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Instructions The following exercises involve turning up the rheostat on your senses in a variety of ways. They will take about ninety minutes-- starting in your bedroom again, moving around through several other rooms (bringing this workbook with you), and ending in the livingroom area. If that plan is impractical where you live, please adapt as you go along, as best you can. If appropriate, ask others to leave the bedroom and livingroom areas free. Since you'll be walking into several rooms, you may be encountering them briefly while those exercises are going on. Please explain beforehand that you are instructed to pay no attention to them, for the sake of preserving your concentration. If they speak when you pass by, make nothing of it. This is a methodical process for getting in touch with the world around you and within you. It is like a "tune-up" with awarenesses. Each exercise is "an awareness." And later you can practice having these same awarenesses again and again, whenever you'd like. If all these exercises are performed impecably, they will provide you with at least one vivid experience in awareness through a whole spectrum of coherent aspects of your body and the space your body occupies and uses at home. Performing them "impecably" means pausing after reading the instructions, turning aside from the workbook, taking the time to get a clear experience of what is being coached, and then staying with that experience for "a legitimate ten or fifteen seconds" (or "a minute," when that is instructed). Please "guesstimate" on the time--do not be counting seconds in your mind. Even fifteen seconds is a long time to interrupt reading a book. Yet a concentrated effort away from reading is appropriate to really have an awareness. Reading keeps you in thinking. Awareness is about getting out of thinking and just experiencing instead. It takes practice to become familiar with each experience well enough to remember it again. In following these instructions, you are already beginning to log practice time, just as if you were lifting weights in a gym to prepare your body to play basketball. On the other hand, flitting through the conceptual instructions for exercises with only quick glimpses of the experiences that are being coached may not enable a reader to cultivate this power of awareness and really learn how to wake up and play. Finally, again, see if you can let yourself do these exercises without thinking alot of thoughts about them while in the process of doing them. The purpose of these exercises is to focus your attention on the raw, wordless experiences of awarenesses.
I'd like to start here by asking you again to feel your body in contact with the ground.
Now, please, "get a feel of the room around you." Notice where the space is in it and the bunches of stuff that are around. And, without words, "get a feel of what the room is like."
I didn't mean any judgment of the room, but just a raw sense of the "atmosphere" of it, the "ambiance." Do it again, "from your gut," get an "unh!" of it.
Good. Now I'd like for you to get into your body a little more with your sense of touch. Krinkle up your face, and wring it out like a dishrag, while feeling that from the inside.
Now feel your face from the inside when it is relaxed.
Have awarenesses, now. Please pause long enough to get your experiential "hits" of these awarenesses as we go along. I'd like to call it to your attention that the upper and lower parts of the face can move separately. Try that out and see if you can get a tangible sense from the inside of your face. of "a moving figure 8."
Now feel your face thoroughly when it is completely relaxed.
I'd like you to do a little "fifteen-second dance" now, keeping your face, arms, hands, legs and feet all moving at the same time, and feel all those movements from within your body.
Shake out your hands rapidly, like a wet handkerchief, and feel that. Let the hands become "rubbery."
Thanks. Here's another brief dance: squinching up your feet, fists, and face, in sequence, holding them all tight for a few seconds, then, dropping it. And sensitively feel yourself along through that dance.
Good. Now feel your resting thighs, stomach, biceps, and face all at once.
Take your time. Turn aside from the workbook and get clear experiences of each exercise, please. Poke your cheek with a finger and straighten out your arm several times. Feel that there are bones in the face and that arm.
Now pick out some nearby object that you can barely reach. And as you reach over and touch it, feel every bone in your body that you can feel moving.
Do it again, please, being sure to also feel your body coming back to its original position.
Perhaps you can begin to feel your spine is in there as the "mediator" of all those "moving bones." Close your eyes and do the same reaching over and touching again.
Reach upward with both arms, and feel that richly.
I'd like you to consider the fact that you have a living skeleton in there. Although we may tend to forget about it, there is a skull in there, neckbones, spine, and all the rest of your skeleton--all alive. Take as long as you need for this now. Starting with your skull, feel all around the skull from within, feeling for the cranium, and where the eye sockets are, the jaw, etc., then proceed down the neck bones and spine bones, concentrating on each bone as you are feeling for it; then build in the ribs and pelvis in awareness, the arm bones and leg bones. Concentrate closely until you have patiently recreated an overall experiential acknowledge-ment of the living skeleton that is there with you inside.
Thank you. It's interesting that we may seldom consider that this skeleton is around. And what about all the muscles? We may usually forget that they are around, too. Bring your attention back to your face again, and, by moving the face around, feel what you can of the muscles that are in there.
Now proceed through the rest of your body, part by part-- by feeling, by verisimilitude, or just by knowing where the larger muscles are attached to those bones throughout your body. And patiently, with the body at rest, systematically feel for all the larger muscles inside your body.
Now repeat the exercise--from your face to the soles of your feet--squeezing muscles a little, one at a time, as you focus on each of them, or squeezing each small group of them.
That ought to have brought these muscles into a little higher relief across the threshold of perception. Later on, you will be taught valuable uses for this ability to feel the specific muscles in the body. For instance, you will be taught how to relax muscles that are tense with awareness. For now, letting your face be just the way it is being, bring your attention back to your face and scan all around it with your feeling turned on from the inside.
Do you notice any tightness anywhere in your face?
Feeling your face like that is one easy way to know, instantly, in any situation, if your whole body is being tense about the situation, or not. [In other words, at any time, this one awareness alone immediately answers the question, "Am I being uptight about this situation or not?"] The muscles in the face are like a small, bright "guage," showing the relative tightness or relaxation of all the other muscle groups throughout the body. This is what creates "facial expressions." Getting in touch with one's own facial expressions--by feeling them--gives an immediate summary of what condition one's inner condition is in. The face is always a transparent reflection of our emotional states (or of our unknown inner battles against our emotional states). Now, close your eyes, and feel the texture of whatever you are sitting on with your hand, and then feel your clothes, noticing the differences or similarities.
Feel your hair carefully with fingers and palms. Then, run a hand over exposed areas of your skin, and see what that all feels like.
Leave your palm on an exposed area of skin on your arm, and, from within, see if you can tell if both sides are feeling that tangible contact.
Place your right palm on the upper left corner of your chest (on the skin, if you can reach it, or on the material of your shirt), and see if you can feel both sides feeling the other side.
How do you feel? On the inside of your body, I mean. Check around in the interior of different parts of your body for awhile, and patiently see if the muscles in there feel comfortable, or if there is tension, soreness, or discomfort anywhere in there, perhaps.
Thanks, again. I am seeking to coach you to get more in touch with your body, and what your body is naturally capable of. If you located some tension in high relief, place your aware attention on that same spot in there, and, without doing anything else about it, just feel what it feels like for about fifteen seconds.
[I hope your body is not uncomfortable today. The training will provide you with techniques later that will help you to deal with bodily discomfort with awareness. Applied properly, awareness dissolves tensions and pains. You may incidentally see some of that happening during these exercises. But first things come first in order to be able to do that methodically. You can, however, apply the previous exercise for longer periods of time for awhile, and just see if the body lets down at all on the tension or pain at that spot. See if you can watch for it to change, at least.] As we are soon to leave the room, I am going to ask you to stand up (bringing this workbook along with you). But before doing so, I'd like you to prepare yourself for feeling what it feels like, within, as your body is getting up. Okay, stand up please.
Usually people find that it feels good to stand up. There is a perceptible pleasure that can be experienced when muscles stretch as the body is standing up. I'd like you to stretch, please, luxuriantly, and feel what that feels like within.
Now, I'd like to ask you to get in touch with the feeling of your feet on the ground.
Then bring your attention up your legs from your feet and focus on your knees. And see if your knees are locked, or if they are loose and free.
Having the knees locked while standing is the usual for people. Standing with the knees loose is usually a sign of the body free of conditioning, because it requires a certain presence of mind, a certain awareness like this, and an interruption of the status quo. Please take your time, and see what it feels like to stand with your knees loose while feeling your feet on the ground.
Do you feel rooted that way? Like a tree--strong, yet pliable in the heavy wind. Please walk toward the door of the room, and as you do so, feel the contacts of your footfalls, and at the same time feel your body "falling" through the soft space to get to the door.
Now, as you are about to enter the next area through that door, I'd like you to get in touch with that spine that you have in there, and the skeleton that is attached to that spine. Get a feel for it all in there, "on the hoof."
Even if the spine and skeleton are beyond the threshold of your perception, feel for it where you know it is in there.
The spine is the mediator of all the rest of these bones walking around, and sitting down, and grasping hold of things and letting go. The next exercise will be a rather longer one, in which you will be "letting your spine walk your skeleton around" through the other rooms in your dwelling, ending up in the livingroom area. Bring the workbook along. Rejoin me inside here again when you finally enter the livingroom area (see bold face print as a marker below). Before starting to move, read the instructions that follow, please: Keep feeling for your spine and skeleton as you walk around. Feel the arm bones swinging. Feel the leg bones swinging. Feel the heel bones dig in as you go. And feel the skull riding up there on top. Stop in each room, and get a hit of what the room feels like to you. Quickly take note of the collective space and the collective stuff in the room, and just get an "unh!" from the gut, a "take," a noticing of how the ambiance of the room seems and feels to you. Keep remembering to come back to your spine and skeleton, as you go from room to room--arm bones and leg bones swinging--and let your spine walk your skeleton around. See if--without thinking alot--you can be focusing on your experiences all the way, coming back to awareness if your mind gets off into thinking about it. Try to keep bringing your focus back to your spine. Okay! Spine walks the skeleton around. Body gets hits of every room.
Stop there, please, and contemplate the room. Get another "hit" of the raw nature of the livingroom--not in words, but in the open experience of this area as a whole.
While you are standing here, let me ask you a few things:
Now, as to the livingroom area at hand: still standing here, using your "verisimilitude," look over various likely, or unlikely, places where you could sit down, and imagine keenly what it would feel like sitting down on them.
The instruction left you room for some playfully "unlikely" places where you could get a hit of what sitting down there would be like. Ouch!
Now pick out the most comfortable-seeming place in the room. But before you go there, walk around the room. Let your livingroom area be "like a museum" for you. Patiently rove around and examine many furnishings and decorations in the room, experiencing the suchness of each of them. And then stand over that most comfortable place that you have chosen.
Now, feel your spine sitting your skeleton down in the comfortable place there to rest.
Thank you very much. Keep getting into it, resting there comfortably. We have come a long way through our awarenesses tour. You have seen two little practice games for being in touch with your body when your body is on the move. The first was in feeling your footfalls on the ground while feeling your body moving forward through the soft space. The second was in being aware of your spine being in there walking your skeleton around. Both of those techniques involve no more than being as focused as you can in your sense of touch. [Either or both of those techniques could come in handy in the future, if you like them. (It's fun to let your spine walk your skeleton around at the grocery store while you shop along the aisles for awarenesses.)] And you have had a little practice waking up into testing the ambiance of a room with your keenly searching sense of feeling. And when you browsed in your livingroom area "as a museum," did any particular furnishings or decorations stand out for you as having been "forgotten in the woodwork" for a long time? Please spend awhile getting in touch with the "wallness," "rugness," and "ceilingness," of your surroundings.
Look around you at a few of the decorative furnishings in your field of vision, and see if you can remember the time when you first placed them in those places right there.
Can you perhaps remember that you checked out carefully how they looked sitting there at that time? Yet, can you see that they have "faded into shadows," since then?
Try to identify some sound that is going on right now in "the shadows" that you were not being aware of. And if there is such, listen to it closely.
Now hear the whole sea of sounds for a minute, with your thinking mind rather quiet. Just hearing . . .
Say out loud into the space the words for each of the sounds that you have been hearing, and hear the sounds of those words.
Can you see that the words we give to those sounds are not the same as the raw sounds themselves?
Say aloud into the space the words for the furnishings that you have been studying there around you and hear those words.
Can you see that those words are just "nonsense sounds?" Can you see those sounds of words have nothing to do with the actual reality of the things themselves?
"Lamp." "Chair." "Couch." "Rug." What funny sounds they make! They are symbols. There is nothing intrinsically realistic about words. They are just arbitrary symbols that we have memorized since childhood, to stand in for the real things that are there. If there is any sound you can hear that is fairly loud, see if you can get a sense of feeling the vibrations of that sound traveling through the space and being feelable, not just with your ears, but with your whole body.
If it is convenient to do so, get up and turn on a radio or other appliance that will provide a temporary stream of sound, and return to your comfortable place and see if you can feel the vibrations of that sound with your whole body. Feel for it from within.
What do you think? Verisimilitude? Actually could feel it? Turn the sound-maker you used off again please for now, and then come back. Be aware of your body moving, going and coming.
And now, turning to the sense of taste, please taste whatever it tastes like in your mouth right now for about ten seconds. Is there any taste that you can perceive?
Now, smell the air around you, and see if there is anything at all that is perceptible to you.
Does this workbook have a smell? See for yourself.
How about your own body? Take a sniff and see what your hands smell like. And then try somewhere else.
Could you smell anything? Most of us don't smell very often, or very well. But this sense can definitely be toned up. Unless some stink obtrudes above the threshold of our usually sleeping olfactory sense, or unless some particularly pleasing aroma overcomes our space, the sense of smell goes relatively unused. It's not as though we browse around with our nose at the ready, sniffing here and there as we move through. But smelling is another way to be in touch with the raw reality of nature around us. Our sense of smell is nothing compared to that of the bears, coyotes, bobcats and deer that may live around us. They could tell us many things that we cannot know in this way. Yet even so, the sense of smell has a part to play in human life. Once upon a time, it could have been a matter of life or death in determining the wholesomeness of food and water. If you'd like to play a little "life or death" game: Play like any odor that can be clearly perceived has a life-saving power. You will die without getting a smell of it. Look around you in the room and identify two things in the room with you there that you feel confident will deliver an odor that you can clearly perceive with your sense of smell. Remember, it's a matter of life or death. Go over to each of your items now and have a smell, and then come back here.
Did you make it? Were there any surprises for you in what they actually smelled like? Please pull your shirt up and smell the cloth of it.
Lick the place on the cloth that you smelled, and smell it again.
Now please smell the skin of your inner forearm.
Please lick the place you smelled, and smell it again.
Well, that's enough of that. You have a small collection of smellable things in your experiential basket now, along with some sights and sounds, many touches and feelings, and a taste or two. I hope you are learning to see that you can use these ordinary natural senses that you have in new ways that bring the life around you and within you into sharper and brighter focus. Let's work on brightening up the room around you a little bit. This is a kind of high speed exercise for a change. While you go on being relaxed and comfortable there, see how swiftly your eyes can zip around the whole room around you there several times, getting vivid hits, in color, of reds only.
Did you see that? Try the exercise again, please, with blues this time. Pay no attention to all the other colors, and swiftly scan the room picking out blues only, and getting momentary hits of the vivid blueness of them.
Once again, this time with any yellows that are around out there. Quickly. Nothing but yellows.
I think you may have been able to see that the human body is "good at that," as they say. We can search quickly for any color through a large area, and it jumps out for us quite rapidly, even in its different hues. Now, more leisurely, let yourself look around the room gently and let many different colors "come on" for you, all around the room. Pay no attention at all to the things that these colors are on, and open up only to colors. Try to see these colors without naming them.
Let your eyes rove again to find a few choice places where the color is especially beautiful to you. And shuttle your vision back and forth between those few most beautiful hues in the whole room around you.
See how easy that is to do? Tuning in to what's beautiful. This human body is good at that, too. What else? You could give your body a bath with awareness. Splash your face with awareness.
Splash your feet with awareness. Splash it into your legs.
Give yourself a whole body with awareness.
Be in your body, and sing a single note out loud. And feel the vibration of that note inside your body.
Well, there is another interesting thing to watch here with awareness. And that is thinking. Thinking is merely any words that you say to yourself in your mind. (Talking, by the way, is thinking out loud.) Thinking is talking to your self. As you know, I have been suggesting that you let your thinking be as quiet as possible while doing these exercises. And that is only relatively possible. But now, I invite you to allow yourself a whole minute, to let your thinking present itself freely and abundantly in your mind, while you pay attention and watch whatever you happen to be thinking.
If a voice in your mind said, "What thinking is he talking about?" that's it. Examine the inner talking of your thinking this way some more, please. Take your time--as long as you need. Notice you are thinking about whatever happens to pop up.
Perhaps this one will be too difficult for you at this point. As you are observing whatever your mind is thinking about for awhile, try to determine which of your five basic senses is doing the observing of your thinking here.
When I do that exercise, what I seem to experience is that it's not any of my senses that observes what I'm thinking. It can seem like a verisimilitude of my sense of hearing at times. Yet, it is more like pure awareness, itself, that observes. It is, just underneath--my being. With this pure awareness in being, I can observe my thinking happening. It's only thinking. It happens. And I can experience it momentarily, and longer, in just the same way that I can experience any of the awarenesses I have with my five senses. Thinking drives out awareness from the pool of our consciousness. Out of the whole of our being, this one process, thinking, can jump up and take over, obscuring all the rest. The loss of our natural capacity to experience the suchness of life with our five senses is the first casualty to this dimming distraction that is caused by thinking. By intentionally occupying your mind with the vivid experience of one of your senses, you will find that it becomes easier by practice to let your thinking be quiet for awhile. It's like the mind has a kind of refuge from thinking when we have the presence of mind to deliberately focus the mind in the senses. (This is just like the mantra of a meditation.) And, as you may observe, one can also have awareness of thinking in the mind when it is going on.
I would like to reiterate that it is not the purpose of this training to teach you to be able to hold all the things in your field in experiential focus all at the same time--although such a remarkable phenomenon may actually occur rarely in peak moments of psychedelic or religious experience. But that is not a target here. A skilled player of the awareness game is simply good at seeing whatever they are looking at, hearing whatever they listen to, sensing what they feel, and smelling and tasting, as well. And, in particular, a player who has gotten good at this game is good at being able to do any of these on purpose, by checking around, by being curious, and having the presence of mind to reach out to the world and make contact with reality, sensing and focusing by choice. The last exercise today requires using several groups of awarenesses in performing a simple task, getting up from your comfortable place there, going to the front door of your dwelling, and going outside for a minute. Instructions:
Can you remember to do all those? Go for it!
Thank you for your participation, and your courage to do these exercises. For now, take a break. Perhaps this won't be the last time you carry the powers of your awakened senses out that door and into the world beyond.
Now you have seen what awarenesses are. The next step will be to learn awareness, itself--a temporarily lasting state of being awake, a calm "center" that is good for having awarenesses from.
First, I'd like to do an inventory of some of the resources for that which you may have already gained here, just by a little guided exploration with your five ordinary senses during the first two sets of exercises that you have done:
You have seen, by experience, that, in routine use, your senses are not usually brought all the way into that clear focus. So you also have a hint of what we mean by "sleep," in comparison.
You have been shown how to deliberately direct a given sense to a chosen spot and have an awareness there.
That is the prime tool of the awareness game! You can get "in focus" that way, on purpose, with your sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. You can "wake things up" by choice that way. You can "throw the ball of awareness" into this and that and have them come on for you in the field, where you can play with what they really are.
And you've seen that you can stay in that focused awareness for a little while, at least, when you are being coached to in the exercise sets, and that you can have awarenesses like this with more than one of your senses at the same time.
You may have learned that you can feel stable and "collected" by feeling your feet on the ground. You may like the feeling of standing with your knees loose while feeling your feet on the ground. Perhaps you've discovered the useful knowledge that your body "likes" to move. And, you have gotten a good tip that feeling your face in awareness can always tell you if you are being uptight or not.
You have also attempted to watch a little bit of your own thinking. And perhaps you have caught on already that it is possible to do that--that is, to have an awareness of what you are thinking, moments after, just like you have an awareness of something that is sounding in the sea of sounds, or of some object that you are looking at.
You have seen, perhaps, that you can feel some sounds with your body, as well as your ears. That is already dancing in place without moving! (You can do the same thing with the voices of people talking to you--and "dance with it" experientially, whether it's strident or sweet. In that way, sweet tones really reach you, and strident tones don't gain any purchase on your body as they are going on through, that is, they don't have the impact they usually do.
(You can practice focused hearing, and receiving music in the body on purpose when you are listening to music being performed. Further, you can do the same with your own voice. And by moments, in social situations, you can look beyond the words and meanings of the conversation you are having with another person to the pure suchness of the sound of it--tuning out meanings completely and dancing in place with the music you are both making. And perhaps there will be some insights in that.)
You may have found that there are some surprises around, after all, when you are having awarenesses with your eyes, your ears, your nose and mouth, and your body with its sense of touch. And you were shown a hint of how quickly one can tune in to experiencing beauty on purpose, whenever one likes . . . if one remembers.
And all of these resources have only become available to you by experiencing them directly with awareness. They are all of a different class of knowledge than ordinary intellectual, or conceptual knowledge, which depends on words, concepts and meanings. They are of a class of knowledge that is experiential.
And you've seen a little of how the body can have a verisimilitude of that kind of impact--even though no physical contact has actually happened at the time.
You have seen that this verisimilitude that we carry around with us can be "very similar" to reality. And you have listened to my cautionary comments that we humans can "get by" on that. We can indulge in versimilitude without pausing and having focused awarenesses of life. And yet, one can also learn to see where the blind one goes.
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