the gaze on individual items so much as become simultaneously aware of the entire 180 degree visual input—being as aware of the peripheral vision as the centre, and not naming what you see. Then try the same with sensation: become aware of the feel of the chair you are sitting on, the breeze on your skin, the position of your body and any tensions or good feelings in it. Smell next, and finally taste.
Note that this is not the same as a “stillness” sort of meditation; the sensing is more active. Although the best approach to sound might be to close the eyes and not move, when it comes to taste you almost certainly need to move your tongue a little to taste what is in your mouth; smell is greatly heightened by increasing the breath and sniffing; to be fully aware of the texture under your fingers, you will do better to move them slightly; and the visual awareness is probably heightened by slight eye movements.
Having run through each sense, you then try to hold that awareness for all five senses at once, to achieve what I'll call total awareness (TA, for shorthand). “Total” is an exaggeration, unless you are highly proficient, because it is very hard to be utterly totally aware. All we require for now is wide open senses and a conscious awareness that is constantly holding those sense impressions and feeling highly aware. Unless you are eating something, the sense of taste will probably get less attention than the other senses, but do at least try to hold sight, sound and body sensation together.
THE QUESTION IS: HOW DO YOU GET ON WITH THIS EXERCISE?
The answer I receive from most people is that, as long as you apply yourself, TA is fairly easy to attain for a few seconds, but hard to maintain.
All too soon you will find your mind has wandered. Either because one sense takes over—as when something interesting is seen and you start watching it and forget the other senses—or else the bored mind starts wandering and you suddenly find yourself daydreaming about something that has nothing to do with your immediate senses.
If that is the case with you, the next exercise should provide a solution.
EXERCISE 4: THE WALKING EXERCISE
Go to some peaceful place—such as the countryside or a quiet suburb—and take a walk, trying to maintain a state of TA as you do so.
Why do I suggest a peaceful place? Not for the value of peace in itself, but simply to avoid the sort of attention-catching distraction mentioned above.
Being in TA, you are vividly aware of everything around you, though trying not to “name” or “think about” any of it, simply receiving and holding the impressions. The Cup not the Dagger.
So, when you inevitably realise that your mind has wandered, and you have lost TA, the fact that you had been in vivid awareness means you can recall your last moments of vivid perception and make yourself turn around, walk back to the place where you had it, and then continue the journey in TA.
Make sure, however, that as you walk back you also maintain TA. So what happens if your attention drifts again before you even get back to where you last lost awareness? You just do the same thing: turn around again, get back into TA, and walk back to the point where it drifted the second time, then continue the journey back to the previous point.
In theory, you might spend the rest of the journey just zigzagging to and fro between two points, each time slipping into a daydream before you have retraced your steps. But in practice I find that the sheer discipline of having to retrace steps does drive the mind to stop its wandering and really hold TA. So with a little practice you will find that you can walk for, say, half an hour and know that most of that time you were in a state of intense, wordless awareness.
The beauty of this exercise is that, because it demands more of you, it is actually much easier than sitting still in a chair and trying to be totally aware. It is a great exercise.
EXERCISE 4: INNER AWARENESS
Answer this question: Do you feel different after such a walk?
What I am asking you to do, firstly, is to practise a sort of inner TA—just turn your senses inward and become aware of your whole inner state. Just hold that state (like a Cup) for as long as you like before answering the question: Do I feel different?
You will feel different. In which case, you can, if you wish, go on to explore what is different by being more analytical. What is your bodily sensation, your metal state, do you feel more aware? More peaceful? Or whatever.
This exercise links back to the first one where you looked at your inner response to music heard in different ways—is it different when standing or sitting? Now we ask: are things different when we practise total awareness? What has it left you with?
SUMMARY FOR WEEK ONE
We want to explore our psychic potential. We may have rational resistance to the whole idea of psychic sensing, so we begin by increasing our sensitivity to subtle sensory data at the edge of perception, rather than immediately going full-on for “clairvoyance”.
We may also have another form of resistance, a dislike of flaky, fey New Age faddism or a sense that, in a world of so much pain and deprivation, it is sheer bourgeois self-indulgence to want to increase sensitivity, or that discrimination is a dirty word and should be reduced, not enhanced. To overcome that resistance, we focus on the joy of exploration, rather than allowing ourselves to become victims to sensitivity.
So when, in the last experiment, I ask: “What has it left you with?”, I am expecting some sort of positive answer. Most people seem to feel good for a while after such an experience. Total awareness adds value to life, and its practice is good for us.
QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS
DOES IT MATTER IF I CAN'T FIND TIME ALONE TO DO THESE EXERCISES?
The first thing I noted in the feedback from these exercises was how readily they could be adapted to suite different daily conditions. I left them simple and flexible because I know that many people are committed to busy work and social schedules, and the exercises could be adjusted to suit these.
For example, it had not occurred to me that the walking exercise might be attempted by a person using a wheelchair, but one of the people on the course did that and their observations were all the more interesting for that:
This one was personally very difficult but interesting for me. As I use a manual wheelchair, movement in this state is quite strange, particularly given the fact that the situation was overwhelmingly kinaesthetic in nature, almost to the exclusion of other senses. I am usually hyper aware of the contours of the ground I cover, but in practising this exercise I found myself actually paying less attention to my surroundings, and more to the sensations of my body, my hands against wheel rims, muscular movements and tightness, my breath, etc.
One participant was practising awareness in a public place—a courthouse—expanding his listening outwards: “So, I'm sat there, hearing more and more—the inane chatter of lawyers, the mobile phones outside, the grumbling of the central heating…” Then he heard a mumbled conversation about a potential criminal deal, and reported it. “A quick word to a security guard, and crime has been fought for one day, all thanks to [this] excercise!” Not a result I was expecting, but an interesting comment on the possible benefits of awareness.
Another person got an unexpected bonus from the exercise:
I tried listening to the sounds around me in the kitchen, was impressed at the dishwasher making such a rhythmic nose, when I realized that there was a meeting at the hall down the road to mark a Senegalese
