Winter Unity in Community
Dissolving Obstacles to Intimacy

Chapter Five: Bare Perception: How Unified Consciousness Transforms the Senses

The mountains, earth, grasses, and trees are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle sound demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed truth. – Yuan-Sou

In 1981, while living at a Zen monastery in upstate New Yori, I met a Yugoslav musician named Zoran, who is now my husband. One of the things that attracted me to him was a quality of alert silence that seemed to surround him like a field of radar. In one of our first encounters, we were sitting on a bench at the edge of the forest, just as the crickets began their evening uproad. With our heads in close proximity, my hearing was stretched open by his sensitivity to sound. The insects’ brassy song became an exquisite pattern of tiny discernible distances.

In the previous chapters, I have described how our capacities for awareness, love, and physical sensation deepen and unify as we realize spiritual oneness. As our subjective organization – our defenses and other holding paterns – of these capacities dissolves, so does our sense of being a subject separate from an objective external world. Our own being is experienced as continuous with the unified awareness, love, and physical sensation that pervades everywhere. This same transformation occurs in our senses. As we realize spiritual oneness, our perception becomes more subtle and unified. As our subjective manipulation of our perception dissolves, we realize that there is no true separation between subject and object. There is no boundary between ourselves as the perceiver and that which we perceive. All our perceptions arise directly out of the unified empty space of fundamental consciousness. In the spiritual literature of the East, this clear immediacy of the perceptible world is called “direct” or “bare” perception. An early Buddhist text describes bare perception by saying, “In the seen there will be just the seen; in the heard, just the heard; in smelling, tasting, touching, just smelling, tasting, touching; in the cognized, just the cognized.”

In the West, this aspect of spiritual realization has often been described as a dropping away of veils. It feels as if there is finally no barrier between ourselves and whatever we are perceiving. We are fully alert to the present moment, just as it is. This stripped-clean perception reveals a very different world from the one we used to know. The apparent solidity of our enviornment now appears to be transparent, permeable. This means that instead of seeing and touching just the surface of the people and things around us, we can see and touch through their internal depth. We can look at a flower and see the vibrancy of the life force within it. We can touch a person and feel the qualities of that person’s being within their body.

As our perception becomes more subtle, we are able to perceive the luminosity and the qualities of aliveness and sentience that pervade the whole material world. Everything that we perceive appears to be radiant and both substantial and weightless at the same time, as if it were made of consciousness. Recently, on the last morning of a week-long Realization Process retreat, one of the participants came to the session very excited. He had been casually looking out of. restaurant window at the forest as he ate breakfast. There was a telephone pole right next to a tree. He noticed, for the first time in his life, how very much more alive the tree was than the telephone pole. In the spiritual dimensio, even a blade of grass looks conscious, as if it could think and speak.

Asian metaphysics says that each sense is a type of consciousness. We do not perceive the world with the sense organis alone; our consciousness perceives the world through the organs of the senses. It is really our consciousness that sees, for example; the eyes are just the instrument of seeing. We can say that the eyes are ike the lens of a camera; they do not actually take the picture. As we realize spiritual oneness, we discover that our various sense consciousnesses are actually the one fundamental consciousness that pervades everywhere. The revered ninth-century Zen master Rinzai said, “O Brethren, the Mind-Reality has no definite form. It permeates and runs through the whole universe. In the eye it acts as sight; in the ear it acts as hearing; in the nose it acts as the sense of smell; in the mouth, it speaks; in the hand it grasps; in the foot it walks.”

As fundamental consciousness, all of our senses function together. For example, just as we are able to think and feel at the same time, we are able to see and hear at the same time. Each moment occurs as a single, multifaceted vibrational pattern that registers in all of our senses at once. Just like the movement of our thoughts, feeings, and physical sensations, our perceptions register in the stillness of fundamental consciousness without altering it. In the language of Zen, they “leave no trace.” For example, the sound of a gong can reverberate through the stllness and.silence of our consciousness without disturbing the stillness or silence at all. This means that the reverberation will occur in its totality, with no interference on our part.

Bare perception is entirely effortless. We do not have to look in order to see or listen in order to hear. We need only to receive our environment exactly as it is in each moment.

Direct transmission occurs in perception, just as it does in the qualities of awareness, love, and physical sensation. As I described above in my encounter with my husband, the openness of another person’s perception can stretch our own. This can happen when we see or hear a work of art. If we open to the depth and harmony of the artist’s perception, we may release some of the holding patterns that limit our own capacity for perception.

The senses are also pathways of resonance and mutual contact between ourselves and other life. For example, we make eye contact with other people. And when we touch another person, we experience mutual tactile contact between the person’s body and our own. This form of contact becomes increasingly subtle and pleasureable as we realize spiritual oneness. Just as two people can experience the resonance and continuity of love, awareness, or physical sensation that pervades them both, they can open to oneness through their gaze or through any of the senses. In the practices, the function of direct transmission will help both partners release the holding patterns that obstruct their perception.

Perception can function as a path toward spiritual realization in the way way that love, awareness, or physical sensation can be a path. The Buddha is said to have attained his complete enlightenment when, after sitting for many days absorbed in meditation, he opened his eyes and saw the morning star.

Since fundamental consciousness pervades our whole being, to perceive with (or as) fundamental consciousness means that we perceive with our whole being. We see, hear, touch, taste, and smell with our whole body and mind. I once attended a meditation intensive with the Zen master Joshu Sasaki Roshi. in private interviews, he tested the student’s degree of enlightenment by banging a short wooden stick on the ground. He wanted to see if we could open to the full impact of the sound. There are many stores in Zen Buddhism in which a master is asked to define enlightenment and answers, “Plum blossoms in the snow,” or something of that sort. Enlightenment is whatever we are experience in the moment, experienced with our whole being.

It is important to know that our perception shifts toward this unified, direct, and effortless experience as we realize fundamental consciousness. Otherwise, we may spend many wonderful hours shut away in meditation and then return to our fragmented state of consciousness as soon as we encounter the perceptual stimulation of our everyday lives. However, some spiritual teachers place so much emphasis on bare perception that we might conflude that spiritual realization involves only the perceptual aspect of our being. I have observed many spiritual practitioners attempting to live only in the clarity of their perception while their capacity for emotion, for example, remains constricted. Although we are never entirely without constriction, to focus only on one aspect of spiritual realization will intensify the fragmentation in our being.

To focus only on the perceptual aspect of realization may intensify a very common form of fragmentation, in which the world outside of one’s body is attended to while the internal space of one’s body is ignored. Spiritual practitioners, often having been particularly sensitive as children, may grow up with exactly this imbalance of focus toward the external world. The vividness of the sights and sounds around them and the changes in facial expression, vocal tone, and other emotional cues of the people in their environment distract many sensitive children from inward contact with their own emotions, thoughts, and physical sensations. it is then only too easy to continue to fine-tune this perceptual vigilance through spiritual practice. We cannot actually arrive at fundamental consciousness through practicing bare perception alone, without opening all of the capacities of our being.

Unveiling the Senses

There are many ways in which we limit or veil our perception. One of the main obstacles to bare perception is the tendency to substitute ideas for experience itself. these concepts come, for the most part, out of our past experience. Human beings are fast learners. As children, we learn that life is a certain way, that men and women and all of the various objects around us are a certain way, based on the information that first impresses itself on our minds. It is very challenging for us as adults, having learned how life is, to perceive each moment of ife unfolding anew.

Our familiarity with the idea of “table,” for example, obscures our actual experience of this particular table in this present moment. In order to truly experience the table, we need to receive it, without any preconception, in the clear, empty space of our consciousness. When this occurs, we realize that the table is not separate from the consciousness that reveals it. It is not separate from our perception. Our own existence and the table’s existence appear to arise simultaneously out of the same consciousness.

To perceive another human being in this way is particularly challenging, and important, in ongoing relationships. Over time we tend to form an idea of who the other person is and then expect them to be that way forever. We form habitual ways of relating to people based on our static mental idea of who they are. when we receive our partner or friend in the unguarded openness of bare perception, our relationship with them is constantly renewed.

When our senses are constricted, it is easy to feel withdrawn from the limited world we perceive or to project onto it our fears and aversions. To feel truly involved with other people, we need to truly perceive them. We need to allow ourselves to hear the sound of their voices, feel the quality of their touch, observe the ezpressions and attitudes that change in them from moment to moment.

Mental concepts also impede our innate function of attraction. We possess a natural capacity for arousal in our intelligence, emotions, and sexuality that draws us toward particular people. Our image of the perfect man or woman can prevent us from finding a mate by obstructing our ability to respond to the actual people we encounter. These images are often based on our personal history. For example, I worked with a woman who always rejected men whose hands looked “too smooth.” Until she examined her childhood, she had not associated this rather limiting preference with her grandfather, a hard-working carpenter who had been the only positive male figure in her early years.

Our images of male and female attractiveness also emerge the communal, cultural fantasy that is passed from one generation to the next and reinforced through the media. Cultural iamges are difficult to shed because they are so ubiquitous; they become as unnoticeable as background noise. To rid ourselves of these generic images of men and women requires that we allow the people in our lives to register fully in our perception. When our senses are open, we often find beauty where we did not expect it.

When we project mental concepts onto the people and things around us, we live in an abstract world. Interestingly, the realization of the spiritual dimension is a progression away from abstraction and toward an experience of specific, concrete reality. Spiritual realization is a realization of this present moment, fully lived, just as it is.

Besides the projection of concepts onto reality, we limit our perception by simply not being attentive to the moment. Anyone who has attempted to sit and quiet the mind in meditation for any prolonged period is familiar with the many ways in which we divert our attention from the present. For the most part, these are habitual patterns of distraction that we have cultivated all our lives in order to cope with anxiety and boredom. We also limit our attention in order to concentrate on particular tasks – for example, the person who dims the perceptual world in order to think without distraction – and we automatically blot out unpleasant perceptual stimuli. Over time, these fragmented or narrowed patterns of focus become fixed in the tissues of the sense organs. This often produces a vicious cycle in which we increase the rigidity of our focus in order to compensate for limitation or exhaustion in our sense organs.

Holding patterns in the sense organs can become so severe that they cause deafness or blindness. For example, I worked with a man who had accepted his deafness as an inevitable symptom of his advanced age. But as he began to contact the internal space of his body, he could clearly feel the tension that he held in the deaf ear. Although he was now retired, he had worked for many years as a television cameraman, receiving instructions through an earphone in the same ear. Meir Schneider, a man who was born blind, writes a moving account of his partial recovery of vision through relaxation exercises and through deep insight into his fear of seeing. There are many reasons people are afraid to encounter the world with clear perception. Schneider discovered that he was terrified that other people would not see what he saw; that vision would isolate him from other human beings. Some people fear that they will dislike what they see if they allow themselves to see clearly, or that they will be distracted by desire for the people and objects around them.

We created most of the rigid limitations in our perception as children, to defend ourselves against the impact of specific painful perceptual stimuli. We may, for example, shut out the sound of our parents arguing by constricting our hearing or shut down our sense of smell against a persistent odor of whisky that accompanies strange alterations in our parents’ behavior. We may respond to spoken or unspoken commands against perception from adults who wish to conceal themselves from the direct scrutiny of their childre. We also match the ways our parents limit their own perception by mirroring their holding patterns in our own sense organs. As adults, we may guard against fully seeing the facial expressions of the people around us, because we unconsciously fear the same expressions of anger, neediness, etc., that distorted our parents’ features or the same dissonance between vocal tone and facial expression that confused us as children.

How Our Pattern of Defense Shapes Our Perception

In addition to these direct defenses against perception, our sense organs are also constricted by the pattern of defense in our whole body. As I explained in the last chapter, each small part of ourselves contains bot the spectrum of our essential qualities (awareness, emotion, physical sensation) and the pattern of defense within our whole organism. If we are most open in our mental capacity and most defended in our physical sensation, for example, each of our senses will contain the same pattern of openness at the top – the top of the eyes, the top of the orifices of the ears, the top of the nostril orifices (toward the tip of the nose)- and constriction at the bottom.

Although this correspondence occurs in all our senses, it is easiest to discern in our eyes. If we look carefully at other people, we will notice that we all gaze more through some parts of our eyes than others. If we have more internal contact with our head than our pelvis, for example, we will see more out of the top of our eyes than the bottom. This will produce a different expression in our eyes than in someone who is more open in their pelvis or chest. Although this placement will change somewhat in different circumstances, most of these patterns of openness and defense are either habitual attitudes or chronic rigidities in the physical tissues of our body. In this way, we maintain specific limitatoins in our perception of our enviornment, which we mistake for the nature of reality.

The pattern of openness and defense in our sense organis determins the range of qualities in the world we perceive. For example, if we see mostly through the top of our eyes, our visual perception of the world will lack texture and weight. You can try this out yourself by looking at the carpet in your room or the fabric of your clothes. Try seeing the teture of the carpet or the clothes that you are looking at. If you observe yourself carefully as you do this, you will notice that you automatically gaze through the bottom of your eyes and contact the bottom ofyour body in order to see the texture.

Our holding patterns also determine the range of qualities in our sense organ contact – for example, in our eye contact or our touch. If we constrict our emotonal capacity, for example, there will be a corresponding lack of emotion in the expressiveness of our eyes or outr touch, in our visual or tactile contact with other life. We will not be able to see or to touch “from the heart.” The information that we receive through our senses will be limited in the same way.

As we realize spiritual oneness, the holding pattern in our senses gradually dissolve, and we begin to receive the whole picture. We are able to rest in the balance of internal and external experience, and the world around us becomes increasingly visual and meaningful. There is a mysterious and satisfying harmony in the “multimedia” experience of each moment.

The process of freeing the senses can be even more challenging than letting go of other types of holding patterns, because it actually changes the world in which we live. The new range of information available to us may require that we rexamine our life choices. There may also be some temporary blurriness of perception as we release our habitual way of focsing, but that will dissolve into greater clarity. Some people also find it difficult to adjust to the luminosity of bare perception. I worked with one woman who would emerge from meditation waving her hands in front of her as if to disperse the excess radiance in the air. It took about a year before she became accustomed to the light-filled space as the normal appearance of the world.

It can also be difficult to shift form our abstract, imagined world to the stripped-down world of actual experience. Although I was a dancer for most of my childhood and adolescence, I experienced the main locus of my being high up in my head. From there I perceived the world around me as a moving array of symbolic meaning. Then, when I was in my twenties, a back injury forced me to enter into deeper contact with my body and self. One of the things I noticed as I began the shift toward wholeness was that the wolrd seemed quite different. It had become more solid, more soberly “just the facts” in its look and sound and feel. Although some poeple feel lighter as they open to the spiritual dimension, I felt heavier, and everything around me suddenly had more substance and weight as well. I was struck by the ungraspable otherness of the world, for it was no longer tied up with my own imagination. Then, as I continued on my path, the appearance of the world continued to change. The solidity of the world became transparent. There was a creek near the monstery in upstate New York where I often went to meditate. Sitting there one day, I noticed that the rocks seemed weightless. They were both substantial and “energy” at the same time. They appeared to be made of radiant space.

Recently a friend told me sadly that after many years on his spiritual path, he is still unable to see God in everyone. My understanding is that God is in the seeing itself. As our own vision becomes the subtle, bare perception of fundamental consciousness, it sees itself in all of the beings and objects that we encounter.

Another woman who works as a cranial-sacral practitioner (a subtle form of bodywork), told me recently that she’d met a photographer who travels around the world trying to take pictures of divine light in the body. All of our senses can become subtle enough to detect the radiance of the spiritual dimension in other people, no matter how hidden it is. In his “Song to Naropa,” the Tibetan Buddhist sage Tilopa calls thie “gazing with sheer awareness into sheer awareness.”

Seeing Through the Body

As we realize fundamental consicousness, we gain the ability to “see-feel” through the internal space of another perosn’s body We can perceive, we gain the ability to “see-feel” through the internal space of another perosn’s body We can perceive, within this space, the qualities that make up their being, the streaming of energy through their body, and even the movement of their feelings and thoughts. Some very sensitive people can hear the unspoken words that a person is thinking. Some can see the internal organs in people’s bodies and diagnose illnesses.

Just as we do not need to see a person’s facial expression in order to detect the quality of anger or sadness in their voice, we are able to perceive emotional qualities in the body. We can discern both a person’s present emotional responses and the static emotional qualities that have been held in their body since childhood. Interestingly, we do not even need to be in proximity to someone to read their emotional responses. For example, in telephone conversations we can often perceive the emotional reactions of the person we are speaking with in the silence that precedes their verbal response.

Bare perception is thus an inseparable part of our oneness and intimacy with other life. Although many people are afraid at first of what their increased perception will reveal, most find that it brings them a deep sense of kinship with other living beings. When we perceive another person this intimately, we are able to recognize in them the same innate spirit and the same painful constraints that we know in ourselves. This is an unshakable foundation for compassion. It also makes our relationships less confusing, because we can see more clearly where people are open and where they are defended. In other words, we can see “where they are coming from.” As well as clarifying our connection to the people in our present lives, this clear-through perception can help us resolve important relationships from the past.

A woman named Cynthia came to work with me because she had become obsessed with a man who had left her several months before. She felt compelled to keep calling him, only to be rejected again and again. I was impressed by Cynthia’s attractive, lively spirit, and I sympathized with her frustration that she was directing her considerable passion toward a man who was not interested in her. But as she narrated for me her history of relationships over the past twenty years of her adult life, it became clear that she was consistently drawn to men who rejected her. As she was well read in the field of psychology, she acknowledged that this pattern might have something to do with her relationship with her father.

I placed an empty chair opposite Cynthia and asked her to picture her father sitting on the chair. The empty chair technique comes from Gestalt therapy and is very effective for releasing bound emotions in relation to important people in our lives. But I wanted Cynthia to do something more subtle than the usual Gestalt-style dialogue. I wanted her to really see her father, to see through his body to the life within.

Cynthia stared at the empty chair, seeming to shrink in her own skin. “Can you see him there?” I asked.

“Yes.” Her expressive face had taken on a pathetic quality, like a beggar.

“What do you feel when you look at him?”

She sat with this question for a while, trying to articulate a feeling that she was so familiar with but had never named. “I feel locked out,” she said finally.

I led Cynthia through the basic Realization Process exercise for attuning to the clear space pervading her body and the environment. I then asked her to experience that the space pervading her body also pervaded the image of her father’s body, sitting on the empty chair. “This subtle, pervasive consciousness,” I told her, “is the basis of perception. Just as your consciousness pervades your father’s body, so does your perception.”

Cynthia was surprised to find that she could see through her father’s body. I asked her to describe his chest. She sat for several moments in fundamental consciousness with her father, focusing on his chest. I watched her expression register surprise, then understanding, and then sadness.

“There is a frozenness there,” she said without turning away from him, “a kind of thickness.”

I asked her to focus her attention within the thickness itself. And then to see-feel the emotional tone inside the thickness. I watched Cynthia tune even more subtlely and precisely into the imaginary figure on the chair. Then she began to cry.

“There is fear in there, it is almost terror,” she said, “and also longing. The same longing that I feel for him. But the fear covers it.” Cynthia felt relieved by this perception. She had always assumed that her father did not like her, that he shut her out because he found her deficient in some way. She had tried to make herself more worthy of his approval, but her efforts had never won his love. Now she could see, with her own eyes, that it was his difficulty, his own fear, that kept him from expressing love for her.

Cynthia sat for a while longer with the image of her father in the chair. She practiced being with him without making herself smaller or holding her breath. She let herself feel the longing in her own chest and in her father’s chest, and recognize that his inability to love her was not a personal rejection of her. This would help her begin to let go of the effort to win his love. It would also help her let go of the compulsion to replay this confusing, painful relationship with the current men in her life.

When we see people clearly, we cease to perceive them as generic types or to respond to them based on our associations with generic types of people. For example, someone who feels insecure about his own intelligence might classify anyone with an advanced education as an “intellectual” and proceed to relate to them with fear and resentment. Bare perception means that we allow each person we encounter to register in our senses in all of their complexity and uniqueness. We experience and respond to them directly, as they appear to us at that moment, without preconceptions.

We are also able to see through the distorted images that people project of themselves. We can distinguish fantasy from actuality, sentimentality from love, inflation from power, or provocative posturing from true sexuality. When we are able to see beyond these images we can no longer be manipulated by them, and we lose our fear of them.

Recently I worked with a woman who was preparing herself for a confrontation with her ex-husband concerning the care of their teenaged daughter. Suzanne described her husband as a very powerful man. She knew that she would have to fight for what she wanted, but she was afraid that he would easily overpower her.

I gave Suzanne the same exercise I gave Cynthia, placing an empty chair across from her and asking her to attune to fundamental consciousness pervading both her and an image of her ex-husband seated there. Suzanne had great difficulty picturing her ex-husband in the chair. She was afraid to look at him, even in her imagination. She could only picture him there if she herself turned sideways away from him; she was unable to face him. This made her even more agitated about her impending meeting with him.

I told Suzanne to dissolve the image of her ex-husband, and instead, I sat down in the chair facing her. I asked her to attune to fundamental consciousness pervading both herself and me. Then I instructed her to bring her focus into the midsection of her body, between her pelvis and her ribs, and to inhabit that part of her body as deeply and fully as she could. When she had done this, I asked her to attune to the quality of power in her midsection. Carefully, and with a self-deprecating incline of her head, she let herself feel the quality of power in her midsection. Next I asked her to see-feel the same quality of power inside my midsection. To her amazement, she was able to do this too.

Now I entered into a battle of power with her, increasing the intensity of the power in my body (we have a volume control on all of these qualities) and asking her to match or better me with the intensity of her own power. Suzanne proved to be quite good at this game. She straightened her head and matched me belly for belly until we were two very powerful women facing each other.

Although to an onlooker it would seem that we were both seated very peacefully and at ease, the true power in the body is very effective in our interactions with people. In fact, it is much stronger than the pretense of power that most intimidating people display. To demonstrate this to Suzanne, I now inflated my upper body into the image that most of us associate with the powerful or overpowering person. It is the image of a bully. Suzanne quickly turned away from me. “That’s just what he looks like,” she said, with her face still averted.

“I’m going to hold this pose,” I told her, “and you see if you can face me again and tune back into your real power.” Suzanne followed these directions slowly, and I waited until she was again the powerful woman that had played matching midsections with me. “Now,” I said, holding myself in the inflated attitude, “make sure that you are attuned to fundamental consciousness pervading both yourself and me. And let yourself really see me, all the way through my body.” As Suzanne did this, I felt her regain her sense of power and ease.

“What do you see?” I asked.

“There is no power in you,” she said. “It is only muscular tension holding an attitude. There is no power in your body.”

All of the genuine qualities of our being are expressed effortlessly, without our having to impress them upon other people. In fact, they only emerge when we let go of our manipulation of ourselves and others. When we experience people in the clear space of fundamental consciousness, we can easily discern the layering of images and attitudes that obscure essential being.

Sometimes people try to restrain their perception as it becomes more subtle so as not to be intrusive toward other people. As I described in Chapter 2, we can invade another person’s space by projecting our focus and energy into their body. However, the bare perception of fundamental consciousness does not involve any projecting of ourselves into other people. In fact, the more we inhabit our own body, the more subtle our perception becomes. Bare perception is the natural and inevitable result of spiritual oneness. We cannot suppress our perception without limiting our own maturity. We can, of course, refrain from being intrusive in the way we relate with other people, which often means keeping one’s observations to oneself. It is also good to keep in mind that we are never (or not for a very long time) without any subjective coloration, so however clear our perception seems to us, it must still be considered our own personal view.

I have found, however, that we usually feel great relief when we are clearly perceived, even if the actual content of the perception is not verbalized. When someone sees us deeply and compassionately, we can feel the warmth and the illumination of that person’s gaze, all the way through our body or being. It can help us see ourselves with the same degree of insight and acceptance. Being truly seen is one of the most healing factors in the relationship between a therapist and client or between a spiritual teacher and student. It is also one of the most healing functions of intimate relationships.

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