One afternoon at the home of a friend, a poster on the wall caught my eye. It was a computer- generated picture showing many rows of waves in an unusual, mechanical pattern. The rows were identical and repeated throughout the picture, each row touching the one below it.
My friend asked what I saw, but I didn’t quite understand his question. He suggested I stand closer to the poster and look again. I still saw rows of waves in graphic detail. He instructed me to focus my eyes an inch or so in front of the poster, which took much counter-intuitive effort. When I finally succeeded, the waves totally disappeared; instead, I saw three large dolphins leaping in open air. Surprised by the shift, I blinked, which caused my eyes to immediately refocus on the original picture of the waves. When I tried to follow my friend’s instruction a second time, it was even more difficult to see the hidden image since I knew I was looking for dolphins.
My friend explained that the computer-generated picture had three dimensions. The hidden image, located in the third dimension, was invisible to our eyes as long as they were focused on the poster. The dolphins, there all the time, could only be perceived when the eyes focused in front of the picture, not on the poster itself in their habitually conditioned way.
Everyone will see the waves and not the dolphins—that’s our common human conditioning. When we see what is obvious, we usually don’t question what else might be in front of our eyes. In this case, even if by some chance we were to glimpse the hidden image, we would lose it the moment our eyes refocused on the poster. The ordinary picture would reappear, and we wouldn’t even know what had happened. We might assume that seeing the dolphins was an aberration of perception and not real. However, not only is the image real and always there— it isn’t even hiding.
Unless we understood how we saw the image, it would be very difficult to do it again. In fact, the harder we try to see what’s on the page, the more our eyes will lock into the depth perception that makes seeing it impossible. Even though there are several ways to refocus our eyes to see the 3-D image, they all require that we not focus on the obvious picture in front of our face. Hint: in order to see the third dimension, we must try softer, not harder.
Getting a glimpse of what is normally invisible could happen while we are engaged in some sort of prayer, worship, visualization, or anything else that relaxes our minds. If our eyes soften momentarily and we see the dolphins, we might believe that the particular activity we were doing caused the revelation. In fact, it occurred because of the non-grasping quality of our inner being, independent of what we were doing at the time. By softening our gazes, we allowed our focus to shift from the obvious and compelling image before us. If we reflect on this, we might realize that although our ordinary sense perception is limited by habitual use, we can expand it with specific attitudes, knowledge, and techniques. Our efforts, however, must include the effort to relax and release.
This story about the 3-D poster is about a shift in perception—a change from one sense experience to another. If we wish to see divine consciousness, however, we must use a faculty that we already have and use, but which is different from ordinary sense perception. Because consciousness has no material element and cannot be objectified, we cannot directly experience it, but we can indeed imperience it. We only need to understand what this is and how to engage it. We know how to experience the world of sense objects, but how do we imperience the heart of consciousness?