Inner Work Friday: Week Three of Eight Week Series by Thomas Telhiard

September 10: Inner Task Week Three – SEEING AS IS

Last week our inner task led us into seeing dimensionally from a three-centered presence. Perhaps what arose within you in this task was appreciation for the gift of dimensional sight. Maybe you were struck by the relatedness of what was within your field of vision. My experience of this task not only makes me aware of the relatedness, but rather how energetically related the vision field itself was. Proximity is energetic and moving and new!

This week, the task is perhaps a ‘step back.’ While still holding onto the dimensionality, we return to a specific piece of our first inner task of seeing. This week we are focusing on the subtlety of seeing AS IS, so to speak. Recall that in the first step of our first inner task in this series, we froze our vision and softened the eyes. It is the latter directive of those two that we are going to work with this week. This is a more detailed refinement of what we have more generally worked with earlier.

Our aim is that we want to see without naming, without associating, without judgment. In a way, this is what has been called in the mystical tradition as ‘being seen.’ Seeing as being seen. What we see does not belong to us, and we do not belong to that which we see, and yet there is an intimacy. It is a freedom that is intimate and confronting!

Madame Jeanne De Salzman in THE REALITY OF BEING describes how this ‘confronting’ of our seeing has to do with inner and outer energies:

“There is an energy in me, a life that is always in movement but does not project outside. To feel this requires a certain tranquility, a certain silence. It is only in the void that another reality can appear. At the same time, there is also in me an energy that is projected outward by my functions, taken by their inexhaustible reactions to impressions coming from both inside and outside. I do not have the attention required to confront all these impressions and reactions. But I am shocked when I see the speed which I unknowingly react. Is it possible to receive impressions without reacting so quickly, to let the impression penetrate me and act on me? For this I would need a pure perception of what is here, a perception not mixed with reaction. In my ordinary state, my attention goes no further than noticing what is present. The moment is very short, too short for me to grasp the nature of the thing as it is. We are generally not interested by an impartial perception of things ‘as they are.’ We always judge them or treat them from the point of view of our personal interest. With every perception we instantly attach a label that distorts the vision. Afterward these labels determine our actions and reactions.” [The Reality of Being (Shambhala Publications: Boulder CO, 2010)]

So, how do we get there? If we can soften the eyes, this is the beginning of being able to see impartially, non-judgmentally, perceiving things as is or as they are. If you have ever done the CLEAR IMPRESSIONS exercise, you will have a sense of what this is about. If not, perhaps the simple task this week, which Cynthia has given in her own format to us before, will be helpful.

You can either set times during the day for this task or allow your daily routine to call the task forward. We hold much tension within our eyes and when we look at our world, we have a ‘fixed’ and many times impositional gaze! The task is to catch yourself doing this, i.e., become aware of how you harden your eyes given the situation you find yourself in. When you realize that your eyes are stressed, rigid and tense, the task is first to let yourself feel the pressure that is there physically in the eyes themselves and in the muscles in support of the eyes. Then after a few moments, simply relax the eyes. Physically relax the eyebrows, the eyelids, the eyeballs – (front, side, bottom and back), the eye sockets, and the small muscles around the eyes in the face. Try this with your eyes open and with your eyes closed.

This is the task for the week:

Set a time for the task or let the day’s activities call the task forth.
Note the tension/pressure that you carry in your eyes – the physical rigidity and hardness at different moments during your day. Stay with this a few moments.
Then, intentionally relax the eyes, releasing the tension in all the eye parts including the face muscles
Pay attention to what if anything changes in your environment or field of vision. What is going on within you? How is the energy?

If you want to combine this task with the Seeing Dimension task from last week, feel free to do so.

We are attempting to see as is.