Softening Your Perception

 "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." ~William Blake

The practice of softening our perception softens the world we perceive.  

Anoint the earth through your senses. Redeem creation by perceiving it more gracefully. Pour your inner light outward through intentional acts of sacramental seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. A soft caress of perception infuses Prakriti with Purusha, the womb of Mary-Matter with Christ-Consciousness.

Until now our senses have been receptors, passive recipients of a world flowing into us. But in the dawning age, we become transmitters, blessing the world with wands of sensation. Sensation activates the hidden potential of matter. Perception is blessing. Awareness is a priestly function.

Sunbeams radiate, not into our eyes, but from them. Thrush music rises from inner silence, reverberating from our ears. Our hearing is half the song. Breathe out the musk of awakening. This world is a garden: we are the Spring.

Practice: the Energy Around the Flower

Practice this exercise no more than a minute or two, without concentration or strain. Then resume your work. If you are on a hike in the wilderness or a daily walk, you can pause to do this little exercise now and then for short moments. Please be without force or concentration. In fact, this exercise asks you to de-concentrate: to diffuse your attention to the creature's periphery, where hints of the Creator glow through the thinnest veil of physical things.

Begin by perceiving the space around a flower, a leaf, any still small living creature. Later, practice this with a person's face.

Notice the subtle fractal luminosity at the outline of the object, between spirit and matter, where form dissolves into space.

Usually we focus on an object, and the space around it is periphery. In this intentional act of softening, let your focus gently shift to the empty space around the object, so that the object is peripheral to the space around it.

The surrounding void deepens in substance, while the form it contains becomes less concrete, more transparent. See that form like a ray of sunlight refracted by water in a still green pond.

Soft perception is not imaginary, just indirect. Through indirection, we perceive what is more subtle. Quantum science teaches us that the object that seems concrete is ever dissolving into subtler layers of energy. At the subtlest level of the physical world, particles arise and dissolve instantaneously in a vacuum. Ultimately, these particles are but waves of emptiness.

In softening our perception, we see the true pointalism of matter - to borrow a term from art history. We allow old patterns to gracefully deconstruct into finer and finer particles of light. We let the radiance of Creator outshine the mirage of creation.

Buddha's Heart Sutra begins, "Form is emptiness; emptiness is form." Softening our perception puts this sutra into practice. The goal of this exercise is, in St. Paul's words, "to behold all things created anew." (2 Cor. 5:17)

On a golden afternoon, practice this in the forest with a wildflower. Then practice with someone you love in a moment of stillness, softening your gaze from direct encounter to the aureole at the edge of the physical form. Soon you will sense your beloved enfolded in compassion.

Next, practice in a mundane public place: waiting in line at the supermarket, sitting on a train, attending a meeting at work. You will awaken compassion for the ordinary, and for the stranger. You will begin to see the beauty that envelopes all wondrous weary human beings.

Finally, practice soft perception in a negative situation: while gazing at someone in deep distress, someone dying, or someone with whom you are in conflict. As their face dissolves into its luminous essence, this face becomes the light of Christ. There really are no negative situations.

When you acclimate to this practice, allow your awareness to descend from the head to the heart: quite literally, from the brain to the warm area in the chest. Even while using your eyes, ears and nostrils, the source of your attention can flow from the heart. As this shift occurs, you literally see through the eye of the heart, and the world around you becomes a Sacred Garden.