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Sadee Whip

Lenses we look through, things we can't see

The focus on truth and the search for truth often comes before we cultivate our ability to perceive. It would be wise to do this the other way around - cultivating perception first then utilization of perception in our search for truth. In fact, perception is so taken for granted, that we assume because we perceive, that our perception is intact and accurate.


But the ability to perceive and the lenses we look through need to be distinguished so that we can cultivate relationship with both perception and lenses. At least, if truth is what you are seeking in any capacity.


Our lenses are determined by many things - culture, environment, health and vitality, and more. Lenses are where we have repeated experiences, repeated behaviors, repeated assumptions, that kind of harden into a way that we see, experience, and understand the world.


If you grow up in a house with a lot of criticalness, you will likely develop a lense that causes you to see or experience the world this way - either being critical of the world or feeling criticized by it. That's a lense being looked through that causes reality to appear, or to be experienced, a certain way. If we do not know you have lenses, and if you do not give attention to cultivating perception, you will miss more of the world than you capture or sense. The thing is, the world itself teaches us. It is, in fact, our greatest teacher for the world is the form that Life playing out takes. The world gives shape to the invisible, the sacred, the intelligent motion and pattern of what this life is. When we begin to explore our lenses instead of assuming they are true, and we do the same with our perceptual ability, we begin to open ourselves to life. We create conditions where an interactivity begins to happen more and more. We begin to experience ourselves as a part of life and life as a part of us, not in any theoretical or intellectual way, but in a truly sensual one. We literally begin to feel life.


A good way to surface, in your own awareness, what lenses you might have is to explore your beliefs and the patterns in your experiences. Then investigate what these beliefs and patterns might be connected to. Then begin to play with imagining other possibilities and notice the reactions, the internal critique or resistance, to those alternative possibilities and you may notice some interesting structures an limitations. Another thing you can do is play with perception. Yo can start in your body or through any of your senses. Scent, for example, might be fun to play with. So say there is a perfume described as "earthy, animalic, leathery, and chemical with notes of dark berry and a hint of smoke" you can engage the scent to try to pick out those aspects. In this way, you are teaching your nose to listen or, more accurately, teaching yourself to notice what your nose notices. You can do the same with taste, with touch, with exploring spaces with your eyes closed. Sit quietly on a cushion and close your eyes then spend 10 minutes just noticing whatever you can - the car driving by, the bird somewhere far away, the itch on your ear, the pressure on your butt, the heat in the bend of your leg, the slight buzzing of the fridge, the distant scent of wood or rain, the temperature, where your clothing touches your body...just notice. try to notice 50 different things using all of your senses. Then try 100. Then 200. If you uncover invisible lenses and cultivate your perceptual ability, chances are different realities will become available to you. Then see how this informs your experiences and assumptions and beliefs. Without alive and engaged perception and with the rigidity lenses create, we are isolated from much of life and then suffer loneliness, meaningless, stress, and anxiety/depression/apathy because of the things we cannot see.







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