imagined I fundamentally was.
My light is turned “inward” to illuminate what I am.
From being focused on mental representations to tell me what I am, I take the backward step and notice what I am. Attention is turned to the context of all of it rather than any particular content like words and mental images.
As Douglas Harding said, when we notice what we are, we don’t go to words to tell us what we are, we instead check to see how accurate they are and where they come from. Do they come from a consciousness that recognizes itself? In this case, the quote clearly does.