In Chinese and Japanese painting you do not look in from outside at an opposite, for the subject and every detail of it are seen so intensely from the inside that the beholder must himself be in the picture, must live in it, in order to do it justice. Not only does perspective become so pointless that it disappears altogether, but the relation of observer to observed is abolished. Space closes around the observer, who now stands everywhere in the center without being the center: he is now in their midst, one with the heartbeat of things. And in turn, what surrounds and encloses him is so much his own equal that he feels it is not there just for him and for his sake. It is not an opposite but, as it were, himself in ever-changing form. They are so at one that he no longer has a meaning of his own; he is submerged in it and, vanishing with it, encounters himself and yet not himself: an evanescence in the essence of things. - Eugen Herrigal, *The Method of Zen*