“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing 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
Imagine you are suddenly living for three months on the French Riviera. You have “traded” your home for an apartment in Nice, France for this adventure. How would your perceptions of life change? How might your spirituality open?
This is exactly what my wife and I are doing. We wanted to break our routine in Boulder County, Colorado. A pattern-interrupt seemed delicious, even life-giving. Ah, to live life differently; to see things through new eyes.
But we also knew such a disruption of our comfortable life would require us to grow; we are embracing that too.
In this blog post, I am more excited about how my perceptions are changing than singing the beauties of the French Riviera, extolling Nice’s multi-cultural scene, or joking about adjusting to France when we don’t speak French.
[Ok, just one humorous foible before we get to the point of this blog post, which is a revelation on love:
We’re in a store trying to buy body lotion. You would think for sure the French word “crème” meant body lotion. Wrong, I learned, as I confidently smeared a sample of “crème” up and down my arm. Creme meant body gel-soap! Ugh, sticky.]
The good news: the pattern-interrupt of living in a foreign country has allowed my perceptions to be broken open (well, at least intermittently, because our human default conditioning is strong, no matter what country we visit).
Soft eyes.
Soft eyes is a big part of the change I am excited to share with you.
If you don’t know the difference between hard eyes versus soft eyes, you should google it later – it’s a revelatory concept. But for now, here’s a quote to give you an intuitive understanding:
“You know what you need at a crime scene? Soft eyes.”
With soft eyes at a crime scene, you are able to allow mere details to transform into clues. Good detectives don’t run around staring fixedly at objects; they let the clues emerge as they softly allow the entire room into their perceptions.
Soft eyes is a profound way to understand how to move from:
details to clues,
conditioned way of seeing to new perceptions
trees to the forest,
small focus to big picture,
doing to being,
left brain to right brain,
profane to sacred,
ordinary to extraordinary,
stress to release,
contracted to open.
Only with soft eyes will much of the spiritual realm be revealed to you.
Only with soft eyes was Love revealed to me recently, as shared in the poem below.
A poem: don’t flinch. Don’t run (poetry done right is supercharged language that suddenly reveals reality itself).
The poem below is also one way to describe what it means to “flash awake” – to come spiritually awake and alive, in a flash. In this case, I was awakened in a flash while watching an elderly couple hobble by. Maybe you have had a similar experience, and you didn’t even have to be on the French Riviera ☺. So here’s the poem:
Poem: Flash Awake (Take 2)
Stop your way of seeing.
Trick your conditioning now,
Breathe yourself to a larger field,
Allow your searching stare to soften,
Let each detail — in fact all that is bounded —
Brim over its edges,
Like a water fountain cascading pool over pool.
Let things slip over the border, like this:
These young lovers kissing greedily,
This elderly couple hobbling by —
Lust and suffering only appearing
As discrete entities paraded before you.
Break the spell. Open sesame now!
Allow soft eyes to receive the shimmer
Of Love in all of this —
Love groping its way.
Here,
In the softness, where it’s permeable,
Where the divine bleds through the silkscreen
Yes, all this too is but love …
Love, like a steamy hot day
Seduced to rise up
Between Earth’s profusion
And open Sky.
. . . . . end of poem . . . .
Pause.
Let the poem’s afterglow linger for a moment.
Take in those final lines again.
What is Earth’s profusion? Love.
What is the open Sky? Love.
Why is love “seduced to rise up” between them? Because it is love that ultimate unifies the earthly and divine realms.
What does it feel like to flash awake for the moment to the omnipresence of Love? This poem conveys one such way.
In the poem, and in real life, you can transform your consciousness FROM experiencing the details of your life through the hard eyes of ego – which relies on separation and judgment … TO experiencing the details of your life through soft eyes – that is, the revelation, the awakening of “all these details too are love, groping their way.”
Why is this important? It is important for those of us on a psycho-spiritual path to develop the capacity of being more fully present with Love suffusing everything.
It is important for us to be able to flash awake to love’s presence in everything which seems disconnected, discrete, separate, or suffering.
To flash awake is to slip into soft eyes. Even so, you will notice (if you really tune in) that your ego will re-assert its control, defaulting back to hard eyes.
But despair not. You can remember to flash awake again. Soft eyes. Voila! There is the love again.
Do I stay at all times in the soft eyes that perceives everything as love? Hell, no.
But I can flash awake again and again. Voila! There is the love again.
… and all this too is love, groping its way.
P.S. I have spent many years researching and experiencing different forms of conscious breathing patterns (belly, diaphragmatic, fire, hatha breathing, etc). If you would like to download my mp3 of the #1 breathing pattern that facilitates soft eyes and the flash awake, you can click here:
P.S.S. It is easy in the comment section below, to share your own “flash awake” to Love. I would love to hear it, and so would my readers I bet.