Have you ever had this feeling that right outside the bedroom window, on the other side of a surface you’ve touched, like the bedsheet, or a stone in the garden⎼ like a voice carried in the wind that you can’t quite make out, there is an insight, a joy waiting, hidden right there? And all you had to do is breathe a little more deeply, shift your perspective a hairsbreadth, and you’d see it in whatever is felt, hear it in whatever is touched?
This isn’t a hope you have but something else.
I feel this almost every morning when I wake up, if I don’t rush off or I’m not too angry or depressed by the pandemic or the GOP. Right behind my last dream, sitting next to the stiffness in my back, there is this sense, this urge or yearning to look deeply at the red bee balm in the garden, the yellow daylilies, the cats that lie near my feet.
When I took a walk yesterday, I tried to remember a time in my life when something hidden was suddenly revealed, or a work of art created itself with my hands. Something dramatic, that I hadn’t already shared with people; but nothing came to me. At first.
There are many examples provided by famous visual artists, athletes, poets, and composers. Zen teacher David Loy provides many in his book The World Is Made of Stories. He quotes the artist Escher talking about his drawing taking on a life of its own. The composer Stravinsky hearing music compose itself; he didn’t do it. The writer Borges saying, “I don’t write what I want… I don’t choose my subjects or plots. I have to stand back and receive them in a passive moment.” The poet Blake talking about poems coming to him almost against his will.
I am retired now, but the memory of my years teaching soon came to mind. Many times in the classroom the right way to reach a student or right answer to a question just appeared, flowed from my mouth spontaneously, unplanned. Painfully, not all the time.
Too many times, especially when I was inexperienced, the right response to a student often eluded me. But over the last few years of working, the number of wonderful moments were multiplied, when I was well prepared yet open, trusting the students and trusting myself. I also practiced mindfulness regularly in some classes.
As I was walking back home, down the steep rural hill, suddenly through the trees there was a view that went on for miles. It was only a peek, a break in the trees visible for a few steps when the road turned just right. I stared for a moment, absorbed, gleeful.
And a thought popped into my head. The reason I might touch a surface and a new reality whisper to me was because that is exactly what happens sometimes. We touch the hand of a lover and suddenly there aren’t two separate people anymore. There is only the touch. We quiet our minds, even though our hearts might be jumping wildly, and a new reality is born. We touch and are touched simultaneously, love and are loved.
When we look “outside” ourselves, step out from our skin shell or our stream of mental chatter and notice the world that fills and sustains us, what before was hidden pops into focus.
I remembered a time in a college creative writing course. One Friday night, I stayed up through the night writing a series of 3 short stories for an assignment. I just wrote down the feelings, memories and words that came to me. As the night shifted to morning, the series was complete. And when I read it aloud, I noticed that the last image of the third story was also the first image of the first story. Without planning, it ended where it began.
I walked further and noticed the road seemed to walk away from me. We might think perception is mechanical; what we see everyone sees. But that’s not accurate. There is a Gestalt principle of perception called figure-ground. This is illustrated by popular optical illusions like the old-young woman or the Rubin vase and two faces. What we focus on becomes the figure seen, and the rest becomes background.
Each perspective is whole while we focus on it. But it is also ambiguous, as Buddhist teacher Albert Low points out in his wonderful book, Butterfly’s Dream: In Search of the Roots of Zen. The information to perceive either viewpoint remains present no matter which is perceived. Thus, the same data can yield contrary viewpoints and we can, and do, shift back and forth between them. We see a vase, and two faces lie hidden; we see a young woman and the older one lies waiting.
Emotions share a kinship with figure-ground. They are complex, and one emotion can emerge from, alternate with, or be built on the negation of another. Hate on the denial of love, anger on trying to hide humiliation, excitement on overcoming fear. Emotions are constructed from many components, thoughts, memories, sensations, feelings, planned actions. Once emotion is aroused, we easily travel from one to another.
Compassion is a readiness to act to relieve suffering, physical or mental. First, we might feel or realize someone’s pain. We might feel outrage at how someone is treated, or a sense of shared humanity or kindness erupts in us, and then we act. Compassion is not the same as or dependent on empathy but involves a shift of perspective, from looking only through our own eyes to looking through the eyes of another person, or a whole community.
In his book Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen, Dr. James Austin, neurologist and Zen practitioner, describes two perceptual systems in our brain. One is top-down, egocentric, and asks how things relate to me. The other is bottom-up, an allocentric (other centered) system that asks what an object is in-itself, or what does it mean?
Imagine we’re playing baseball, a batter at the plate looking at a pitch. We want to see the ball in relation to us, how far away it is, its speed. But if we want to hit it, we also need its size, weight, what it is in-itself. We need both perspectives or a clarity of perception, thinking and acting is impossible.
Right now, as I inhale, there is a feeling of my belly expanding, the sun on my face, the sweat, the warmth of the air. There is no sense of mystery, only the open fullness of an inhalation. This is one side of an ambiguous figure, like perceiving the vase in the optical illusion. There’s a slight pause; and then, right inside the exhalation, and despite the summer heat, there is a coolness and relaxation. The pores of the skin open as if I had just stepped into the shade. Nothing is missing. Right there is joy and a mystery. And the two faces of the ambiguous figure.
The feeling that something is missing can be the surface layer of a sign, outlined with the light of attention⎼ “look here” it says. “Feel here.” Be present. Buried in this response to feeling is treasure. Feeling the feeling is what is sought. Not something distant, separate, over there, but here. Not something we possess or could possess, but the essence of intimacy.
By educating perception and when the time is right⎼ when we feel safe enough to be open and can step outside our idea of ourselves to simply breathe or perceive⎼ then inside feeling itself, inside longing, can be found what is longed for. Inside the breath, we might find joy. By shifting perspective, who knows what might be found.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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