To Hear with Eyes Belongs to Love's Fine Wit -- Wm Shakespeare

Dear Friends,

We are working with sense perception, and today we'll continue in the realm of sight by working with two stones.  So please have on hand two small stones or pebbles to work with.  They shouldn't be crystals or anything human-formed or sentimentally charged.  Just your average pebbles.

It was Thomas Aquinas who in the 13th century most thoroughly developed a sense for the way that the natural world, the world of things, is actually a world of light or sacred significance.  Rumi, also, his close contemporary in Islam, said that things both reveal and conceal their true meaning.

Our normal sense-perception of today pushes things away and dumbs them down.  We see things, but we see them according to our preconceptions and prejudices.  As we learn to relax our gaze, looking with what Spangler calls soft eyes, we can notice that the "object" becomes less of an object and more of a subject, a source of meanings that are usually beyond us --not merely a canvas on which to project our familiar meanings.

This may sound complicated; it is simple enough in practice.  Looking up at the sky, it is easy to let yourself go and feel that you are up there among the clouds.  Or, at night, that you are up there among the stars. We can learn to dwell among things on the ground too, even a bit of gravel.  We look with the attitude of listening, and the pebble starts to bring us news we are glad to hear.

with love,

Michael