Looking Meditation

Our sense of vision, which is the lead sense for most of us, is kind of addictively tied to seeing separation: it breaks the panorama of stuff around us into distinct “things”. This activity relies on depth perception and takes some fairly sophisticated sensory and neural gymnastics to make all this separating work. (Our auditory and tactile senses are much more likely to perceive global waves of stimuli.)

But there are ways to get around this misperception of what is actually all connected. One is to briefly unplug our depth perception. You can look at what is around you as if it were a photograph or painting – flat, with everything connected on that two-dimensional surface. It’s a little tricky to do this and will usually only work for moments, but is a fun experiment.

The other work-around of this erroneous perceiving is more cognitive and is a perceptive skill that we actually can grow. In order to see everything around us as separate, self-contained objects – which is how we have learned to perceive things - we have needed to do two things:

1) We need to believe that this object we are looking at stays in one place and does not intermingle with the objects around it. That vase is separate from the table it is sitting on. But modern physics tells us that, on a subatomic level, each object has only a tendency to exist where we see it. In fact, most of that object is actually space, with its electrons moving around so fast that it looks solid. Secondly, these electrons don’t stay put within the edges we see around the object. The electrons of the vase actually do tend to intermingle with the electrons of the table. So what looks solid is mostly space and what looks like a clear separation is actually not. Things are neither as solid nor as separate as our visual sense would tell us. Remembering these two things – even momentarily, because the old habits of our visual sense will tend to reassert themselves – can help us take more lightly the separations that we think we see.

2) The other deceptive cognitive spin we tend to put on our visual sense is that we decode the space between things as being empty – that’s what allows things to stand alone, separate. But that empty space is anything but. In scientific terms, it’s loaded with particles. In energetic terms, it’s loaded with life energy, prana – aliveness. So then how does anything stay separate? If everything we see has in common this subatomic chaos, is actually made up of the same energetic structure, where each electron flashes back and forth between matter and energy – and this is equally true for what looks like empty space as it is true for what looks like solid objects – then what happens to what looks like solid boundaries?

Again, this shift in our perception relies on a cognitive process – our visual sense does not yet know how to perceive energy filing the space around us or the space that these super-fast electrons are always leaving all through that vase. I think that some mystics are able to literally see all these interconnections and mushy boundaries. And sometimes one can see it during or after deep meditation. LSD pretty surely induces this kind of perception, at least some of the time – no wonder that so many “seekers” have been attached to dropping acid, especially in the 70’s. Many martial arts, perhaps Tai Chi especially, rely on working with and moving around the chi or Qi – the life energy – around us. When you are doing a good Tai Chi push, you can feel or even see the energetic force that you are pushing in front of you.

If you have ever done the exercise where you rub your hands together fast, then hold them out just inches apart until you start to feel the ball of energy between them, you have had a glimpse of this. The more you play with this exercise, you can feel the ball of energy between your hands even as you move them further apart. During a ten-day silent meditation, I became able – with my hands out to my sides, my body and mind relaxed, and moving very slowly – to feel the energy boundary of a tree, which extends out way beyond what looks like a solid physical boundary. I even tried to teach my young nieces how to do this, which they found totally hysterical. (“Uncle John has always been a little odd – in a nice way – but this is the farthest out he’s ever been.”)

But, even without LSD or advanced martial arts or meditation-induced mystical perception, knowing that all this is true can actually shift the way we look at things. Especially in repose, we can look at the world in front of us as if it were all connected. Allowing our breathing to get deep and full, our body relaxed, and maybe our eyes soft and half-closed – all of this can help. And perhaps all of these ways of starting to see connectedness where we had before seen separation, perhaps all of them rely on not trying – letting our eyes and maybe even our minds get soft, receptive. The more receptive we get, the more we are available to life giving us glimpses of this connected reality – even when we are not looking for it.