Looking Carefully
Description:
Set aside five or ten minutes and look carefully at any object of your choosing: a flower, a tree, for example. When you have become used to this technique, try it with people.
The word carefully means attentively, with awareness, mindfully, meditatively, with love, with caring. We can look without caring at all, and then we miss the whole point. The word carefully has to be remembered in all its meanings, but the root meaning is meditatively.
And what does it mean when we see something meditatively? It means without mind, fully in the present moment, bringing no past memories or future desires. Simply being in the NOW, enjoying the beauty of what the object of our looking offers.
When and Where:
Anytime/anywhere is good.
Benefits:
Meditation is alchemy: it can transform the base metal into gold, it can transform a tulip into a lotus of paradise. The ordinary becomes the extraordinary. This is the way of meditation. To find the extraordinary in the ordinary, to find all in the now, to find the whole in this. As we look carefully, a great wonder arises, a great joy, a moment of sheer magic. Try it!
