Surely you can't be open and receptive all the time, and letting in everything you see? That sounds very overwhelming.
The opposite is true. Looking with an open mind, heart and eyes on the same axis is not the same as letting everything in. In Miksang, the key word is 'availability'.
Availability is a combination of openness, alertness and curiosity.
From this state of being available we notice what joyfully resonates. We can see everything else as well, but this becomes a neutral state of seeing, as in observing.
We don't get tired of the world; we get tired of how we react to the world.
We become tired of letting in what we observe and what does not joyfully resonate.
- We become tired of thinking a lot about everything we see and what is going on in our lives.
- We become tired of the conversations we have in ourselves with ourselves, or with others in ourselves.
- We become tired of our inner reactions on what we think about all kinds of things.
- We become tired of our outer reactions on the things, people and situations around us.
We especially become tired of of these seemingly ongoing processes in ourselves.
1. We walk around sleepwalking
And so we mainly walk around sleepwalking, with our eyes wide-open and ongoing conversations in ourselves commenting on the world around us. We hardly see anything. We glance over our daily world and barely connect to anything, missing out on experiencing full connection with our immediate surroundings, not because it is not there, but because we are not aligned enough to receive what already resonates.
We experience direct visual experiences all day long, with all our senses. But we let in too few of these vivid sensory experiences. This is exhausting, because it takes energy and start feeling heavy.
2. We reason away moments of seeing from the heart
We reason away many moments of direct vivid perception. We often feel overwhelmed by the multitude of stimuli around us all the time. As a result this causes the feeling that we need to keep things at a distance, and exactly this strategy keeps these moments of vivid perception at bay.
Nowadays feeling overwhelmed and burned out seems like a trend. The wide range of media and entertainment that we can comment on, and all the public reactive responses that we can see and hear and that we expose ourselves to, do not help us to develop inner calmness in order to develop noticing what resonates.
The world around us in general does not help us to develop calmness and inner silence.
3. We also are getting tired of being open to everything
Being open to anything and everything but also not positively resonating. We observe everything all the time: either in a positive, neutral or negative manner. If something does not resonate in a positive way, but it does affect us, and we decide to comment/react on this, whether that is out loud or inward: this is tiring. We are entering a negative critical spiral that we keep feeding with our not so uplifting reactions, and this is simply exhausting. You have lost control of your discernment.
4. Dramatic effects
Because the moments of being touched are ignored and yet there is a need for touch and feeling connected and giving expression, people look for it somewhere else, often in extreme physical ways. Extreme views are looked up and found, and photos are edited with filters such as HDR, heavy hues, faint hues, overexposure, underexposure or converting natural colours into black and white. Deploying dramatic effects to want to convey something is also a form of creativity, but we get tired of this in the long run. It is indirect perception.
in the long term we get tired of dramatized photos, both creating them and looking at them.
Understanding the nature of perception
Feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of all the above means that we start to think that we must close ourselves off and protect ourselves. But that is hard work, because how do you filter?
It is easier to develop openness to what strikes us, what we see from the heart. It gives inspiration and we recharge.
This means we first have to understand the nature of perception, the nature of our senses and the nature of how things are. We need to be willing to understand this, and understand what resonates in a joyful way. Which means we also have to understand ourselves.
My experience is that the more open I am to receiving what strikes me visually, the easier it is to enjoy the simple sensory things in my immediate surroundings. When training one's mind and receptivity through the main sense perception of the eyes all the other sense perceptions develop accordingly.
In between all daily things. Not in special places, but in the here and now; en route from A to B, from the front door to the bicycle, from the car to an appointment, from the table to the coffee maker.
When I am low in my energy and strolling around in my own neighborhood, with the intention of awake seeing and my camera, I feel inspired again after 10 minutes or so. All the heavy things fall away from me in the lightness of awake seeing, and simply tuning in to wonderment and not needing to know what I am going to see an d photograph but letting it happen and unfold.
Not needing to know what I am going to see in the next moment and what the pictures are going to look like is the magic of being me.
It never ceases to surprise when in no time at all I feel inspired and experience appreciation. Simply by experiencing a moment of direct and vivid seeing, something that resonates and that I recognize and allow letting it in, something out of the richness of the everyday beauty; this is basic beauty
"In this century, to stop rushing around, to sit quietly on the grass, to switch off the world and come back to the earth, to allow the eye a willow, a bush, a cloud, a leaf, is -"an unforgettable experience".
Frederick Franck from ‘The Zen of Seeing‘
