Inner  Frontier
Fourth Way Spiritual Practice

 

Inner Work


For the week of February 6, 2017

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Vision of Oneness

(Opening to Oneness 1)

The ways of opening to oneness are as varied as the people who come to it. While for the rare few it comes unbidden, there are methods, some ancient, some newer, that can predispose us toward oneness, give us a taste of oneness. In this inner work series on Opening to Oneness, we explore some of those methods.

We begin with a method we can call Vision of Oneness. Working through our open eyes, we widen our attention to become aware of our entire visual field. This is not our attention actively going out to grab our seeing or the scene. Nor is our attention passively laying back and doing nothing. We see in a way between those two, actively receptive, letting the whole field come to us, while we remain alert to receive it. We relax in body, heart, and mind. Our eyes are relaxed. But we see it all.

We work with this whole-field seeing for a while. Not, of course, while driving or doing something else that requires a more focused attention. But we can work at this while sitting, standing, or even walking. In the latter case, we take care to stay safe as we walk through our visual field. For those who practice sitting meditation, another propitious time for working with the vision of oneness is at the end of the sitting, just before getting up.

When we turn our head, our visual field shifts, so that we can see what was behind us and unseen. Even though we do not see what is behind us, we know it is all there: reality is not just what is in front of us. So as we take in all that our eyes bring us, we also become aware of the world behind us. We open to the awareness of what we would see if we turned our head. We perceive that unseen half of the world viscerally, almost as though we do see it.

Then we join that sense of what is behind us with our visual experience of what is in front of us. We let our entire immediate environment be one experience. Whether in a room or on a mountaintop, here is this great seamless world.

In this choiceless awareness, we do not give perceptual preference or extra focus to some things over other things. We are not picking out things to focus on. We just see it all as one whole. We focus on the whole, on the proverbial forest rather than the trees. Particular objects are part of that wholeness. Everything is wrapped in the wholeness, embedded in the wholeness. That wholeness cannot be broken apart; it is unity itself. The parts exist only in relation to the whole. Each part expresses the whole.

We base our perception in the entirety of the scene surrounding us. It is one scene, one experience. We stay with that. We stay with the oneness of experience, simply and directly.

This can touch us deeply. As we move through our days, the vision of oneness gives a new context to our life. It can help us transcend our separateness, step into love, live in the timeless, and open to the true wonder of this world. For this week, please practice the vision of oneness.


     

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