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SOFTENING THE BOUNDARIES BY TUNING THE SENSES

“Hark how the little birds sing of love,” sang the old lady on the park bench.

“That's aggression, not love! They're staking a territorial claim when they make that noise,” sneered the acne-scarred youth by her side.

Why did he say that? Was the fleeting intellectual triumph really worth the effort? See how quickly the old dear has forgotten his remark and returned to blissful contemplation! But does he look any happier for his knowledge?

They live in two quite different models of reality. Society would call him ”strong-minded', but he bears his reality like an irritating burden, whereas she has disciplined the world into a cornucopia of joy. Should we not then admit that, though not so strong in mind, she is at least the stronger in soul?

The above quote comes from a book I wrote called Thundersqueak (1979). It reflects a conflict between puritanism and sensitivity.

ARE YOU A PURITAN? OR A GOURMET?

When, for example, I read some glossy magazine article extolling the fine difference between one sort of gourmet delicacy and another, or immensely flowery descriptions of the precise impression that a certain wine leaves on the refined palate, then something in me may protest that so much time and money is being spent on expensive delicacies when there are millions of people on this planet who cannot even afford enough food to stay alive.

For some people, the argument stops there. These are the puritans who would deny all luxury or indulgence for any number of reasons—because the flesh is sinful, because others cannot afford them, because the environment would suffer if we all enjoyed them…or whatever.

Although I can accept the truth of many of these objections, there is a second voice in me that points out that the gastronomic spirit is also a very natural and joyful celebration of existence.

On the one hand I can be angry because the Puritan Spirit in me associates gastronomic refinement with excessive wealth and a desire to show off. On the other hand I know that, once the basic needs of staying alive have been met, even the poorest and most destitute can begin to differentiate between foods that evoke delight and those that simply nourish. Just because one is a homeless tramp does not make it impossible to savour wild berries in Autumn, and I myself can recall just how utterly exquisite was the taste of a simple boiled egg after a week without any food…

In fact the real problem with wealthy food snobs is not so much sensual indulgence as the fact that they can be so obsessed with abstract issues such as the price, the prestige, or the rarity of their indulgence that they fail to tune into its true sensual qualities. They become blunted rather than sensitised by their wealth. Don't we love those tales of wine buffs praising a bottle of cheap plonk onto which some joker has pasted an expensive wine label?

IT ISN'T JUST ABOUT FOOD AND TASTE…

Like the angry young man in the quotation above, there are some people who consistently react against the craze for alternative medicine or organic foods by quoting research showing that it is over-priced, or bogus, or no better for us. On the one hand I know how good it feels to get back at some frightfully smug and dogmatic New Ager by challenging their fads, but on the other hand I know that there can also be a great deal of joy in exploring the options for better food or a healthier life. I am all for joyful exploration and believe that exaggerated criticism of that human need reflects a form of dogmatic puritanism that does not like to see people having too much fun.

WHAT HAS ALL THIS GOT TO DO WITH EXPERIMENTAL CLAIRVOYANCE?

It is all too easy to put the full blame for blocked psychism onto an over-developed intellect, without recognising that there is a puritan tendency that can also form a barrier. The spirit that disapproves of the connoisseur, or the food faddist, or the flaky New Ager, or the twittering “sensitive”, is not far removed from the spirit that frowns on any form of magic.

I have some sympathy for people who try not to eat too much microwaved food, but I am irritated when someone refuses to eat any microwaved food even when there is no alternative. I am irritated when someone refuses to take some necessary action because of “bad feng shui” or “negative vibrations”, and yet I sympathise with those who strive positively to create better feng shui or improve the world's vibrations.

IT'S ABOUT HAVING FUN…

It's the difference between being the victim of one's own sensitivity, and opting for a “sensitivity bonus” to increase the joy of living.

So the first message of this course is that we are seeking to develop our psychic abilities not in order to become enslaved or driven by them, but rather to enjoy the value they can add to our lives.

The second message, then, is what to do about an over-busy intellect that keeps insisting “How can you see fairies when you know they do not exist? When irrefutable scientific evidence for the human aura has never been established?” and so on. This is the voice of reason, a very useful voice when you wish to stop things running out of control, but a real bore when it stops anything at all from happening.

Here again there is a puritan side to reason, when it says “I won't allow this to happen because I know it cannot be real”, but there is also a more playful side that can be just as inhibiting. This is the voice that gets so excited when something looks like happening that it rushes in to examine it—rather like the excited child who, having planted a seed, kills it by constantly digging it up to see if it is sprouting. This voice can say : “Wow! I seem to have scored a real hit with that bit of the tarot reading! So I wonder if I'm really psychic, or was it just that I picked up a subtle clue from the punter's body language?” Once you get into that frame of mind you can be so set on finding out “how it works” that you hinder any further results.

THE MAGIC CUP AND THE MAGIC DAGGER

So we need to encourage a different mindset, one that will allow things to develop without slamming on the brakes. To illustrate this mindset I will use an analogy based on a Cup and a Dagger—two so-called “magical weapons”.

The open, receptive attitude that seems to foster clairvoyance is analogous to the Cup, and it is very different from the Dagger of analysis. In the following exercises you will be encouraged to gather sensory data, to explore with all your senses, and I will encourage you to imagine yourself as a Cup, filling up with feeling impressions and simply holding them as a whole, just as a cup holds water.

What you want to discourage at this stage is the tendency in a scientific culture to behave like a Dagger that cuts things open to examine them and analyse into separate parts. For if our Dagger side is over-active, then all impressions get shredded before they can collect.

We are not abandoning the Dagger, simply telling it to wait its turn. First we need to gather impressions in the Cup, and only when we have got some results should we then use the Dagger to see if they were worth collecting.

EXERCISES FOR WEEK 1

The plan is to begin by increasing sensitivity in a way that does not present a direct challenge to reason. We can even catch reason unawares. Nor do we want to challenge the inner puritan that would disapprove of excessive sensitivity.

What would that puritan spirit think if it heard some know-all musical connoisseur say: “I simply refuse to go to that concert because the symphony they are playing should only be listened to lying down”? The reaction might be, “What a load of arty-farty codswallop! How can it matter whether you listen to music lying, sitting or even standing on your head?”

Like the angry young man quotation at the top of the chapter, it's an understandable reaction, but it isn't quite as rational as it might seem. Because, ever since the advent of stereophonic sound, it has become common knowledge that acoustics do vary as you move around in a room, so the position of the listener's head would actually make some small difference. What's more, the experience of music is not directly that of the vibrating atoms of air in the room, but rather how they are interpreted by the human ear and auditory system. Standing, sitting and lying alter the parameters of the balance system governed by the inner ear, and affect other factors like muscular tension and blood pressure.

So the position we are in must have some effect on the musical experience. The only question is whether it is too small to be noticed—can we detect the difference?

EXERCISE 1 : LISTENING TO MUSIC

So the idea is to go alone into a room and put on a piece of music fairly loud, then make a conscious attempt to hear it more intensely than ever before.

Try to extend your senses so you hear it not just in your ears, but feel the vibrations over your whole body. Give it your total attention—not a narrow analytical attention that separates out the instruments (like the Dagger frame of mind) and analyses the musical score, but rather a complete surrender to the sheer sound in its wholeness (the Cup frame of mind).

Do this for a while, maybe with different pieces of music, until you get a really good feel of listening in a different way, of experiencing the music as never before.

When you have done this to your own satisfaction, then proceed to answer the question: “Does this piece sound better standing, sitting or lying down?” In other words, you know rationally that there must be some difference, so are you able to detect it?

Experiment with that for a while and note your results with different pieces of music for comparison.

The idea is that we are trying to observe something that is very nearly invisible, but with the reassuring conscious knowledge that there really is something to observe. Unlike later clairvoyant experiences, this exercise does not challenge our scientific culture, but simply stretches it a bit to include experiences that it would consider to be trivial, rather than nonexistent.

EXERCISE 2: BEING A CONNOISSEUR

Now apply the same approach to explore your other senses. For example, assuming that you are not already a trained wine taster, see if you can make sense of the wonderful descriptions on the back of the bottle. Pour yourself a glass, sit in silent contemplation and sip the wine to see if you can detect the “sensational alchemy between the sweet flavours of creamy, soft red berries, chocolate covered orange peel and the fragrant, savoury woodiness which, on the palate, wrap themselves around the cool flinty core of this profoundly complex wine”—or whatever the experts say.

Once again, the inner puritan might want to declare “What a load of rubbish”, but remember that the person who came up with this rubbish is probably a highly-trained and paid expert. Again, there must be something in it, but is it something we can tune ourselves to detect?

The sense of smell is a tricky one for many people. You might for example take a selection of perfumes and, instead of asking the simple question “Do I like this perfume?” try something subtler, such as “What sort of occasion would be right for this perfume and what would be wrong?” or “What sort of person should wear this perfume and who should not?”

Sight is difficult for a different reason. Many people are so visual that they have ingrained habits of seeing that are hard to shift. If you take drawing lessons the teacher might well begin with exercises to make you look at things in a new way, seeing them as if for the first time. Rather than try to compete with that, I suggest you move on to the next exercise…

EXERCISE 3: THE SENSUAL AWARENESS MEDITATION

Sit comfortably in an agreeable and not overly intrusive environment and begin by listening to the sounds around you. Do it in the same vivid, fully aware way that you listened to music in the first exercise, but this time you are simply listening to the ambient sound around you. Again, try not to engage the analytic (Dagger) mind that recognises individual sounds and names them, but rather be open (the Cup) to all the sounds together as if they were the totality of a piece of music.

When you have achieved a measure of success at this, move to each of the other four senses, one by one. I suggest vision next: see what is around you in a similar, fully aware way. As before, you do not focus the gaze on individual items so much as become simultaneously aware of the entire 180 degree visual input—being as aware of the peripheral vision as the centre, and not naming what you see. Then try the same with sensation: become aware of the feel of the chair you are sitting on, the breeze on your skin, the position of your body and any tensions or good feelings in it. Smell next, and finally taste.

Note that this is not the same as a “stillness” sort of meditation; the sensing is more active. Although the best approach to sound might be to close the eyes and not move, when it comes to taste you almost certainly need to move your tongue a little to taste what is in your mouth; smell is greatly heightened by increasing the breath and sniffing; to be fully aware of the texture under your fingers, you will do better to move them slightly; and the visual awareness is probably heightened by slight eye movements.

Having run through each sense, you then try to hold that awareness for all five senses at once, to achieve what I'll call total awareness (TA, for shorthand). “Total” is an exaggeration, unless you are highly proficient, because it is very hard to be utterly totally aware. All we require for now is wide open senses and a conscious awareness that is constantly holding those sense impressions and feeling highly aware. Unless you are eating something, the sense of taste will probably get less attention than the other senses, but do at least try to hold sight, sound and body sensation together.

THE QUESTION IS: HOW DO YOU GET ON WITH THIS EXERCISE?

The answer I receive from most people is that, as long as you apply yourself, TA is fairly easy to attain for a few seconds, but hard to maintain.

All too soon you will find your mind has wandered. Either because one sense takes over—as when something interesting is seen and you start watching it and forget the other senses—or else the bored mind starts wandering and you suddenly find yourself daydreaming about something that has nothing to do with your immediate senses.

If that is the case with you, the next exercise should provide a solution.

EXERCISE 4: THE WALKING EXERCISE

Go to some peaceful place—such as the countryside or a quiet suburb—and take a walk, trying to maintain a state of TA as you do so.

Why do I suggest a peaceful place? Not for the value of peace in itself, but simply to avoid the sort of attention-catching distraction mentioned above.

Being in TA, you are vividly aware of everything around you, though trying not to “name” or “think about” any of it, simply receiving and holding the impressions. The Cup not the Dagger.

So, when you inevitably realise that your mind has wandered, and you have lost TA, the fact that you had been in vivid awareness means you can recall your last moments of vivid perception and make yourself turn around, walk back to the place where you had it, and then continue the journey in TA.

Make sure, however, that as you walk back you also maintain TA. So what happens if your attention drifts again before you even get back to where you last lost awareness? You just do the same thing: turn around again, get back into TA, and walk back to the point where it drifted the second time, then continue the journey back to the previous point.

In theory, you might spend the rest of the journey just zigzagging to and fro between two points, each time slipping into a daydream before you have retraced your steps. But in practice I find that the sheer discipline of having to retrace steps does drive the mind to stop its wandering and really hold TA. So with a little practice you will find that you can walk for, say, half an hour and know that most of that time you were in a state of intense, wordless awareness.

The beauty of this exercise is that, because it demands more of you, it is actually much easier than sitting still in a chair and trying to be totally aware. It is a great exercise.

EXERCISE 4: INNER AWARENESS

Answer this question: Do you feel different after such a walk?

What I am asking you to do, firstly, is to practise a sort of inner TA—just turn your senses inward and become aware of your whole inner state. Just hold that state (like a Cup) for as long as you like before answering the question: Do I feel different?

You will feel different. In which case, you can, if you wish, go on to explore what is different by being more analytical. What is your bodily sensation, your metal state, do you feel more aware? More peaceful? Or whatever.

This exercise links back to the first one where you looked at your inner response to music heard in different ways—is it different when standing or sitting? Now we ask: are things different when we practise total awareness? What has it left you with?

SUMMARY FOR WEEK ONE

We want to explore our psychic potential. We may have rational resistance to the whole idea of psychic sensing, so we begin by increasing our sensitivity to subtle sensory data at the edge of perception, rather than immediately going full-on for “clairvoyance”.

We may also have another form of resistance, a dislike of flaky, fey New Age faddism or a sense that, in a world of so much pain and deprivation, it is sheer bourgeois self-indulgence to want to increase sensitivity, or that discrimination is a dirty word and should be reduced, not enhanced. To overcome that resistance, we focus on the joy of exploration, rather than allowing ourselves to become victims to sensitivity.

So when, in the last experiment, I ask: “What has it left you with?”, I am expecting some sort of positive answer. Most people seem to feel good for a while after such an experience. Total awareness adds value to life, and its practice is good for us.

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS

DOES IT MATTER IF I CAN'T FIND TIME ALONE TO DO THESE EXERCISES?

The first thing I noted in the feedback from these exercises was how readily they could be adapted to suite different daily conditions. I left them simple and flexible because I know that many people are committed to busy work and social schedules, and the exercises could be adjusted to suit these.

For example, it had not occurred to me that the walking exercise might be attempted by a person using a wheelchair, but one of the people on the course did that and their observations were all the more interesting for that:

This one was personally very difficult but interesting for me. As I use a manual wheelchair, movement in this state is quite strange, particularly given the fact that the situation was overwhelmingly kinaesthetic in nature, almost to the exclusion of other senses. I am usually hyper aware of the contours of the ground I cover, but in practising this exercise I found myself actually paying less attention to my surroundings, and more to the sensations of my body, my hands against wheel rims, muscular movements and tightness, my breath, etc.

One participant was practising awareness in a public place—a courthouse—expanding his listening outwards: “So, I'm sat there, hearing more and more—the inane chatter of lawyers, the mobile phones outside, the grumbling of the central heating…” Then he heard a mumbled conversation about a potential criminal deal, and reported it. “A quick word to a security guard, and crime has been fought for one day, all thanks to [this] excercise!” Not a result I was expecting, but an interesting comment on the possible benefits of awareness.

Another person got an unexpected bonus from the exercise:

I tried listening to the sounds around me in the kitchen, was impressed at the dishwasher making such a rhythmic nose, when I realized that there was a meeting at the hall down the road to mark a Senegalese festival and it was actual, real drum beats that I could hear. I watched them all reunited nostalgically, grouped together around their drums, keeping up a rhythm that lasted well into the night. I watched one man in a long white tunic walk away with such a joyful spring to his step that it made me laugh.

This is another example of how one can set out to expand one's universe a little by learning a new skill, and find little side-benefits from the exercises adding extra value to life—a conversation overheard, a discovery of an interesting spectacle down the street that one might never have witnessed in normal consciousness.

Although I specify a particular way of doing these exercises for the sake of clarity, they are in fact very adaptable to everyday life once you get the basic principle. It is a way of listening—rather than a way of listening just to music.

THIS TOTAL AWARENESS, AM I MEANT TO GO INTO A SORT OF TRANCE?

If by “trance” you mean a turning inward, or you mean a narrowing down of the attention for economy of effort—like the times when you are so focused on driving that you are not aware of anything other than the road—then what we are exploring would seem quite the opposite of trance. And yet what we are doing can shift consciousness in the same way that a trance does.

If, instead of opening up his hearing to everything around, the writer above had been a security guard specifically listening out for signs of crime, would he have been more, or less likely to hear that conversation? It is an interesting question.

But I suggest that for most of our evolutionary history we would have had our senses wide open for all impressions. When walking in the wild, danger can take so many forms—a lion's footprint or the trembling of a branch, the hiss of a snake or buzz of a mosquito, a smell of rhino shit or of fire, and so on. This was confirmed by one of the participants who had been taught a similar exercise as part of the Kamana Program of the Wilderness Awareness School, described as “a mix of native wisdom and field biology”. He mentioned an interesting extension of the awareness exercise that you could experiment with:

One of the things they taught was to imagine each sense being a different animal: Owl for sight, Deer for hearing, Raccoon for touch, Dog for smell, Fox or Cat for movement. One then pulled it all together and became the Wolf. For me this helps.

So I reckon that human beings, like most animals, evolved to be hard-wired for wide open senses, and that modern living has narrowed down the threats so that we have gained a greater ability to concentrate, but that we do not practise open awareness sufficiently. That could explain why it feels so good when you do practise it. As one participant wrote:

Things seemed more beautiful and more weird—hearing sounds without taking for granted where they were coming from made listening a much more interesting experience…It had the effect of making me feel liberated, I suppose from emotions and attachment. Everything seemed new, it was a bit like being on holiday or waking up first thing in the morning, before you remember all the stuff you've got to do.

Another wrote:

I did find that focusing on the environment as fully as possible took the focus away from all the stuff going on in my head, leading to a meditative state. Even if I did struggle with maintaining TA, at least I learnt a way of clearing my mind and reducing anxiety that can be used in daily situations.

IF I CAN'T MANAGE THE WALKING EXERCISE, IS THE SEATED ONE OKAY?

Exercise 4, the walking awareness exercise, makes it much easier to get results because of the physical discipline involved in making yourself walk back every time to the point where awareness was lost. It is the better exercise.

The reason I suggested you start with Exercise 3—the seated sensory awareness—was to get you used to the idea, and to find how difficult it is to maintain high awareness and not fall into daydreams when simply sitting still. So it was good preparation for the more effective Exercise 4.