The Capacity of the Visionary: Sacred Perception.

May we learn to return

And rest in the beauty

Of animal being,

Learn to lean low,

Leave our locked mind,

And with freed senses

Feel the earth

Breathing beneath us.

John O’Donohue. “Eternal Echoes”

O’Donohue describes spirituality as a state of leaning low, with freed senses. But this freedom may seem unnatural for sapiens. It comes at the end of a long earthly path for most of us. Arriving out of the long slog of our development and gradual enrichment of mindful, attuned, flowing states, we evolve the awareness that we’re not just the physiological, mental, emotional patterns we have learned and reinforced. There is something true that is not our ego in time and space only. There’s something Beautiful in the universe that heals, endowed with intuitive and inventive currents. Such awareness eases us further from self-sabotaging patterns and survival fears, allowing what happens to us to have less of a grip on us. With freed senses, we sense and begin to understand in our Heart that we’re another being amongst an infinite variety. We enter the garden.

From the inside out, we find that we’re one beyond the forms we have taken, above the roles and rules we have adopted from others. We dive beneath the surfaces that have been intuited as foreign. We can step in and out of other beings now, whether they wear shoes or not. We come to know and trust a deep state of energetic belonging. We may call this the oneness in all. Buddha Nature. Christ consciousness. Atman. The Inspired Self.

Truth Beyond Appearance

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.  

William Blake, “The Marriage”

In the Mindfulness of the Awakened Child, we can stay aligned intentionally and connected but be separate (differentiated) from our Pain and Self-deception and from the acrobatics of the Abnormal. In the Flow of the Artist, we have a similar capacity in our work, which Keats named Negative Capability. We see the barriers and the loss of flow but don’t submit to despair.

In the Attunement of the Lover, we again find something similar, Unconditional Love, which allows us to be here and be there, to cope with our triggered states (loving ourselves) while loving the other. For the Visionary, I believe we find a capacity which I’ll call Sacred Perception. This allows us to live our life with a state of reverence for each moment while simultaneously recognizing a depth that signifies the infinite.

Limbic Exercises for Developing Sacred Perception

“So, awe is possibly the perception that’s bigger than us . . . in the words of a dear friend, probably one of our greatest photographers, still living photographers, Duane Michaels, he said to me just the other day that maybe it gives us the curiosity to overcome our cowardice.”

Beau Lott and Cirque du Soleil, “How We Experience Awe,” Ted Talk

The Awe of nature. Illusive. Hard to put it into words. But it reminds us that there is so much beyond appearance. I was considering this while sitting patiently on the side of the dirt road near our house, where my companion, Jewel, has rolled herself over, clearly waiting to stop and smell the roses. At least she is inhaling the grass, the smells of animals who have passed here. And I am certain she desires a belly-rub.

How astonishing that we ended up together in just this time and space, joined by a grey bird that hops on a maple tree branch forty feet above us. When I look at the eastern part of the sky, the light is just at a certain angle to blind me with its brilliance. I try an awareness practice that I’ve found helpful, noticing my body, my mental activities (quiet at that moment), witnessing my emotional state (something like joy). Check my felt connection to the surrounding—the sights and sounds and smell, find an alive place in my chest where the glory of the day seems positively mirrored in some inexplicable way.

There is yet another understanding that naturally arises in this Powerful-Play. We discern abuse. We see with clarity the impact of ego-created ideologies. We notice injury to the defenseless and to the most vulnerable. There is an Upside-down energy I call Playing at Power destroying our planet. Intergenerational Responsibility is the Heart’s response to this reality.

Between

“Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived lives.” Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom

The Visionary lives between. The past trails off into the infinite unknown. The future trails off into an equally infinite unknown. From any cosmic perspective, our world, our lives, are momentary. But with vision (grounded in Loving playfulness, Loving work and Powerful work) we need not be so demoralized by our short lives. In fact, understanding our brevity gives rise to deep moral reflection on what is worthy of honor and respect, what is worth struggling for or against.

Walking with my dog, I know—but grasp it not with my intellect. I know the ancient beings that fill our diminished forests are worthy of some struggle to protect. The sadness is sharp to imagine a landscape without them. It’s just magical thinking that human beings could subsist alone in a world with such endless death and loss and emptiness. I don’t know what manner of being we would become but it wouldn’t be fully human.

The Visionary’s Awe and Powerful-Play Creates the Capacity for Sacred Perception

Sacred Perception                                                                                                

Connection, Vision, Beauty & Truth

 

Without Contraries, there is no progression. William Blake

 

The Bears ascend with their heartbeats embodied in Nature. They give themselves to the Beauty all around and rise above into something greater, though—wise bears–they don’t generally try to put this into words.

The past trails off into an infinite unknown. The future trails off into an infinite unknown. But the bears dwell fully in this place and make the most of it, giving each other bear hugs and belly rubs, astonished to have ended up in this time together.

 

Why This Painting?

As any one Drama ends, and we begin to make sense of it, there is a potential for an inner transformation. The Visionary stirs in an internal domain, still Loving and Playful but more Powerful. Where once—before all this Work–we endured divisions in conflict (the Abnormal, Pain and Self-deception), after, there is some movement toward an Integration of these “Contraries” which allows us to access a higher moral development, an ethical vision.

The Visionary is filled with multidimensional awareness of Beauty and Truth—what I am calling the capacity for Sacred Perception—enlivening us with the energy of Powerful Play and prompting us to answer the Visionary’s central question, “When I am gone, what will I leave behind?”

Our soaring bears depict a powerful relationship and imply a shared vision, a spiritual awareness common in any community where you find refuge and deep mutual understanding with at least one other being you trust implicitly. The bear’s perspective is grounded in experience and reality but is taken to great heights, even to a sacred or transcendent view that crosses time and space and gives rise to moral reflections.  Together, they are face-to-face with the very real fact that we are all momentary flickers in the Universe.

So why this painting? Perhaps there has been a death or loss or challenge that has recently impacted you. If so, you are encouraged to seek out others who can embrace you lightly, with loving care. We are mammals until the Fallen World transforms us into something less, and it our legacy that in heart-felt connection, we rise above uncertainties and sorrows and find a way (in our time) to be more grateful for life’s blessings.

Inside-Out:

Having developed the capacity for Sacred Perception, this would be a good time to explore larger patterns in your life, perhaps multigenerational family history or you might journal on other forces that have pushed you in certain directions. Some of these powers—family, religion, career, peers etc.—may no longer align with your purpose and your most important needs. Identify what no longer serves you and turn to others who are supportive of your playfulness and creative vision. I remind myself to be like these bears, seek not to be weighed down by the grave and constants of reality. And recognize that healing and growing is hard to do alone.

The ‘visionary’ is the man who has passed through

sight into vision, never the man who has avoided seeing.

Northrup Frye, Fearful Symmetry

Upside-down:

What the painting leaves out can caution us to be careful who we let into our lives. Do not mistake earnestness, conviction, or sober counsel for wisdom. Carefully weigh the advice that is given. There are always those who are at odds with our true nature. Leave them out of the picture. Though they may seem important or clever, or appear to have some special status, if they do not sincerely share your hopes and dreams, like crosscurrents chopping against a boat’s momentum, they can stall you, drain the sails of a wind that lifts you and leave you anchored in doubt. Do not seek their advice. Block their posts.

Deflation

In the science of compassion,

My gravitational mind sucks all those particles

Back together until I know

Only what I’ve aways known,

But when I hit bottom and deflate, I know

A weight in the heart as it let’s go

And suddenly laughter rises until I find the whole

Of this physical world.

I greatly cherish all things

That can be seen, all the stars so brightly

Defined in the night sky. But most of my living

Is unlit by reason and fills with feeling

In the empty spaces between.

When I am lover

Enough to practice love,

Whatever pops in and out without effort

Is not always Joy. There’s a quality of sadness

And of the dark, sometimes. I don’t know why.

It’s a quality of suffering

In the body as I touch your sensuous skin,

Even as the soul opens a door

And rushes toward what is beautiful.