Eyes · 17 November 2009
Monday I fell asleep watching for meteors, lying in the back yard on the hot tub cover as the waters gurgled beneath. The giant buildings down in Century City hum all night, ventilating themselves. All those confident vibrations put me straight to sleep. Woke again at 3, in time for the last lights of the Leonid, just a few spacerocks aflame streaking sideways in east to west.
Before, I would have done what Vipassana teaches: stare at the sky like a rabbit hole, poised to spring on any peeking phenomenon. But this time I payed as much attention to my eyes as the sky, shifting the gaze little by little, letting the whole space twinkle and change, meteors or not. Different.
Meditation class Sunday. I curled up in the solstice sculpture on the sea cliffs, put on the phone headset, and practiced with thirty quiet others on the line. The sculpture’s center is two soft foot-wide planks, soaked and bent to meet each other in an ellipse, then replicated a dozen times around the axis, with openings directly east and west. Inside is echochamber to the ears, windtunnel to the skin, hammock to the back, and to my imagination the dead center of Sauron’s searching eye.
On the line, we were working on restricting the attention to the visual field, then allowing impermanence to happen in that zone. The specific technique was: note the vanishings of experiences, calling that elusive moment gone! This technique is similar, if way more specific and difficult, than the usual vipassana method of labeling subjective activity: planning, anxiety, fantasy, etc. It reminds me of Nintendo Duck Hunt: watch the phenomenon so closely you are paying attention when it goes poof. Except for Nobody is pulling the trigger.
What Shinzen calls sight flow—attending to change through the sense gate of sight—is, his old timer students say, one of the more difficult sensory techniques to master. Especially when you’re just sitting there, gazing at some floor. We did something so subtle it seemed stupid until it clicked for me: let the eyes stay in their drste, but shift the seeing ever so slightly. Let one eye become more dominant, modulate the relationship to light, wobble the eyeball a tiny bit. Recognize this as a kind of sensory experience “a flavor of impermanence.”
This whole exercise brings up all kinds of practical questions about where mind and the world reside, but for once I didn’t let myself care about them. I just gazed up in to the nexus of nested ellipses, shifting the eyes bit by bit, letting something this trivial sharpen my concentration (and maybe understanding) a little bit. The combined difficulty and triviality of the technique might have irritated me enough to shift to the more obvious field of change, tilting my head to watch the waves roll in on the beach. Life on the ocean is always easy philosophy.
However! Not this time. The method worked because of what happened the day before. In dance, after a couple of hours of godknowswhat involving deep trance and high receptivity, some woman—calm and respectful, clearly a yoga practitioner, experienced in the healing professions, a decade or so older—drew me down to the floor and took lotus touching my knees. Next thing I know we’re doing the white tantra thing, where you gaze unblinking in to another’s eyes. I’ve done tiny bits of this, stints of two minutes that felt like five, but only as a kind of dare and accompanied by a special feeling of excruciating uncanniness.
First thought: Wow, I’m glad I didn’t get myself in to this situation with anyone other than this person before me. Seriously, staring someone in the eyes for 15 minutes straight (time went away, but enough passed in the body that my knees were stiff coming out of lotus) could be really stupid for your spirit or whatever it is. Next hundred thoughts (lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes, I don’t remember): God, when will it end? Can I stay with it? Also: Eyes are so freakish! (Remembering my professor, author of How Emotions Work, who says that people the world over are most superstitious about the eyes.) But after that: Ok, all we’re doing is looking. And it keeps changing, depending on which of her eyes I really see, which of her eyes is doing the looking, and which of my eyes is leading. (It didn’t occur to me to try to separate the gaze of each eye, doing a two-pointed drste on each of her pupils, but maybe that happened at times.)
The woman’s eyes changed and changed, even though she barely blinked or moved her face. I noticed everything—her eyes and mine—because this was an insanely high stakes situation. No part of me could stray from it, so I learned very quickly and for the first time to give myself fully to the visual field. How to relate relentlessly with who or what is there.
She was as rich and complex and easy and comfortable in her skin as humans can possibly become. Just looking at me, stabilizing me with steady disappearances of her way of looking, radiating little content but all kinds of electricity (well, I wouldn’t have gotten near her if the love weren’t trilling away, but that can be a background element). I couldn’t hold the experience of her at all still, even though she was going nowhere and doing nothing but being there “for” me. (And “with” me… existential philosophers would go crazy on this most unadorned obvious encounter with the so-called other if they ever had the guts to try it.)
This is something different. In an exact way, involving the activity of the eyes and the behavior of what’s in them, looking at the world can be like sitting with a philosopher-stranger. Intersubjective, interobjective, razor sharp, high stakes but at the same time dead calm.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: having a body
, spirituality
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Now go finish your dissertation.
Posted by: Flap o' the robe · Nov 17, 07:30 PM · #
I applaud your ability to hang with the eye to eye gaze for 15 + minutes. I think I would freak and be done in by my suspicions of all sorts of alterior motives. Two people just looking, like two nobodies looking at two nothings, doesn’t seem possible for me. I know I have lots of old traumas and dramas to still work through.
A bare twelve hours after your sculpture sit I was there as well. My circumstances were different. Sadly different. I woke Monday under the law of Murphy. People didn’t show, delivery wait windows were in the 8 hour frame. The flow was not happening. Then around 11 am the the 120 dB jackhammers started 10 feet outside my desk window as I was getting around to some writing, working etc. By 2 I was as anxious as I can ever recall. Each thought was a new expletive variation. But I had to wait for the “delivery” window. This was the modern equivalent of the swarm of locusts. At some point I said – “to hell with the wait” and ran for the spacious ocean and ended up hanging out the foot of that sculpture. I had no idea it had solstice lore around it. It really helped me. And when I got back, the jackhammerers were gone and a few hours later the package came. And the law of Murphy was lifted.
Posted by: e&sj · Nov 17, 10:00 PM · #
That would freak me out!!! Ooooooh!!!!! I don’t get that intimate with ANYone! Intimacy is basically a thing of the past for me and to lay yourself open like that can be scary!
Posted by: boodiba · Nov 18, 02:34 AM · #
As scary as plastering yourself over the internet in various forms of video’d contortion?
I think not.
Posted by: durgadawg · Nov 18, 02:40 AM · #
Something tells me our new angry Nepali hasn’t tried either public contortion or the eye-gazing. It’s actually a great comparison, though. This morning I was learning to tock, all the way to the edge of this fear-block my mind has created about it even though my body is totally capable. Two women in the back row were openly staring, and one said to the other: “It’s better than watching television.”
This would have infuriated and freaked me out as recently as last week. Having privacy around the very challenging aspects of practice has been a big “issue” for me in recent years, especially because the crazy asana shit attracts unwanted attention. I can’t explain it at all, but I feel like the eye-gazing episode this weekend made my filter stronger rather than weaker, or maybe it cleared some of the self-protectiveness that has in the past made me so fucking angry when people objectify me in practice. In any case, the old anger didn’t happen this morning at all. I didn’t enjoy the attention… it just didn’t create a response in me either way.
It’s true that the eye looking experience is FREAKY and brings up crazy shit, but that kind of intensity might also get real results. Or maybe it’s nothing. As my prof says, they’re just eyes, after all. Nothing to get all superstitious about! (Yeah right!)
ESJ, this Sunday predicament, trapped at home by your own stuff, jackhammered in… god that’s excruciating on such a perfect day. I’m glad you escaped in good time. The sculpture is one of my favorite things in town, maybe I should do a going-away picnic there. It’s oriented to the winter solstice. Details
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 18, 10:32 AM · #
Try doing it in a mirror. Interesting.
Posted by: OLDDUDE · Nov 18, 12:45 PM · #
That sculpture is so beautiful! The toc, though, is a total mindfuck.
As for people gawping at me during practice, it’s never bothered me.. I guess partly exhibitionism and partly the fact that, as the most ‘advanced’ practitioner in my particular shala (95% are doing primary), I kind of like for them to see me nail the crazy stuff, but also to see me struggle just like they do. We all get brought to our knees somewhere in this practice…
Posted by: susananda · Nov 18, 12:50 PM · #
I like it when you persevere, meteors happen… :)
Posted by: Gregor · Nov 18, 04:48 PM · #
Your unconcern for the superficial invasions may be due to the positioning of both Venus and the Sun in Scorpio right now. Or at least that explanation would help you deflect the invaders from getting all up in your shit.
Posted by: Carl · Nov 18, 05:28 PM · #
Carl! Can I just say… LOL. I think I have about 25 planets in Scorpio, maybe 30 (thank god for that Capricorn rising). Does this change the calculus or just render me an utter pain in the cosmic ass?
And can I use this Scorp passage to manage the separation anxieties of others? I just decided to bust out of LA at the next new moon and the emotional weather around here is getting all turbulent and shit. Departures bring up a lot; and I don’t know if my filter can filter it in the best way.
Susan yes, TOCK MINDFUCK. Adult gymnastics has brought me to my knees… or at least tip-toes…. Let’s see what happens this next month, you and me.
Tick tick tick tick tick….
Gregor, thank you.
OD, funny we look in the mirror constantly but never consider it a freaky liminal activity (at least, unless on certain drugs and unless Lacan/Zizek are, by some accident of stupidity, actually right).
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 18, 05:47 PM · #
watching a human face dissolve— your own or others— a little bit like seeing a falling star: oops, there it goes.
owl, the michigan forest left word on fb (who knew?) that its already waiting to hear your one-hand-clappin’-asana.
Posted by: Sara · Nov 19, 11:54 PM · #
Nice!
When an owl falls in the forest…
Those woods are deep. Kind of scary at this point.
Posted by: (0v0) · Nov 20, 09:51 AM · #