Don’t Trust the Senses (Day 66)

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​We practice awareness to tune ourselves in to reality and cosmos, untainted by ego-rooted opinions and emotion-linked decisions. In self-awareness practice, we seek to know our own habituated thoughts, feelings, and actions… and once known, to navigate our inner and outer experience in such a way that we are not affected by ourSELVES. 

With the subject of today’s contemplation, I’m left asking myself: 

With what senses to we perceive mind and spirit? 

How do we utilize senses designed to intake data from beyond ourselves? We cannot. 

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Heraclitus called self-deception an awful disease and eyesight a lying sense” 
(Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 9.7)

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We can’t trust our standard-issue senses to come to a place of self-knowledge and self-awareness: Why? On one hand because they’re external, and on another because we have egoic opinions on every bit of data we intake from those senses. We don’t just *sense* the *thing*. We have thoughts and feelings about the *thing*, whether we want to accept that or not. They’re there. Subtly. Running deep in the untrained subroutines of the mind. 

However, there is a way to short-circuit the habitual patterns of unconscious living. 

Take a pause, then a breath. Feel it leave your body. 

Practice patience; the same kind needed to see the ripples in a pond come to stillness again. 

Awareness is a tricky business, but like Heraclitus said, self-deception is an “awful disease”. 

May we have what it takes to seek the cure in perpetuity. 

(See y’all tomorrow)