Connecting with Nature | A Doorways into Presence miniseries, Part 3

When you're in nature, you may be looking at something, whatever it may be. But then you can also take in the totality of where you are, whatever it may be. Your surroundings, trees, mountains, the ocean, or just simple, a low grassy surface, bushes. Take in the totality and then bring in other sense perceptions too. But that requires alertness so that you don't drift back into mental concepts. Stay alert. Then you bring in, become aware not just of the visual aspect of being there, you become aware of the sounds. There may be sounds, natural sounds, or there may be sounds that are not natural, that are interfering, but that's fine. There may be natural sounds, a breeze, you can hear the wind, the leaves are moving in the wind, or the certain birds, who knows all natural sounds. Then there's also the air. You can feel the air. Perhaps there's a very slight movement of air. You can feel it on your skin. And then there's a sense of you smell. There's a certain sense rise as you become aware of your sense of smell. Maybe you can smell the moisture in the ground or be there with all your senses, all senses. You can also, for few moments close your eyes so that you can more focus on the other senses that tend to be neglected for many people. So you just take in your. You smell the air, you feel the slight breeze on your skin. Sounds. It's a beautiful experience. And you don't need to look for always the spectacular in nature. Sometimes nature can be very spectacular, but a lot of the time it's just ordinary things. Yes, sometimes you have a beautiful incredible flower or gigantic sequoia tree or whatever incredible things. And many other times there's just normal nature there. Nothing that says pay attention to me. So you have to find, if you are alert enough, you will see the concealed in the ordinary spectacle of nature, there is an extraordinary aliveness and beingness and presence. So you don't always look for the one, the great thing just to be aware of many things that one would habitually overlook in a normal state of consciousness. It's just there's a bush there, there's a grass here, it's been cut. Nothing special. But if you really come alert, then you see everything is intensely alive. There's a consciousness there. It may not be self conscious, not conscious of itself. There is a consciousness that has manifested as the tree, the flower, the grass, the bush. There's a consciousness that has manifested in that form a different vibrational frequency. One could say to your consciousness, but it's not your consciousness. There's only one universal consciousness manifesting in countless life forms. So you begin to recognize, but only because you know yourself as consciousness. Your mind has become still enough for you to know yourself as consciousness. You sense the consciousness that is inseparable from who you are. That is the essence of who you are. That is who you are. And then you can sense the consciousness in other life forms. It's only then. And that sensing of consciousness in other life forms is a deep state of connectedness. You're no longer separate from it, but you are condemned to this separateness when you only relate to things through conceptualization because that becomes a barrier to everything. The concepts become the barrier. When they are free of that, the sense of separation disappears. And there is a oneness, for example, of you and the flower, the oneness of you and the tree. Because there's no longer an entity there that is me, a conceptual entity. There's only consciousness perceiving itself in a different form.