Zen Dilemma

Saturday I heard a dharma talk, where the speaker said that if we saw things clearly, we would see them "as they are." I've mentioned before that Suzuki called this, "as it is." At first his students, confident in their native English tongue, would correct him. But he would insist, "as it is." To me, this designates that there is only one thing, and therefore "it" is the correct word.

In any case, I wondered if a number of people all looked in the same direction and all saw things as they are (or as it is), would they all see the same thing? I asked the speaker. He didn't think so. I also wondered if they would make art if they got rid of their ego. He said, no, he didn't mean that and sometime he'd give a talk about why the ego is good. There is the story about all these photographers who photographed the same mountain from the same vantage point and all the photos looked completely different.

So we have the world we construct, and then we have the world we see when we are not constructing. How can it be that we'd all see the non-constructed real world differently? What would account for the differences?