Listen with you Eyes

July 22nd, 2007 Fred McVittie

Achieving mindfulness through an attention to the visual or the tactile sense can be difficult. Both of these senses rely o difference to operate, the saccading of the eye picks up difference (the difference that makes a difference) and without finding any such differences the eyes would effectively cease to see anything at all. In order for the fingertips to feel anything they must be constantly on the move. Neither sense provided the stillness and quietude which mindfulness desires. Also, both of these senses require active content in order for them to come into being. If we close our eyes it is impossible to imagine a kind of contentless ’seeing’, a visual attentiveness without anything to be attentive to. Similarly, it is hard to imagine what it might mean to ‘feel’ something when there is nothing to feel. Non-specific, contentless feeling seems to be an incoherent concept. As with seeing, it seems that our intuitions tell us that feeling and the thing felt arise mutually and the feeling sense cannot exist as a free-floating independent sense.

It is, however, comparatively easy to use the sense of hearing without having any specific aural stimulus to listen to. We seem to be able to allocate attentional resources to the act of listening even when there is little or nothing audible to capture that attention. We can, as Krishnamurti put it, ‘listen to the silence’. Listen, in this sense, connotes a kind of mental state; an attentiveness and readiness in which we might listen for something or may simple remain poised and empty, waiting for nothing.

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Seeing the Void. Listening to the Silence

October 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

‘Seeing’ is particularly effective as a means of experiencing non-duality if the finger pointing exercise is preceded by a number of other ‘pointings’, at a distant object, an object nearby, at one’s own foot, thigh, stomach, chest, and only then culminating in the ‘pointing at self’ gesture in which the finger points at the head or eyes. This may be because the visual systems of the brain are prepared for the act of seeing by this procedure and the intentionality raised by this procedure continues to be present and active even when there is no ‘object’ indicated by the pointing finger and the intention is itself ultimately ‘pointless’. This mechanism, in which the active processes of looking are directed toward a space which is both ‘possessed’ by the pointer and also empty, may parallel the exercise of ‘listening to the silence’ which Krishnamurti and others write about. A significant and necessary difference between these two exercises is that, whereas listening is immersive, with little or no separation between the sound and the listener, seeing does (usually) create such separation, placing the seen object ‘out there’ in objective space. To listen to the silence one effectively listens to one’s self, but to see the void, and to see it in oneself, one has to turn the gaze around. In theory one should be able to see the void around us in everything, and perhaps that is an achievable ideal attainable by some adepts, but the separation of self and other reinforced by vision makes it difficult to identify with the void ‘out there’ so one must seek the void within. The Seeing technique directs the body and the brain to carry out this peculiar act of non-vision.

Posted in Harding, Douglas, Krishnamurti, Siddu, Non-duality, Self, Sense, Void | No Comments »