This is an article I wrote in 1992 about meditation and perception, it's a favorite of mine.
From the Fall 1992 issue of Center Voice, newsletter of the Center for Sacred Sciences
This afternoon I went for a long walk by the ocean. The beach is rocky here at Yachats and displays a surprising fierceness at high tide. As I walked waves would rush up the narrow inlets between rocky fingers of land and shatter high overhead. In places the water has battered the rocks so hard underground channels have been carved beneath my feet. In one spot a few feet away from where I am now sitting, the roof of one of these channels has caved in and when waves smash into each other inside it, a rainbow-filled geyser crashes uproariously out of the hole.
There are so many singularities here at the ocean’s edge that the power of mindfulness, “a clean, bare attention” to what is happening, seems easy to sustain. Yet noticing the distinct qualities in each realm of consciousness, one of the basic steps in a practice of inquiry, is not easy. The ocean’s presence is so striking, sensory experience feels unified and seamless. How can I divide it up? Here is the sound of ocean. Listening, I try to hear it as sound. What is it that I experience when I hear this? I listen not for the roar of ocean, but the quality of the sound as a part of awareness, distinct from what I see, touch, feel . . .
It’s hard. The sound is so evocative, it’s difficult to distinguish it from a feeling of expansiveness as I sit here, and what is the sense that I feel as pressure and vibration in my body? Sound? Touch? And the rhythmic nature of what I hear—is this sound or something else? I am aware that as I follow what I thought was sound, it runs into multiple channels of awareness, just as the water rises up in a mass and breaks into thousands of separate rivulets on the rocks and trickles down to the sea.
You know those Gestalt images in psychology books, optical illusions in which you can see the profile of a young woman one instant and the profile of an old woman the next—but you can never see the two profiles at once? Each distinct, imaginary image is created from the same set of lines. They’re not really separate: one image becomes foreground, the other background. They’re polarized, symmetric—objects located exactly in the same space. The image you see submerges the other, which goes—where?
Are the boundaries between things, the solid world of objects we experience simply a trick of the way we focus on the whole? When we shift focus we find our easy definitions unraveling. Think—is everything carved out of our awareness like this? “What we see, we see / and seeing is changing, “ Adrienne Rich said in her poem “Planetarium.” As we isolate boundaries with our attention, we begin to see their imaginary nature. But baring enlightenment, new boundaries rise up in their place. Our attention shuttles back and forth, within/without, weaving this seemingly seamless whole (and it is!) into its familiar shape.
Much later—people around me are pointing, binoculars out, staring at the sea. I squint out over the water, amorphous specks in my vision resolving into—seabirds? Anomalies of waves? A puff of froth and a shadow. It’s true, it’s a whale.
He’s not so far out. But he never quite emerges. I see the long dark sleek shape of him rise imperceptibly, so that after the fact I think “oh!” and then he glides by and disappears like the fabled sea serpent, the merest sinuous line on the water’s surface. All the late afternoon he stays, almost in one spot, rising and disappearing like that other fabulous beast, the final object in consciousness, the self, leaving behind only a cloud of vapor. I have been staring so long at the space where he appears that at times I don’t realize if I’m still seeing him or not.
I think perhaps it’s time to go, but I am reluctant to abandon watching him, hoping that he will emerge so I can see him clearly. I feel just as I often do when I meditate, anticipating the reward of insight that remains stubbornly submerged in the familiar sea of habitual experience.
So I’ve been sitting a long time now, the tide is out, and I am aware of how the clarity of the noonday light has changed. The late afternoon sun spreads a milky golden light over the water. Everything calms down, recedes slightly into the distance. A seal’s head pops up in the surf, gilded like everything else with the mellowing light. A haze forms on the horizon. This novelty contains its own reassurance. Even without whales visible there is something to see, something that may not be seen when whales emerge.
—Melody Carr
