The first characteristic [of attaining _satori_] is that all things are of equal importance in its sight, the most trivial as well as the most significant by ordinary human standards. They all seem to have acquired an absolute value, as if they had become transparent, revealing a relationship which does not obtain in the ordinary field of vision. This relationship is not horizontal, linking one thing to another and so remaining within the world of objects, but vertical; it plumbs each single things to its very depts, to the point of origination. Things are thus seen, and at the same time understood, from the origin, out of the "being" which manifests itself in them. To that extent they are all of equal rank, all possessing the illustrious patents of their origin. They are not objects isolated in themselves; they point beyond themselves, to the common ground of their being, and yet this ground can be perceived only through them, through what exists, although it is the origin of all existence. - Eugen Herrigel, _The Method of Zen_, p.46,47.