1.2. Sense of Sight
Let's begin by examining each sense individually through introspection.
First up, the sense of sight.
Meditation on the sense of sight
These next six meditations can be moved through quite quickly, they are merely an orientation guide to the qualitative differences between each type of sense experience. Spend part of the day on each sense, then move on. You can always come back to them later if you like.
For this particular meditation, it might be better to get up and walk around, so that you can fully engage with the way sight works. Or, if you'd prefer to sit, don't be afraid to move your head around a bit, to give some variety to what meets your eyes.
Transcript
Let's spend a little time with the first sense, the sense of sight. Bring your attention to the visual field, the world of seeing, all the information coming through the eye channel. If you're sitting down, open your eyes. If you're walking or moving around, keep your eyes open and watch where you're going. It doesn't matter so much what you're seeing, what objects you are looking at. The important thing is to know, right now the experience is of 'seeing'. There is a visual experience happening. Look at the entire field of visual experience. All the different objects that you see are part of the visual field. Instead of looking at the objects, see the whole field. Not the objects of vision, but vision itself. Focus on the act of seeing, the fact of seeing, the field of sight. Right now, seeing is happening. This is a visual experience. --- While you're seeing, you'll still be hearing, smelling, feeling physical sensations and thinking thoughts, but give priority to this process of seeing. Give more attention to the sense of sight. --- When your mind wanders off into thought, come back to this very simple, quite mundane, sense of sight, knowing that right now, you are seeing. Seeing is almost always available to experience, but when nothing interesting is happening in the visual field, the mind will tend to wander off. This is part of the training, to condition your mind to stay where you put it. Sit, stay, good dog. If you are easily distracted, just mentally note to yourself, "seeing", "this is sight", "eye channel" or whatever language is useful to you. Noting or labelling can be very helpful in the beginning to anchor the mind to the task at hand. --- Notice the types of objects in the visual field. Shapes, colours, light and dark. That's all the eyes really perceive. From change in those we infer that there is movement. --- Notice the range of the visual field. How far seeing extends to the left and to the right ... up and down. Notice that you can't see above, below, or behind you. ^^^ The eyes are orientated in a forward direction and have a limited range. --- Notice the accuracy of seeing, in focus in the centre, fuzzy everywhere else. ^^^ Notice how indistinct and colourless objects in peripheral vision are, although movement is clearly visible. --- Notice how attention automatically jumps to the other senses as soon as there is a strong stimulus coming from another sense field. It's perfectly natural, nothing to change. Just know that it's happening and bring the mind back to seeing. Give priority to seeing. --- Notice how when you blink or close your eyes, your sense of sight temporarily disappears. And when you open the eyes again, your sense of sight reappears. It seems like stating the obvious, but this is something we will explore in more detail, the conditions required for seeing. --- Notice how you like certain sights, how you dislike certain sights, how you are indifferent to certain sights. --- This exercise is merely to orientate you to the sense of sight. Later on we will move to more open awareness, and then you need to know very clearly, "this is the sense of sight", "this is the eye channel" so there will be no confusion about which sense you are experiencing. --- Keep coming back to this sense of sight. Give it your full attention. Remember to blink.Please continue studying the sense of sight for a portion of the day until you are familiar with its basic details, then move on to the sense of hearing.
Q&A
Q: You mention light and dark, colour and shapes, what about depth perception, how far away something is?
A: Interestingly, that information is not really available on the eye channel. It's something that the mind deduces from a visual experience. But, hold that thought, we'll explore it in more detail later when we come to the dual aspect of experiences.
Q: Do you have any more questions or doubts at this point?