Sensing the world as a mirror
Sensing the world as a mirror
The phenomenon of 'ingression': how your being drinks in the world
In order to heal your inherited wound of separation from the world, it is incredibly valuable to learn about - and tune into - the phenomenon of ingression.
This word describes the way you drink the world in - how the overall experience of each life moment becomes embedded within you, rearranging the way you carry yourself forward into the future.
It’s why scary movies keep you up at night and social media is destroying the attention spans of the upcoming generations. It’s why, when you think someone is attacking you (where ‘true’ or not), your bodily tone subtly shifts into attack mode.
Yet it’s also why your entire body relaxes when you receive unconditional love, why the sunrise or a beautiful piece of music inspires you.
Your are a porous being. You are constantly taking in and digesting all of your experience, not just the food you eat and the air you breathe. Everything you encounter via sensory motor perception makes an impression.
Likewise, you are making impressions on everything around you.
When you become consciously aware of ingression, you start to notice how the way you feel is not only the result of how much sleep you got last night, what you ate for breakfast and how much money you currently have in savings.
More importantly, how you feel right now has everything to do with your participation in the world in this moment.
This doesn’t have to mean that you are ‘doing’ anything special. But - all else being equal - if you stand in front of a tree and give it your full attention, you will be affected by it, and much differently than if you were looking at a person or telephone pole.
The architect Christopher Alexander developed a theory of ‘living centers.’ He was convinced that some objects had “more life” than others. In early experiments he presented people with two different chairs and asked them which one felt ‘more alive.’ He was usually able to predict which one the majority would choose.
Later, he proposed that the chair (or any other object) that feels ‘more alive’ is the one that, when we look at it, feels more like a mirror that reflects our self back to us.
(For a fantastic introduction to Alexander’s idea about living centers, check out the article Christopher Alexander: Generating a Living World by
.)The world is not a mirror like the one over your bathroom sink, but it is your mirror insomuch as every cell in your body and every cell on this earth has a common origin in the stars. Every idea in your mind was born of your interaction with this world.
And the way the neurons in your brain interact while you think is not unlike the life world in the depths of a pond.
The following video demonstrates a simple exercise that you can do - anytime and anywhere - to begin to tune into the feeling of ‘ingression.’ Make it a regular practice (it only requires a few moments of deliberate awareness for any given occasion) and I think you will notice a palpable shift in the way you relate to your world.
Note: video cuts abruptly at the end because my phone battery died!
To enhance your experience of ingression, practice ‘Still Hunting’ meditation.
See article below
