Bare Perception

At the time of this writing, I am still holding space for resolution with the issue of not having access to the SCS-Matters.com domain using my Comcast WiFi at home that began 10 days ago. This morning I was successful logging in using the unsecure Xfinity WiFi hotspot, and I am on my laptop at home.YEAH!

Yesterday morning my “dharma study buddy” mentioned a term that I had not previously encountered in our study with Barbara Brodsky, and I have been searching Aaron’s archives for ‘Bare Perception.”

Emrich Retreat – February 26, 2000

So it’s important that you see that the qualities of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral, are not innate to the object but depend on your relationship to them.

Very occasionally that relationship is what we call “bare perception”, being just with this object as it is in this moment without any prior conditioning to influence how you relate to it. As a simple example, if you had never seen fire, somehow you had lived your entire life and never seen even a candle flame, if you came into a small village after traveling through a cold winter night and somebody invited you into his home where fire burned in the hearth, giving off warmth, in that moment it would be very pleasant. Right there, nothing but the fire. Nothing but that moment. No past conditioning. Yet even here, there is past conditioning that equates warmth with comfort, so already there is some slant.

Think how different it would be if you were traveling on that cold dark night because your home had just burned down and all your family died. There might be a pleasant sensation of warmth from the fire, but your overall experience of fire would not be pleasant. Usually you bring this old conditioning into the moment and so it taints your experience in this moment. It’s very hard to see clearly just what’s here right now.

It’s not easy to bypass that old conditioning. Often the best you can do is to know, “My response here is conditioned by old experience” and to allow a spaciousness which is not so attached to the view, “This is good” or “That is bad”. One notes, “In this moment this feels good to me. It feels pleasant and wholesome. But I acknowledge that consciousness in part is based on past conditioning.”

My past experiences with being on perma-hold, then getting a non-native English speaking entry-level person who asks me the same questions as the last person just asked me has been anything but pleasant.

Last evening I was with my sister. She was saying she felt sad. She was able to say she could see where the sadness was coming from, and she recognized it as old conditioning. She said she knew tomorrow she would feel better.

This morning, I see all of this so related to the talk I gave at St. John UCC in New Buffalo yesterday. I was speaking about the way the news creates a false sense of the world as unsafe and unkind. I encouraged people to pay attention to their own experiences. I suggested making lists of the kindnesses we receive and give. We spent some time reflecting on the true nature of the world.
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It is because we are raising our standards that things seem to be getting worse.

This is true about our world, and it is true about my sister.

We care more than we have ever cared before.

I would like to add the sermon to this post but I have not yet figured out how to do that with the cobbled-together process. You can send me an email message asking for the audio file of the sermon if you would appreciate listening.

I am here with my fingers on the keyboard, grateful for improvement and I know tomorrow I will feel better….