Throughout my decades of journeying it’s become clear to me that all meaning in our lives comes from three foundational paths of inquiry — 1) What are we perceiving? 2) How do we perceive? and 3) Where is the perceiver located? I touched on questions #1 and #3 in my last blog, Dissolving the Doer, and in this piece I’ll try to shed some light on question #2, How do we perceive? Once we start down this path of inquiry, a wondrous world of mystery opens up and continually invites us to explore, question, contemplate, and align.
If there’s one thing I know, it is that we each perceive through the Body. The five sense gates of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are commonly known to everyone, but let’s also add feelings and emotions, vibratory sensation, thinking, and intuition. Taken together these cover the perceptual content of our lives. Perception is truly an embodied process. We could also say that the Information of Reality is flowing through us; and our Body is receiving and perceiving that Information, organizing it, and then displaying the results — much like an antenna receives, processes, and transmits signals. However, as we all know from experience with our electronic devices, sometimes the information we receive, as well as the signals we transmit, are distorted, full of noise, garbled, or lost in transmission. Our Body antenna is no different.
If we are not rationally and emotionally healthy, energized, strong, and clear, then the Information we receive and perceive will be full of “noise”; and the corresponding Reality we project outwards will be confused and distorted.
How easy is it to clearly perceive and communicate when our Body-Minds are physically sick, emotionally drained, full of anger or pain, dull, lethargic, or depressed? The answer is pretty obvious. By comparison, the information we receive and project as Reality is vastly different when we feel healthy, happy, strong, clear, joyful, loving, kind, and grateful. The liberating Truth here is that we don’t have to go find these positive qualities of Life — They are already contained within the Information Stream (Mind Stream) of the Great Loving Reality — waiting for us to recognize and express them in our daily lives.
Instead of trying to find happiness, we align with the ever present happiness that’s already Right Here in our Mind Streams. We perceive through our Bodies so that we can fully express the Divine Information of our True Nature through our conduct and actions. Neuroscience and quantum physics research the world over is confirming and expanding on this understanding everyday. The Ground of Reality is always In-Formation, or In-Forming Itself, By Itself, To Itself. It flows through our Body-Mind and is subsequently displayed as our conscious experience.
Each of our bodies is a sacred Temple of Divinity, and our responsibility to ourselves and others is to treat it that way.
When we recognize this, the motivation for a daily commitment to practice comes naturally. We choose to eat healthy, contemplate, meditate, exercise, and breathe mindfully in order to keep the Temple of the Body, vibrant, clear, and open. We clean our antenna and allow it to perceive what is already Right Here, free of obscuring distortions. In this way, we remain open to receive the Truth of True Nature, so that our lives and actions are fully aligned and in accordance with the One Divine Will.