In this article, we look at the three windows of perception and the three movements of allowance through consciousness, awareness and emptiness which offer the secrets to the mastery of form.
Let it go.
Consciousness
Infinitely powerful, curious, charismatic and engaging, consciousness is a hooker.
Through the perceptive power of consciousness, we witness our world, as if it were separate from us. As such, consciousness is closely related to the divisions inherent in the creation of form.
Through the form of words, our world is mentally structured and a reality is composed. Every word is an illusion, standing in for the existential moment of perception. Each word is even separate from the imprint of memory, in that the moment a “thing” is named, it becomes a “thing”, which creates an “other” to the thing.
For example, love, in itself can be boundless and absolute, found in every particle of perception. Yet when love is named, the possibility of non-love is also created. In this world of duality, love itself is lost and replaced with a warm, positive concept which at best can signal the way towards a phenomena which is so much more than any thought, feeling or memory.
With any situation, issue, state, or emotion which appears to us as a limitation, the first movement is to consciously let it go. When consciousness agrees to unhook the story, the verbal form, the context and the naming, then perception can expand to include the feeling or energy configuration at play beneath the surface of the mind. Consciousness steps back, and the perceptive window of awareness is able to expand into the domain.
Let it be.
Awareness
It is not accidental that after time spent with the Maharashi in the ’60s, the Beatles came with the top hit Let it be. The wisdom of the song goes far beyond thought and directly opens to the perceptive portal of awareness which can only be accessed through unlimited allowance of form.
Feeling exists in the world of form. Although it is unstable, it is the soul of the story, the substance that brings the mental story to life. It is the energetic disturbance which the conscious mind tries to contain through the structure of words and stories.
Feeling itself can seem to be a multi-layered chaos, begging the intellect to sort it out, lest the pain become to crushing or the feeling so strong that we lose the safety of known direction.
Yet feeling cannot be annihilated by consciousness, it can only be frozen, contained, denied or repressed. The energy of feeling continues to pulsate, perhaps with added energetic layers of containment.
The magic of transformation and healing can only occur through the allowance of feeling into awareness. This allowance, in the first instance involves the unconditional of whatever is surfacing in the world of feeling to completely exist. Through “letting it be”, movement is allowed, which can be observed without effort and without interference.
This observation is the magic which means that the feeling patterns are no longer absolute. They totally exist as phenomena but they are not definitive or threatening. The stronger the Observer, the less important the weather on the emotional landscape.
The feelings can, in their own time, come back to source.
In Let it be, the mastery of non-effort is an extremely powerful movement of healing which involves total connection together with complete non-intervention.
Be for real.
Perception through Emptiness
Perception through emptiness arises out of the wisdom of impermanence. Impermanence means that there is a consciousness or awareness that all that can be seen, felt or experience, exists in the world of form. It is nothing more than perception. That which is seen or perceived is never stronger or more powerful than that which is able to perceive.
Perception through emptiness engenders the certainty that all that can be seen is a kind of illusion, passing and changing. All that can be perceived arises as unstable form, and can be passed through.
This window of perception creates a strong sense of reality as a process. Noise subsides to the eternity of silence. Silence continues irrespective of vibration, which comes and goes and utterly depends on silence for its form. Feeling subsides to the non-dual space of love, which exists through, between and behind every composition of feeling, good or bad. Battles and conflicts subside to the perennial presence of peace, which exists irrespective of winners and losers, preceding and outlasting every temporary conflict.
Above all, through perception through emptiness, we begin to BE for real. Unhooked from the illusion of our states of being or our patterns of suffering, a vast window is opened in which existence itself is never caught, indeed it is the source of the whole which allows the service of a human life to take place.
It is not an enlightenment trip, not status, not success, not anything or anyone we believe ourselves to be. All of this is in the world of form. Our being is what is manifest in the moment in the light of truth, without bells, without agenda and without lasting attachment to identity.
Through these cracks in creation, the light of the absolute miracle of being here as human can shine.
