Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of February 26, 2007


Being the Decider-Perceiver

The central fact of human life consists of our individual core, the decider and perceiver in each of us, the one who sees and acts and lives our life. This “I” occupies a pivotal position as the agent of our inner life and outer actions, as well as the agent of our relationship with the higher worlds as the one who prays, the one who opens to the sacred, and ultimately the one who surrenders in service to and union with the Divine. All these actions depend on the choices I make.

The problem is that we do not choose, we abdicate our responsibility toward ourselves and let things happen in us by habit, momentum, and the path of least resistance. Furthermore, we do not fully experience because we are not at home, we are not there to receive and participate in the experience. Our body perceives, thinks, and does things with only minimal presence of the intentional chooser and conscious perceiver in us. Conflicting desires battle it out and the stronger ones take control. We live a rather benumbed life, lost in thoughts and daydreams, half-aware.

At any given moment, however, many possible choices lie within our purview. For example, I can choose to be, to be one who experiences and lives my life right now, to be the one who perceives, inhabits, and owns my body, to be the one who thinks my thoughts or at least sees them thinking themselves.

Right now I see this page. My eyes and brain register and interpret the perception, as would happen ordinarily. But now I am here seeing it. I am the one who sees it. I am at home at the center of my experience. I am directing my attention and focusing my powers of perception.

Certainly we see and do things all day long. But the vast majority of it goes on by itself: no one doing what we do, no chooser, no decider, no one being at home in the center of it all. The familiar patterns of our personality act as if they themselves occupy the seat of the decider and perceiver. But that is just egoism.

Living as “I,” being the decider and perceiver, does not necessarily mean that we act differently than we would ordinarily. But presence, in the form of will-to-be, changes the very core of our experience and our life.

You can feel yourself being, being the one who reads these words, the one who gets their meaning. For this week, practice being the decider and perceiver, the one who inhabits your body, the one who experiences and lives your life. Work to understand what this means in practice by trying it, in a relaxed way.


     

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