Seeing is receiving
One of the most powerful meditations I have yet come across is Loch Kelly’s meditation on seeing.
Seeing is our most prominent sense, our brain devotes a significant portion of its resources to processing visual information.
This mirrors our experience of the world. Seeing is much higher resolution and arguably more useful than the other senses. Our eyes help us scan for danger and they are historically strongly tied to our fight-or-flight response.
As a result, we have built significant experiential artifacts around this sense. Watch your experience: Pay attention to hearing. When we hear, we receive sounds. It’s a relatively passive act, though of course we can influence which sounds we pay attention to to a degree.
With seeing it’s different. Most of us go through life perceiving seeing as projecting our attention into the world. It’s much more active. Our eyes are usually focused on specific details in our visual field that are relevant or scanning for potentially relevant content.
They are rarely in a passive state of just panoramic receiving like our ears or our touch.
This habitual pattern of constant focus can be relaxed through targeted meditation. For me this immediately relaxes my mind’s grip on my experience. It’s a powerful tool to put things into perspective and take a step back.
If you’d like to try it out, please get in touch!
