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I feel I am cauterizing the wound intellect has inflicted on experience: reductionism, institutionalism, and egotism to name a few. What is left is simply awareness: the cultivation of perception. To learn anything about consciousness one must drop one's beliefs and simply watch. Watch what's happening inside oneself and outside oneself. One's self exists between the two.
Perception
Perceiving nature is not about nature "out there" because our perception is not "out there." Perception resides in between things, and through it both things are revealed. This is how our minds work, defining "us" and "not us," and we have the opportunity to decide where to direct our attention.
If you want to be a larger person, examine things greater than yourself. The natural world in its living form is such a thing. Deepen your insight into it, and you deepen your insight into yourself.
"The perception and awareness of subtle energies expands a person's sense of the world and of himself or herself. The earth becomes a larger place. This can have its challenges -- access to a wider vision also brings more responsibility and a greater need for integration -- but it also has its rewards.
"Perception is sometimes thought of as a passive process: we receive sensory impressions from the environment. But it may also be seen as an active process, that we are extending ourselves into the environment and into connection with the world around us through perception and it is extending itself into us. Perception is an active process at a threshold that transforms the world into us and us into the world."
-- David Spangler, "Subtle Awareness"
Learning to Perceive
Learning perception is both learning to perceive more and learning to perceive other ways. You already have perceptive abilities latent within you, abilities that are unused because they are not part of our shared experience.
Our subtle perceptions have gone subconscious. There are many such cues we get from sight and smell and touch of which we're not consciously aware. Things too faint to be sensed by others, too uncertain to be understood, too personal to be shared or even examined. Without expression these impressions are lost, like the ideas you neglected to write down, like the memories of dreams.
"We are accustomed to perceiving first and then engaging; after all, how, we may ask, do we know what to engage with if we can't perceive it? But the trick in developing subtle perception is often to reverse this and to engage first, then perceive."
-- David Spangler, "Subtle Awareness"
There is a paradox here: how can you focus on what you cannot see? There is an answer, in fact there are two. First, focus on what you can see but focus more deeply, patiently, and intently.
Second, allow, invent, imagine, conjure, create, and concoct. Creativity is the action of bringing things into being, and this applies to all that we experience. The difference here is that we bring into being things that were not there before, but isn't that what we want to do?
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