Have 360 degree awareness
Opening allows one to sense all other beings while being sensed, to live in the realm of intersubjectivity.(33) Opening coincides with releasing or letting go (the essence of forgiving and of healing). Opening allows one to freely merge with all that is, to be at home in the universe.
Some of the persons I see as a psychotherapist are in the process of closing their hearts because they are in pain. A closed heart feels like a knot in one’s chest. Breathing becomes shallow. Anxiety attacks occur. Bitterness sets in. Stupor is sought. A closed heart is death.
Healing (making whole, hale, and hearty) requires an open heart. Pain can still arise but it also dissipates as one opens to the rhythm of life. Openness means no clinging – no clinging to pain, no clinging to joy (cling, cling, cling goes the folly).
Contemplation: Living in the Temple
The dictionary definition of meditation is “to keep the mind in a state of contemplation.”(34) Contemplation means to go to the templum, an ancient space for observation marked out by the highest class of official diviners, the augurs. Ancient Rome had a college of augurs whose sole duty was the interpretation of signs, especially through observing the flight of birds. To do so they needed a clear and open space, the templum.
The augurs moved to the clear and open space with expectancy (predetermined signs would answer specific questions) and with no expectancy (unexpected portents or omens could occur). With expectation and no-expectation, with mind and no-mind, looking for one of several specific events to occur, like a scientist awaiting one of several possible sets of data to show up, while staying open to the unexpected, the augurs sat in contemplation.
[Shortly after reading about augurs, I went to the forest with my dogs. I stood in a clear open space. A red-tailed hawk (one of my totems) appeared. The hawk flew about twenty feet above my head, looking down at me, circling twice, and then shooting out of view. I stood meditancing.]
When we meditate or sit mindfully, we go to the templum, we prepare for insight by moving to an inner space of clarity and openness. We open in con-templ-ation, move into the temple, and become one with the universal template.
Open Awareness
I was in the grocery store the other day, picking up a few things for the home. Though the store was full of people, the only one who saw me was a three-year-old, perched in his mother’s shopping cart. Our eyes met with clear awareness. No words hid us from each other. The adults were lost in thought, in self-induced trance states. The three-year-old was wide awake. We saw each other’s openness. Our open presence was a blaze of awareness that extended outward in all directions.
Such presence comes with calmness, with the absence of the will of separateness, with letting go of words and thoughts, with allowing life’s flow. This relaxed extension of awareness is called “extension of ki” by Aikido folk. A circle or sphere provides the perfect imagery for describing ki extension. A sphere depicts 360 degree awareness, awareness in all directions.
To provide an example from everyday life, bring to awareness the experience of driving a car. Driving a car requires 360 degree consciousness; an awareness of what is going on behind, to the left, to the right, to the immediate front, to the distant front. The driver’s awareness radar perpetually scans the spherical area radiating outwards from her center.
Any movement or potential movement in that 360 degree field of consciousness receives immediate attention and relaxed response. This 360 degree awareness can be condensed or expanded at will through attention.
Galeropia: Clear and Cheerful Vision
Galeropia (gal-uh-rope-e-ah) is a word combining the Greek galeros (cheerful) and opsis (vision). A medical term, galeropia means exceptional clearness of vision. Clear vision is cheerful vision.
Cheerful vision is not smile-button, Pollyannaish, bubble-headed vision. Cheerful vision is not accomplished with one’s noodle full of meringue. Cheerful vision is practical, down-to-and-expanding-past-earth vision.
Derived from the Middle English word chere (face or welcome), cheer at one time meant countenance: the outward look or appearance. It eventually came to mean spirit, state of mind, or heart. The word cher refers to courage (French: couer) and heart.
Be of good cheer, said Jesus, the Ki Master. Have courage and heart. Be of good cheer. Have a good countenance toward all. Face all with good spirit, good mind, and good heart. [Good originally meant fitting or belonging together, as in “and God saw that it was good.” The creation of the heavens and earth was good. When creation was flung into being, God pitched a perfect fit.]
Be of cheerful and clear vision (awareness). Galerope through the day.
Settling Down
A pre-requisite to open awareness is allowing oneself to relax, to settle down. Settling down is an inner experience. One can feel the muscles and the cells of one’s body relaxing and letting go. No longer is one “bearing up” under the stresses and demands of one’s current trance state. One settles into one’s center. One lets go of all else.
Please put down anything you are doing and let your awareness move to your breathing. When you breathe in, breathe into your heart area. Visualize, sense, and feel that you are breathing into your heart. Use your childhood imagination.
After breathing into your heart, when breathing out breathe down into your one-point, just below your belly button. Breathe into your heart and when breathing out, feel that breath go down to the one-point. If your breath does not go all the way down, be patient. Over time, it will.
Breathe in to heart. Breathe down to center. Allow settling down. After settling down, extend positive energy in all directions. “Positive” refers to clear sensing. Negativity blocks one’s field of vision. For example, fear does not allow one to see clearly.
In extending clear positive energy in all directions, one is exquisitely aware of one’s surrounds. One is also expanding one’s sphere of influence. Eugene Herrigel (35) writes of this expansion of one’s sphere of influence as spreading your field of power around you in ever-widening rings.
Settle down. Extend clear positive awareness in all directions.
Spaces Between Thoughts
As I sit quietly centering, I pay attention to thoughts going by. I see my thoughts like boats on a river, like a train with cars. I begin to pay attention to the spaces between thoughts. Sometimes it seems as if these spaces are razor’s edge thin. I continue to attend to the spaces, the intervals between thoughts. The spaces become larger and larger.
By giving attention to the spaces between thoughts, energy is directed to the spaces rather than to the thoughts themselves, and the mind gradually becomes empty, empty in a positive way. As the mind empties of preconception and thought, awareness opens to the Larger Context.
The extension of open awareness toward infinity in all directions (a spherical 360 degrees, a sphere with no bounds) becomes comfortable and natural.
Condensing and Expanding
Park your body in an alert, yet relaxed and stable posture. Breathe in deeply, smoothly, calmly. Breathe out beyond the far horizon. Visualize a sphere of energy the size of an orange at your center of balance, about two inches below your navel and deep inside. Halve it in size. Halve it again. Continue to halve it until you reach subatomic realms and the Infinity of Inside.
Then double it and continue doubling until you and the Earth are enveloped in a light-filled sphere of energy. Continue to expand until you reach galactic realms and the Infinity of Outside.
Condense again. Repeat the process for as long as is comfortable.
Your Openness Practice
Notice the times during the day when you feel more open and able to engage life situations. Notice the times of closure, of your energy condensing. While honoring your natural rhythm of opening and closing, consider that with a relaxed spirit you can stay open to the energy of our source, to the wellspring from which all life flows. Maintaining openness to the source is essential to spiritual life. This “rooting” openness allows our remaining open to daily life.
What is the quality of your openness? Do you have calm awareness or is it agitated hypervigilance? What is your openness practice? What are your practices that allow you to remain aware?
