Deep Perception: Cultivating Awareness and Rediscovering the Art of Seeing elegantly illuminates the vast potential of vision and explores the means and methods of increasing perceptual awareness in an inspiring and accessible manner.
Seeing is fundamental to our lives. It informs our awareness and plays a crucial role in most of our daily activities. But do we know how to see . . . really?
Deep Perception provides guidance for the general reader on achieving a state of heightened awareness and developing the gift of observation. The book is intended for every individual who sees, who questions the nature of seeing, and who wants to understand more about this mysterious and unexplored capacity. It functions as a catalyst to stimulate the growth of our perceptual capabilities and has a definite slant toward the relationship between vision and creativity. The gift of observation, of the inner and outer worlds and their profound relationship, can be cultivated—indeed, must be—if we wish to live full and authentic lives.
What can we gain through cultivating awareness? If we could truly open the windows of perception, our lives would be infinitely richer, finer, truer to the possibilities of the soul. We would become considerably wiser, in understanding and in action. We could occupy the moment more fully, and employ more of our latent capacities. We might begin to genuinely respond to life and to others, not just react. And our lives would not fleetingly descend in a slumbering stupor of hazy half-awareness from birth to the moment of death.
The senses would become instruments of delight and discovery, the feelings would become a refined way of knowing: weighing, evaluating, tasting the nature and substance of what stands before us. And the mind would be immeasurably enriched through the questions raised and the material gleaned through direct perception. The energies of life could pass through us, transformed by a resonant awareness into effortless action and generous kindness.
We could approach truth, not our subjective notions based on verbal concepts and mere opinions, but an unclouded apprehension of the always radiant and sometimes sobering facts of existence. States of heightened awareness, non-ordinary perception, where we directly perceive the energies behind phenomenal manifestation, could be voluntarily induced and may well become a consistent feature of our experience. We could simultaneously develop the capacity for sight that we share with all others and discover our own perceptual gifts, unique to our individuality.
We would deeply experience the outer flow of life through the senses, and we could directly observe the myriad and changing states of our inner world through the mind’s witness. Our strengths and limitations, our sympathies and antipathies, our potential wholeness as well as our many contradictions would emerge under the lamp of impartial insight, engendering a humility that in its wake breeds compassion and empathy. We would gain a relational awareness, where we could perceive directly the interdependent unity, the one taste of life. The moment would slow down, its inherent magnificence would be revealed in a single glance, and the world would be seen as different branches of the same stream, the everflowing infusion of spirit into form.
If we wish to make sense of the world we inhabit, if we wish to assist in meeting the collective challenges of the modern world, if we wish to be responsible toward ourselves and each other, and if we wish to attain the great aim of self-knowledge, then we must develop the courage to see what is, ignoring neither its intrinsic complexity or its radiant beauty. The voice of conscience often reveals that the world and others need our deepest attention and care — our real seeing — as well as the actions that arise genuinely through moments of direct observation.
Featuring extensive tools and exercises designed to open the senses, Deep Perception teaches the development of a “seeing practice”—in which we use the gift of vision to increase our connection with the world, ourselves, and each other. It is a thorough commentary on human perception, designed to inspire, instruct, and inform readers on the miraculous function of sight.