Sensing Looking and Listening – Reality As It Happens
Sensing, Looking, and Listening (SLL) first came into my awareness in 1986 when I read Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential by Charles T. Tart. SLL was given as one way of practicing self-remembering.
I recall self-remembering being promoted as a method to reconnect with our ‘real self’, our true self.
A Disappearing Act
It’s not about getting real; it’s about dissolving what’s in the way of what is.
Despite evolving intellectual and conceptual understanding, it’s taken decades to see these two perspectives in a life-changing way:
- The self is not
- SLL is the doorway to direct experience of consciousness
You can’t get into the moment. You can’t get into the now for one very simple reason – you’ve never left the moment, you’ve always lived in the now.
So, how do you get into something you’ve never left?
Or, how do you become aware that you’ve never left the moment, but in fact, at this very moment and in all past moments and in all future moments you will be fully in the moment regardless of your experience of your experience?
This article seeks to entice the reader into a state of open-ended curiosity and experiential exploration, into the fabric of existence and being.
It is not an intellectual exposition, nor a house-of-cards treatise built on concepts as self-sustaining, self-sufficient building blocks of fundamental knowledge. Actual knowledge is aware-ing, awareness as dynamism, not as a noun, a thing; or a doing, a verb – it’s bare-bones “isness.”
Ever, Ever Neverland: Reality Rising
What’s your understanding of the following?
- Awareness
- Consciousness
- Life (Existence)
- Self
- Experience
- Spiritual Practice
Orange Dream Ice Cream and Sex
Favorite foods and sex are great examples for articulating how the self orients and functions.
One of my favorite ice creams is Orange Dream, a vanilla and orange sherbert mixture. It’s a dynamic blast of simple yet distinct flavors and cool refreshments.
No matter how many times I eat Orange Dream, regardless of how fulfilling and satisfying the experience, when I have the desire for Orange Dream, whether it has been a day or months since my last Orange Dream experience, self anticipates an equivalent or better experience than the last.
This may only result in an extra moment or lick of flavor-dom, or it could be me imagining being more present in the experience with the hope that fulfillment and satisfaction will last forever.
It’s the same with sex. The best sex ever, the ultimate orgasm, never lasts forever. One might not even finish that after-sex smoke before the self imagines how to improve any subsequent encounter.
All spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer, and devotion, are fundamentally sensing, looking, and listening – perceiving experience and the experience of experience in immediacy. In this world, everything is fundamentally SLL. Experience is sensing, looking, and listening – perception interpreted by the brain and given meaning.
We’re usually so busy wrapped up in the jibber-jabbering of mental process that SLL (bare-naked perception) is rarely experienced in its immediate potency.
Think about it: experience is based on perception and the organization of perception into meaning and understanding – relevance to one specific organism – you.
But sensing, looking, and listening, as stated earlier, is a practice of self-remembering. There are the senses we know – sight (visual), taste (gustatory), touch (tactile), hearing (auditory), and smell (olfactory). The three we’re not so familiar with are vestibular (balance), proprioceptive (movement), and interoceptive (internal). Then there’s mental process.
There is also the issue of the brain’s bias on object focus with little attention to the space holding everything.
What is the brain’s purpose?
I ask this question as it relates to perception. The brain’s role is to interpret input and perception, specifically as it applies to the organism it is part of. You can’t stop it from doing its job. You’ll experience significantly less “wear and tear” if you quit trying to control it and simply become fascinated and curious about something – like the nature of awareness.
So we need to look at what is perception. What is fundamental to perception?
Fundamental to perception and all experience is awareness. and experience requires not only particulars that can be discriminated, but a consciousness that is capable of knowing (discriminating) what is happening. Concepts, mental and essential, are necessary for experience.
Our everyday world, mental processing, and daily life are rooted in the fundamental dichotomy of subject/object. In itself, this is not an issue. It’s simply one way reality presents itself.
The issue is how being lost in the illusion of separateness affects one’s experience of their experience – dulling the vivid luminosity and vitality of each moment.
This is the “playing field” for sensing, looking, and listening. Playing with SLL is more effective than working at it.
How does one play (experiment) with SLL?
Taking just the eight senses, thinking, action, and space give us 2047 possible combinations to play with. But the list can be much greater.
I can play with SLL by sensing my legs while walking. I can experiment with the legs extending from the kath, the genitals, the heart… I can play with SLL by breathing into my arms and legs while walking, or into the space I’m moving through, or into my arms and legs extending from my heart and into the space around me simultaneously.
SLL involves many factors, but three of significant import are openness, availability, and sensitivity. Playing with sensing, looking, and listening brings awareness and attention to a particular combination of elements (extending an arm to pick up a jar) with openness, availability, and sensitivity while being curious about the gestalt – the shifting field of dynamic presence.
Have you ever noticed how the shade of a bright, blue sky changes as you move between paranoia and delight?