Softening 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: Softening Perception

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. Diffuse your attention to the creature's periphery, where hints of the Creator glow through the thinnest veil of physical creation.

• 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 luminosity at the outline of the object, the fractal edge where material form dissolves into space.

• We usually focus on an object, not the negative space around it. In this intentional act of softening perception, let your focus gently shift to the empty space around the object, so that the object is background and the space around it becomes foreground.

• Let the surrounding void deepen in its silence. Be open to the possibility that the space becomes more substantial and solid, while the form it contains becomes more ethereal and translucent. The object's form is like a ray of sunlight refracted and softened by water in a still green pond.

• Space itself becomes downy and soft, a living presence. Space is awake. As you move through it, you float in the divine Presence.

"Soft" perception is not imaginary, just indirect. This indirect seeing is actually a very ancient shamanic technique for entering the world of the nature spirits and animal guides. Through indirection, we perceive what is more subtle.

Quantum science teaches us that a "material object" only appears concrete at the gross level of perception. But at finer levels, the reality is that the object ever dissolves into subtler layers of energy, and is part of the boundless energy-field around it. At the subtlest level of the physical world, particles arise and dissolve instantaneously in an all-pervading 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.

Softening is not weakening. Softening perception does not make our awareness frail: it makes awareness more substantial, more solid in its silent foundation. In truth, the pure awareness we used to perceive as abstract now becomes solid as diamond. It is not awareness but the world around us that is ever-changing, passing, ephemeral as a dream.

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.