The Value of Sensing

By Charles Brooks
excerpt from chapter 4, Reclaiming Vitality and Presence

Attention to sensing quiets what is compulsive in our thought, so that the mind becomes free and available for its normal function of perception. When the radio in the mind is stilled, everything else can come to life. The camper's lantern is blown out, and the darkness fills with stars as the woods deepen and widen for him. The primitive world in which things appear and disappear, bloom and fade, eat and are eaten can be perceived surrounding us - and including us. I myself have feared this world, in which I have had little practice in living.

I have spent much of my life in the half makebelieve world of words and know that, though it may often bore one, it is comfortable, and one is loath to give it up. This is the familiar and the "secure," even in its insecurity. When it seems inadequate one can always dwell in the past or add a new dimension like heaven, or tomorrow. In the world of perception the present is infinite; the only authority is I, the perceiver. We cannot know the future, and only the least trace of the past. But when we breathe the air of the night woods, and let their forms and almost imperceptible sounds into us, or when we stand silent in the sunlight that glows on rocks and leaves and city buildings, and perhaps feel the earth sustaining us, we know that we exist, at first hand, surrounded by innumerable other beings who exist too. Need we ask more?

The study of this work is our whole organismic functioning in the world we perceive, of which we are a part-our personal ecology: how we go about our activities, how we relate to people, to situations, to objects. We aim to discover what is natural in this functioning and what is conditioned: what is our nature, which evolution has designed to keep us in touch with the rest of the world, and what has become our "second nature," as Charlotte likes to call it, which tends to keep us apart. We shall discover a spectrum spreading from the perceived to the conceived, in which our upbringing has found us at one end and pushed us to the other, where it has held us. In sensing, we shall gradually return to that broad area in the center of the spectrum where our birthright is balanced with our culture, and from where we are freer to move in any direction.