Transcription
[Note: this bit from Rob is extracted from the end of Catherine's talk, 7-31 *"*Reflections and Meditation"]
The encouragement, as we move on in the retreat, as Catherine was saying, is to open up a little bit more. We started saying energy body, be here, get really wedded, if you like, or inhabiting the energy body. That's always going to be a part of the meditation. It's always going to be a fundament, an aspect of experience that we're endeavouring to always incorporate, always remain sensitive to, always involve, the energy body. But the encouragement is to open up the senses and allow, or even gently encourage and play with, in this poetry of perception, in the art of perception, a cosmopoesis -- or plural, cosmopoeses. In other words, different ways of sensing this world around us. This obviously spills over into the other postures, especially walking outside. That's a place that gives a lot of availability to that, walking on the lawn or going for a walk, standing, moving, as we talked about.
One way of phrasing something is we're habitual creatures, human beings. The mind is, from a certain perspective, a mechanism of habit. It's a creature of habit. That means the ways we tend to think, conceive -- even below the level of thinking -- and the ways we see, sense, and perceive, are often quite habitual. We just tend to see the world in a certain way. I tend to see myself in a certain way. I tend to see others in certain ways. And they repeat. There's a kind of inertia that goes with being a human being. So how do we soften this inertia? How do we loosen things up? As we were talking some days ago, a lot of this is about loosening, loosening up so that other ways of seeing, other ways of knowing, become available to the soul and to the heart.
It's interesting. It's like one aspect of allowing ourselves to perceive differently, or supporting a different kind of perception, is a kind of softening. We can, in our habits of mind, look in certain ways, or hear in certain ways, and something in the mind is just automatically rigidifying around a way that we already know how to see, how to hear, how to smell. And that fabricates what we see, what we hear, what we smell: "It's like this. This is its reality." We don't even think this. Sometimes what supports a cosmopoesis is something softening -- something softening in the gaze, in the attitude, in the heart, in the being. It's just a little bit of softening that allows more of this liquidity, the alchemical solution, and that allows the more creative seeing, the malleability of the seeing.
So if you're going to do walking meditation in the day, or standing meditation, we're not forcing anything, but opening up to the possibility: what is it to walk with, as Catherine was talking about, this different awareness of the elements, and the sacredness of the elements? What would it mean to walk in a sacred landscape, to walk prayerfully in a sacred landscape? What does that mean? It can mean lots of things. What does this word, 'prayer,' mean? We talked about that. 'Prayerfully' -- what does that mean? How does that affect the body? We talked about these hand postures or movements, allowing your body to move in a certain way. Just like when we were chanting out loud, it's like the whole body is involved. The whole being can be involved. What is it to walk prayerfully in a sacred landscape? You don't have to force that. It's more that we're trying not to prevent it, so that there can be this liquidity of perception.
You know, minds are inertial. They're not locked, but there's an inertia there. Also sometimes bodies are inertial. Again, we get used to, "I sit with my eyes closed, and I sit in a certain posture, and I keep it still." That's great; it's a great discipline. And then there's a kind of, I think, "If I do this movement business that we were talking about, I'll be a bit self-conscious, because that's not really the culture here." There's an inertia that comes from maybe being self-conscious. That's part of what we might need to pay attention to. Somehow what we're doing is, we're often locked in, as I said -- to thinking, to ways of relating, to ways of perceiving, all of this. Most of the time, we don't actually realize what we're locked into. So a lot of what we're doing is loosening. Sometimes only after a thing has loosened, you realize that I was locked into something. So a big part of what we're doing is loosening, allowing that loosening to happen. Then there can be the shaping, the sculpting, the creativity.
So allowing it, allowing it to expand, allowing it to be liquid, allowing it to spill out into the world -- without forcing, but opening up a space where that can be possible. When it is, it's almost like, let's say you're walking, and there's a sense, some kind of sense of sacredness or cosmopoesis, something like that -- that becomes the meditation. Might be through the soles of my feet. It hopefully will involve the whole body. But the thing that I'm concentrating on is the cosmopoesis. That becomes what I'm tuning to. It's a dimension of experience that one is then looking to engage and relate to and linger with, tune to. No forcing. Allowing things to loosen so that things can be born for us, and then gently encouraged, supported.
