Will Johnson - Eyes Wide Open: Buddhist Instructions on Merging Body and Vision

To the seer and visionary in all of us

Eyes Wide Open

By situating the body (or soma) right at the center of sitting meditation practice, Will Johnson helps initiate a quiet, slow revolution.... Such a contribution to meditation instruction is transformative in numerous respects. This book, like previous books by the author, is a landmark text in the contemporary literature of homecoming.

JAMES MARTIN, COFOUNDER OF MINDFUL SOMATICS INSTITUTE

With his delightful stories and exploration of the many wisdom traditions, Will Johnson continues to impress upon us the importance of the embodied experience. If we are to gain any traction on the spiritual path or to address that nagging inkling that something just isnt right in our lives, this little gem of a book can guide us. Johnson offers many simple techniques to do this, honing in on vision as the vehicle for our exploration. The daily experience of looking has been imbued with the power of transformation with one quick read! Will Johnson continues to be at the forefront of body-based dharmic practice and its confluence with somatic psychology.

JACKIE ASHLEY, MA, BC-DMT, LPC, ADJUNCT FACULTY AT NAROPA UNIVERSITY

Acknowledgments

S pecial thanks go to Phil Gronquist, who, many long decades ago, first helped me open my eyes and see.

As always, the good folks at Inner Traditionsin particular Jon Graham, Meghan MacLean, Erica Robinson, and Elizabeth Wilsonhave been wonderful guides, helpmates, and contributors on this project.

If there was ever an award presented to a spiritual teacher who created a technique of awakening so simple that it was probably destined to be overlooked, that award might easily go to the English seer Douglas Harding. Douglass book On Having No Head inspired me as a young man to pay far more attention to my relationship with the visual field. The Rumi quotation to dissolve the body into vision is cited in that book.

To my wonderful wife, Gretavatti, who raises love to the level of devotion, and to my two handsome sons, Kailas and Jamieall of us fans of the movie AvatarI say, I see you.

when my mind was cleansed of impurities

like a mirror of its dust and dirt

I recognized the Self in me

deep in my looking

the last words vanished

joyous and silent

the waking that met me there

LALLA

if you use your mind to look for Buddha

you wont see Buddha

to find Buddha

you have to see your nature

BODHIDHARMA

with my eyes wide open

I absorbed everything

as a sponge absorbs liquid

HENRI MATISSE

INTRODUCTION

The Monk Who Lost the Contest

right behind your eyes you are there

T ake a moment, and you can feel yourself there. Looking. Youre always there, and whenever your eyes are open, youre always looking. So intimate is your connection with your looking that when you say, Im looking, youre not just saying that youre engaged in the act of seeing. Youre also implying that you are your looking, that how you look and what you, in turn, see are a direct reflection of who you are in this moment.

No matter what its contents may consist of, the visual field only ever offers us two choices, two different ways of looking and seeing, and the choice we make profoundly affects how we experience ourselves in this moment. It all happens in the space behind your eyes, the place from which you look, the place where awareness of self and awareness of vision cross paths.

Ordinarily the way we view the visual field confirms in us a felt sense of separation from everything we can perceive to exist outside our bodies. The visual field that I look out on, with its infinitude of multiple, discreet objects, with its convincing sense of otherness, is so out there, outside of myself, and I am so in here, right behind my eyes and inside my body. This way of seeing and beingthrough which I experience myself as somehow poured into my body, like a beverage into a bottle, and view everything inside my body as exclusively me while everything outside my body is other than meeffectively splits the whole of experience into two neatly separated worldsone inside, the other outside. And even though these worlds are constantly interacting with each other, still they must remain forever separate and disjoined. This is, far and away, how most of us view the world and our relationship to it.

But this splitting in two of the world of experienceinto an inside-the-body world of thoughts, sensations, feelings, and personal identity and an outside-the-body world dominated by the otherness of the visual fieldcreates in many of us a lurking uneasiness and tension, a sense of isolation and loneliness that were not easily able to shake, a feeling of alienation and disconnection from the larger world into which weve been born and out on which we look. This subtly pervasive sense of separation, of vague disconnectionmind separate from body, self from other, inner from outeris at the base of the human condition, and its staring us in the eye. We may have no idea what it is we feel that were splitting ourselves off from. All we may sense is that something just feels... a bit off. Something keeps tugging at us, some niggling little feeling (or perhaps not so niggling and not so small), and even though weve accepted it as part of being human, it still doesnt particularly feel very good.

The Buddha spoke of this uneasiness, this nagging inkling that something isnt quite right, as duhkka. The great thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi spoke of this uneasiness as well, in terms completely resonant with how split in two your world of experience can be carved by this way of seeing. He would say it makes you feel separated from something you very badly want to reembrace and that feeling separated in this way hurts, both in your body and in your soul.

As common as it may be, this isnt the only way we can look out at the world. Theres a second choice we can make, and its almost the exact opposite of the first. Instead of reinforcing how isolated and alone we are in this vast universe, the visual field is equally capable of reflecting back to us a felt sense of connection and inclusion, as though it were offering an invitation to merge with the energies of the larger universe in which we live and look out on, rather than confirming how irrevocably separated from them we are.

Through the shift in perspective of this second kind of seeing, divisions between your inner and outer worlds start to drop away and you begin, bodily, to experience an intimate connectivity to the world you look out on. Instead of a world composed of an infinite number of separate objects, of which you are but one, you become privy to a substratum of experiencewhat mystics have often referred to as the great ground of beingthat underlies the world of appearances and ties all the individual parts back together into a single, cohesive piece. Beyond the mind caught up in conventional divisions of inner and outer, theres another place of perception that you can directly access, a place of far greater ease and profound relaxation in which you no longer feel so disjoined from the world you see.