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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy:
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Awakening To The
Miracle Of Ordinary Life:
Living in Relationship
by Dennis Lewis |
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To be alive is to live in relationship. Our thinking, feeling, sensing, perceiving and doing are organic functions that relate us not only to the so-called outside world but also to our own being. But this relatedness is not static. It involves a process of opening and closing, expansion and contraction, and harmony and disharmony, based on a continual "exchange" of substances, energies, perceptions, information, ideas, and so on. It is the appropriateness of the exchange, of the "reciprocal feeding," that defines the quality of the relationship.
At the most functional level, we take in air, water, and food from the earth and its atmosphere, process these substances in our organism, and return various "waste" products to our environment. The waste products are only such from our standpoint, not from the environment's, since they are part of a vast chain of exchanges necessary for life on earth to continue. The quality of our relationship at this level, which helps define the degree of our health, has to do with whether the exchange is an appropriate one. If we do not eat or breathe properly, or if we take in the wrong substances, the exchange can quickly become harmful.
On a larger scale, the same process takes place with regard to humanity's use of the earth's resources. We take material from the earth, process this material, and return various substances, often poisonous, to the earth and atmosphere. It is only now becoming clear that this "exchange" is getting out of balance, and that future survival of the human race may well depend on our soon finding a new relationship to the earth.
At the personal level, we use the word relationship constantly. We talk about our relationship to our job, friends, spouse, children, and ourselves. We talk about good relationships and bad ones. About what we get or don't get from our relationships. We read books and attend seminars on how to have better relationships. But we seldom question the reality of this "person" that we take to be ourselves. And we seldom look at ourselves and our relationships from a more global perspective-the perspective of consciousness and conscious living.
From the perspective of consciousness, relationship takes on a new meaning. As we begin to become more "globally aware" of our interactions with ourselves and others, we begin to realize that these interactions are not ends in themselves, but represent the "material" of our own understanding, our own being. And these interactions, in so far as we are conscious of them at the instant they occur, are windows into our own psyche and psychology, revealing the particular "person" we are at the moment. As the master psychologists and searchers have told us, "our being attracts our life." What we are determines in large part what we see, experience, and do. And if we honestly observe ourselves in the actual moment without judgment, comparison, interpretation, and so on, our lives come alive in an entirely new way. We experience a new, profound relationship with ourselves. We suddenly begin to sense that all of these relationships, all of these movements in our being, all of these perceptions of ourselves and others that we've taken for granted-including our own concept of ourselves as a person-are not what they seem to be. They are not "objective" phenomena, but are, in a way that we can just vaguely comprehend, manifestations of our own consciousness.
It is interesting to note in this regard that modern science itself is moving in this direction. The latest discoveries of quantum physics, for example, make clear that it is the observer of the experiment who in some unknown way determines its outcome. What's more, the very notion of a separate object in space and time is being questioned, since the latest developments may indicate that the so-called subatomic particles that underlie what we call the physical world can somehow communicate with one another faster than the speed of light (which contradicts Einstein's relativity theory). Or they may indicate that reality is somehow "nonlocal," which means that space does not exist as an objective phenomenon, but is simply a way of viewing this nonlocal reality.
Regardless of how we interpret these latest developments in physics, it is clear that the so-called objects that make up our world depend as much upon consciousness as they do on some kind of independent reality. A good analogy, though imperfect, is the process of dreaming. In our dreams we create people and objects of all sorts in sometimes spectacular environments where we have never been or at least do not exist at the moment. Yet we take these creations as objective phenomena, not realizing that the very space in which they take place is nonexistent, but is simply the result of a particular state of consciousness called dreaming. It is only when we awaken from this state that we realize that this "reality" had no substance, no independent existence, but was simply a projection of our own mind.
So no mater how we look at the question we see that our relationships really depend on us-in particular, on the way we look and listen to what is in and around us. We create the world in our own image, but because we do not realize we are doing so we lose touch with our perceptual creativity. Reality is not only out "there" waiting to be discovered; it is also in the silent inwardness of all experience. There is nowhere special to go and nothing special to do. All that is truly required is an instantaneous opening to the miracle of being itself. This is the relationship we all crave-a relationship in which our experience becomes whole and unified because our perceptive powers, the very manifestations of being, are no longer bounded by the limits of conditioning and memory, but are free to embrace the totality of what we call life.
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Dennis Lewis,
Teacher of meditation |
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Dennis Lewis is a teacher of meditation, authentic breathing, and qigong. A long-time student and group leader in the Gurdjieff Work, he also studied for three years with Advaita Vedanta master Jean Klein.
Lewis has been certified to teach various qigong and Taoist meditation practices by Bruce Kumar Frantzis, Mantak Chia, and Dr. Wang Shan Long. The foundation of his approach today is the awakening of consciousness, of presence, in our everyday lives.
His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Yoga Journal, Gnosis, Parabola, Somatics, Library Journal, Manas, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is co-editor, with Jacob Needleman, of two books: Sacred Tradition & Present Need (Viking) and On the Way to Self Knowledge (Knopf).
His acclaimed book The Tao of Natural Breathing: For Health, Well-Being and Inner Growth, published in 1997, is now available in eight languages. His audio program Breathing as a Metaphor for Living was produced in 1998 by Sounds True.
His new book Boundless Breathing: Teachings, Exercises, and Meditations for Health and Self-Transformation will be published soon.
www.authentic-
breathing.com
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