The Sense of Hearing

 

I want to begin with saying what the sense of hearing is not! It is not the perception of words or ideas.  Hearing is just the perception of sound waves, acoustic events.  In this message I want to share with you four distinctions I find through my hearing sense. If I confused hearing with the perception of words or the perception of thoughts, I would miss the great wisdom that lives in hearing.

 

Right now I am hearing a clock ticktock and water play with water in a stream outside my window, neither of which are words or ideas. The first I experience as a mildly unpleasant mechanical noise and the second is a sweet sound of nature. A noise is something I don't want to hear and wish I could shut off or shut out. A sound is something that is natural and not distorted. I react to hearing a noise or a sound with pleasure or displeasure and that tells me about me.

From the reality of my soul, what does my hearing hear?

My soul's hearing can awaken listening.  I want to listen to something that offers a communication or a message.  I listen for a voice. If my soul experiences a voice, my listening tells me something about the source of the voice, not about me.  Voices offer all kinds of information. Some evenings I hear the voice of an owl.  I recognize the sound. Voice also tells me the mood of its source.  The dog's bark tells me if it is excited, alarmed, attacking, or just wants to come in or go out.  A friend's voice tells  about their energy and their emotion. A violin's voice tells me about the music, it's sound tells me about the instrument.

In a voice I listen for a tone and this asks my soul to hear and vibrate from it's deepest core.  With the tone of a voice I begin to resonate with the truth or falsity, the beauty or distortion, and goodness or illness of the source of the voice. When I hear tone, I find imagination, inspiration and intuition about the source.

In my counseling practice, much of which is over the phone, I listen to my client's voice and listen for his/her tone. Through my hearing of voice and tone, I learn how to percieve their words and ideas, their questions and their longings, I hear the vibrations of the wounds of the past and the possibilities of the future  I am resonating to something far deeper in their souls, to their living nature.

In the reality of my soul, my hearing moves from mere perception of an acoustic event to a vibrational knowing of deep intimacy.   And all this is before the experience of words or ideas.

With the sense of warmth, you begin to experience what lives in another.  With hearing your whole soul vibrates with what is living in another, the noise, the sound, the voice and the tone living in the world around you.  Listen well everyday to everything.

At the end of the day, reflect on what you have heard. With practice you will be able to know when you are hearing the harmonies of the cosmos.

Back to a mundane and practical sense, reading includes a sense of hearing living in a different part of consciousness than the words and ideas. In reading email or a novel and particularly in a poem,  your soul hears through the silence all the noise, sound, voice or tone present in the soul of the writer.

The Sense of Warmth

When you touch something you are thrown back into yourself, but you are accompanied by something of the other - the warmth (or coolness) of the other. I experience myself through touch whether I am touching a rock, the bath water, a book, the keys on my computer, or my grandson’s sweet cheeks.  But I am finding a special knowledge of the object I am touching by its temperature.  I feel something of the object within me by perceiving its degree of warmth.   It seems to permeate me.

This within-ness of the warmth, of the other, is quite a revealing and intimate experience.  Much more intimate than seeing it, because seeing requires separation. The sense of warmth requires the relative absence of separation. 

When your heart and soul experience the warmth of another’s existence, of their thoughts and feelings and intentions, what could be more intimate? You find yourself perceiving their meaning, their purpose, their love, their suffering, even their becoming.  The sensitivity of the soul’s temperature sense is measured by the presence of sympathy, of antipathy and of empathy. How empathic are you? Do you prefer the warmth of sympathy in your perceptions of others? Or do you like the coolness of antipathy.  Do you want to control your inner temperature and avoid intimacy or do you want to risk the rising and lowering of your soul’s interest through the permeation of the other’s truth into your truth? Can you maintain your sense of self when someone else gets under your skin?

The soul’s sense of warm is the threshold between our superficial perception of another human being as an object outside us and the intimate conscious perceptions of what lives within them.  The next four senses are the senses of love. These four ask more of us than the four senses of participation.

I really love this sense of warmth. It’s like the invitation to the surprises and delights of really knowing another.  But it also challenges me with two polar threats.  I can lose myself by melting into the other.  I can meet the chilling shadow of disinterest.  I then must be able to regulate or stabilize my perception of warmth with a soul thermostat.

As you read my thoughts on warmth, do you feel their warmth or do they leave you cool? After I send out any message I will always get a few responses.  Some coolly unsubscribe. It is always nice when the unsubsciber takes the time to warm up the “rejection” with a reason.  And then there are the incredibly warming notes that express how grateful for or inspired the writer is by my thoughts.

Every message I write brings me a whole range of temperatures.  When I begin it’s like diving into chilly waters as I feel somewhat distant from the topic.  Then I start swimming around in the mystery of the topic and start warming up to it.  By the time I hit the “publish” button, I am warm as toast and wish I could write pages more. Sense the warm of everyone you touch.

The Sense of Vison

Dear Friend,

 

The richness and complexity of the vision of vision in our souls is astounding and wonderful. I am writing this during the lunch break at a conference on The Search for Humanity in Contemporary Art, so I have a list of visual thoughts in my notebook from listening to the presentations.

The phrase that stands out and grabs my eye (I) is "onlooking."  LOOKING ON!  In your soul what do you rest your I on?  Or do you bring your visual consciousness only to what your eyes see in the material world?

Let's add a few more prepositions. Not only looks on, but also looks out, looks in and looks away. From our inner life, we look out, in and on seeking the light of truth, beauty, and goodness.  At the same time we may look away from the shadows cast by falsehood, distortion and ill will. 

Are these looks out, in and on a mere glance or a penetrating gaze? A glance is quick and provides no deep value, but it can capture your momentary attention and invite you to return later for a lasting gaze with more attention and intention.

Gazing lets the I penetrate, see through and beyond.  Gazing lets the object be reflected in the heart of the subject. Gazing often changes the one gazing.


Do you choose to gaze so you can see through and beyond the surface?  This is a serious question as it indicates a real responsibility and a certain fearlessness.

This act of soul seeing requires practice and discipline.  It also requires a willingness to be surprised, shocked, even frightened.

You can see how it is very, very helpful to have worked with and developed your sensitivity to the soul's touch, well-being, self-movement, balance, smell and taste, to maintain a strong sense of self before you start looking on what lies inside our skin, out in the world and deep in the realities of another human being.

This week choose an image to gaze on.  Spend a few minutes each morning and each evening, in dawn's early light and in the growing shadows of dusk, seeing what you can see. This object can be an idea, a work of art, your own hand, a tree, the sky outside a particular window in your home or someone you love.  The question in your heart is "What am I seeing? What is the shape? how many colors? what shines brightest?  what am I not seeing? could I take another perspective? How does this object reflect me? reflect God? What does this image ask of me?


Gaze on, my friend.  See what you can see.

Of course, if you look away, you might never see what needs to be seen. You may overlook the essential?  Are you afraid? Of what?

 

Here's looking at you,

 

Lynn

The Sense of Taste

How does your soul savour life? Or what in your life does your soul savour?

I love food.  It so delights my senses with smells, textures, flavors, colors, and shapes.  But now I am feeling seduced by my senses because inner maturity wakes me up to the reality that what I eat needs to delight my body, not my senses. My senses get my attention and they give me a sensation that becomes a perception but then I must seek the substance living behind the perception.  I must engage my selfhood and seek the meaning the perception offers. And that goes for every morsel I put in my mouth and every perception I put into my soul.

With the sense of taste, we suddenly have a new, more active relationship to the perception then those five senses that have come before.  We can spit out anything that does not please our sense of taste. We can decide to swallow only what tastes good. 

There is a more developed relationship to flavors beyond easy choices of like and dislike.  We can acquire taste - learn to find pleasure in what we formally found nothing pleasing and rejected.  My acquired food tastes are olives, blue cheese, liver, sushi, etc.  I love them all even though I found them utterly disgusting when I was younger.

Now take the notion of acquired tastes into your soul functions.  What thoughts have you acquired a feeling for?  What feelings do you express, even celebrate now that in the past you found unbearable?  And your will, your energy, your disciplined practices...what strength of attention and force of engagement has developed in your life?

What soul tastes would you be willing to acquire if you knew you would find truth, beauty, harmony, goodness in digesting a new soul diet?  Would you let go of your familiar identities? Your convenient prejudices? Your habitual behaviors? What exotic and nutritious tastes have you been unwilling to try? Now is the time to be adventurous in your tasting. Seek out flavors that heal, that liberate, that empower. 

This week chew on a new food for your soul - read a challenging book, practice a different meditation, listen to different music, write in your journal from a new perspective or focus on feelings you find difficult to swallow. Notice all the subtle new tastes.  Just imagine acquiring a new taste every week of your life...how wise you would be.

The Sense of Balance

Balance lets us sway in many directions and never fall.   Through balance we maintain our uprightness.  No matter how much we sway in any direction we can return to our standpoint, head held high, ready to focus on what is important, find our center between two opposing forces or infinite possibilities. We are not dizzy or light-headed because of this perception.  We know our inner balance of power and our infinite flexibility.  Balance dots our i and crosses our t. 

Balance crowns us with inner sovereignty and gives us dominion over our pulling, pushing, chaotic impulses.  Balance also frees us from dependency on the rules of earthly gravity by giving us a center of gravity within our own being.

This week look at balance in your soul life.  Your souls move to and fro in your thoughts and your actions.  In your soul you find your balancing point in your feeling life which allows you to judge the (up)right relationship between many thoughts and many actions.

Over this week connect with your sense of soul balance.  Look at all the “things” you want to think, all the “things” you want to do, all the “things” you want to be, all the “things” (spiritual and material) that you want to have. Human existence asks you to choose, to say “yes,”  “no” and “maybe” - to say “now,” “later” and “never.” A balanced soul chooses well, manages the swaying from choice to choice elegantly.  How balanced do you feel?

If you are having a hard time balancing your life, balancing your emotions, balancing your thoughts, imagine a thin crystalline thread of pure light attached to the end of a fiery sword coming from the heavens and piercing through your head straight through your body and down to the center of the earth. This thread gives your selfhood a constant balancing energy.  No matter what forces cause you to sway, you easily sustain your balance as through you the heavens reach into the earth.

Blessings on your growing sense of inner balance.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We are getting close to the time of year that begs the soul to focus on the mysteries of balance in our individual lives.  As light fades and darkness increases, as we start to feel death in nature, the soul must strengthen it’s consciousness of balance.  In the Inner Year curriculum, the 4 part teleseminar, The Mysteries of Personal Balance, begins on August 15 for the Sunday sessions and August 19 for the Thursday sessions. You will receive a description of the teleseminar next week.

Sense of Self-Movement

It seems intelligent to give you the brief dictionary definition of the sense of self-movement. There are two words that relate to self-movement:

Proprioception from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body.
Kinesthesia from Greek, kinesis, motion, aisthesis, feeling
1. The sense that detects bodily position, weight, or movement of the muscles, tendons, and joints.
2. The sensation of moving in space.

As I watch my grandson develop - today he is five months old - I witness his growing awareness of his own movements, the achievement of willful coordination and the awakening of the ability to move toward and grasp (touch) what he desires. Of course, everything he wants and gets, then is brought to his mouth because all hunger (the sense of well-being) is satisfied through his mouth at this age.

Slowly he is moving from awkward to graceful. His body is becoming his own. And he will be developing this sense for the rest of his life at least in his soul.

As my grandson learns to master the movement of his body, he is also learning how to master and coordinate his increasingly complex soul life of thinking, feeling and willing. That is why it is so necessary to play, to move your body in all kinds of ways that develop and challenge movement coordination. The more you move your body as a child, and as an adult, the more graceful and coordinated your thinking becomes.

 Movement in Your Soul

How conscious of your soul movements are you??? Do you always move the same way or do you explore new movements?

Is there grace in your soul? Is there weight in your soul? How well do you coordinate your desires? How do you move toward truth?

How aware are you of the relative positions of your perceptions, your opinions, your feelings, your intentions?

I want to encourage you to stretch. Compare the perception of stretching in your body with the perception of stretching your ability to think or focus or relax. What are you stretching toward?

I want to encourage you to leap. When was the last time you risked leaping? A child leaps and feels such a delighted sense of self. If you take a leap in your soul will you feel delight?

In our times we are perhaps moving too much from activity to activity, from feeling to feeling. This week as you work with the sense of self-movement, don’t forget to experience the grace of stillness.

Movement In My Life

I have always been a good dancer and a good swimmer and, of course, loved water ballet and wanted to be Esther Williams. So there is something about choreographed coordination that resonates with my ideal of self-movement. Yet I also enjoy spontaneous, surprising, yet mindful, movement. My body feels at home in the discipline of ballet and the freedom of jazz dancing.

Now, after years of practice, I am most delighted with the way my thinking moves from imagination to imagination sometimes stretching and sometimes leaping and almost, always coordinated. When I reflect on my thinking, I discover the choreography of it all. I realize just as I choreograph my body’s movements, there is a divine choreographer guiding the movements of my soul.

The Inner Year curriculum is choreographed movement for the soul, yet it empowers inner freedom and inner grace for each soul seeking self-expressive movement.

Move!!! and Other Metaphors

No matter what your age, move! Move your body and move your soul.

P.S. What other soul metaphors for self-movement can you imagine?

The Sense of Well-Being

Once we incarnate into our sense of touch, through which we experience the resistance of something else and the reality of our own boundary, and we find ourselves thrown back into our own center, we move to the perception of “the existence within” our skin. What exists within our skin is our life, our biological organization and the functions that keep us alive. This new sense is called our life sense or our sense of well-being. We don’t pay too much attention to this sense until something is not well within. With touch we perceive “is,” our being is because I experience my limits and boundaries. With well-being we perceive “is not,” I am alert to an absence in my “isness.”

When something is not right, lacking, or overwhelming, our sense of well-being alerts us with feelings of hunger, thirst, exhaustion or dis-ease. As infants and children we depend on others to fill our bellies, quench our thirst, put us to bed, and calm and comfort our dis-ease. Curiously this sense tells us that what resists our touch can also care and provide for us.

Before I go into the soul perceptions of well-being, I want to quickly point out that touch wakes us up to space and well-being wakes us up to time. When our sense of well-being grabs our attention we begin to endure. Duration is the body’s perception of time - how long can I bear this suffering, the absence of my well-being.

Now to the sense that let’s the soul know it is suffering...

Begin with questioning your ability to endure suffering. Your own suffering and the suffering of others? Are you struggling right now with the suffering of the planet, with the Gulf oil spill?

Is it easy for you to repress your suffering? Repressed suffering lives below consciousness and never finds relief. (I know for myself, I learned to endure and put on a happy face at an early age. Eventually, I lost all sense of what was unendurable, found myself seeking relationships that demanded I hunger, thirst, and exhaust myself, etc. It’s a whole story of a very unhealthy sense of well-being. I’ve been in soul recovery for years. I know now it is up to me to notice when my cup is empty and fill it with kindness myself. When it overflows, I can share my kindness with others. There are so many great lessons living in the awareness of well-being.

When your soul is hungry, what is it hungry for? How do you feed your soul? Who else feeds your soul? Think of comfort foods for the soul - a poem, a painting, a string quartet, a long walk, a good movie, telling your truth. Make a list. You might want to make a bunch of little cards with suggestions for soul snacks or soul feasts and keep them in a bowl. When your soul feels hunger rumblings, go to the bowl and pull a card. Enjoy the nourishment.

When your soul is thirsty, dry, parched - do you know this feeling? Where do you go? Where are the sweet waters your soul drinks from? Does the smile of a loved one or a stranger quench your loneliness?

Souls need rest. Do you overwhelm your soul with too much self-help, too much seriousness, too much demand to develop? How do you imagine taking a soul nap? What lullaby would sing your soul into a gentle sleep? If you just close your eyes.

And if your soul knows dis-ease, pain, illness where do you seek healing? When your soul gets inflamed what cools you down? Or if your soul gets chilled, what blankets your thoughts and feelings with warmth?

In your sense journal, make lists of how your soul experiences a lack of well being, when it feels it is losing its liveliness and life. Then make lists of all the wonderful things that restore your soul’s health and wealth. These lists will be an endless source of personal care and wisdom, recipes for delicious soul feasts, juices for a juicy sense of self, soft pillows on which to lay your soul down and all kinds of therapeutic relief and restoration.

If you need a summer conversation for soothing or stimulating, I might have what you are seeking. Read more...