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Chapter 1: Recognizing and Sensing Beyond the Veils

For the benefit of those of you who chose to skip the introduction, and as a reminder for those of you who were kind enough to read it, please note that the veils in this text are not those personal personas we don in various social situations or when talking with different people. Neither are they the veils we sometimes wear to keep others at bay until we’re certain of their intent. These veils are not in any way something we consciously generate. They are the “norms” that result from the subliminal, societal conditioning to which we’re subjected from birth until death. For a very general example, if things are a certain way and have been that way for a long time, there’s no inherent reason to expect those things to change; hence, there’s no reason to look more closely at them. If and when they do change, we seldom notice it.

Some will want to argue that we could include national, cultural, and gender “veils” here as well, but those aren’t so much veils (which we can control) as roles that we either assume or that others force upon us so we fit their perception. Remember always that we cannot control what others think or say or do; we can control only our reaction to what others think or say or do. We will discuss much more about control later.

The Veils and Their Sources

As I also mentioned in the introduction, how we sense the world around us and what we are able to sense is affected by various veils, those “norms” that adversely affect your ability to sense your world. They affect your perspective (your physical, mental, and emotional state at the moment of observation) by altering or blocking your perception as an observer. The veils include superiority, expectations, routine, normalcy, adulthood, time constraints, and our experiences as expressed in our own communication filters. I stress, these are my names for the veils, but labels aren’t important except as a point of reference in this book. You might call “time constraints” something else, for example. You very probably will discover other external veils that exist between humanity and the world or yourself and the world. No matter how many you find or what you call them, the veils are the direct result of social and familial conditioning that started the day you were born, and their effect is cumulative.

When you were a toddler, the veils affected you hardly at all. You acted in a natural way, befriending the cat and the puppy and the tree in the front yard with equal joy. When you were a pre-teen, they affected you a little more strongly. In order to please your parents and other adults, you began to learn to do certain things in certain ways and not look too closely at what was going on around you. With the advent of your teen years and peer pressure, the veils strengthened. You fell into step with your friends and began to think about “normalcy.” You began to develop communication filters that sometimes caused to you misunderstand others, but that also enabled you to frame your own statements in a particular light to achieve a desired effect in others. And finally, as you plunged into adulthood, though you retained the desire to “stop and smell the roses” you were too far gone to actually do so. And even if you did stop to smell them, did you also notice the texture of the petals? The variances of the scent? The hues of color on the petals and stem? Probably not. No time for that.

The first step toward becoming an observer is learning to recognize the veils, and recognizing that they are an integral part of the world around you. We contend with them every waking moment of every day. Because they are so ingrained in our individual and collective human psyche, such a normal part of our world, we don’t notice them, much less think about them. But they are there, directly affecting everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch or even intuit. Trying to observe with the veils in place is like looking at the world through foggy lenses. How much more clearly we can see the world once we’ve realized the fog is there and cleared it away!

Until you are aware of the veils, until you are able to immerse yourself in the world and sense beyond the veils to the substance that lies beneath, you will not be able to write with the depth that garners respect and acclaim. This chapter will remind you of the awe of childhood for everyday things and appreciation for the wonder of your unique perspective and the world around us.

As you will learn, veils always are subject to your control, although we don’t often realize it. To negate the effects of external veils, you need only be aware of them. It would probably take years of counseling to even begin to negate or eradicate the internal veils, but you don’t want to do that anyway. The internal veils help structure the external veils and are what make you who you are. Read on.

External Veils

The external veils, like that fog I mentioned earlier, hinder your perspective by affecting how you perceive things when you sense them. They alter what you see when you look, what you hear when you listen, and so on.

Expectations

It’s a simple fact that most of the time, most humans sense what they expect to sense or what they’ve learned is appropriate to sense. Sometimes we don’t even attempt to explore certain sensory experiences because we’ve been taught that the very act of such an exploration would be deemed inappropriate.

My heart and soul are in the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona and northern Mexico. It’s the only place on Earth that I can honestly say I love. Its beauty is unparalleled. Yet I’ve heard many people remark that it’s so very desolate and unchanging and (gasp!) boring. Others have even remarked that it’s lifeless. I seriously doubt any of those people ever spent much time in the desert, and if they did, it was probably in an air-conditioned hotel room or restaurant as they were passing through, making judgments through the side windows of their air-conditioned cars. If they experienced the heat of the desert at all, they did so during the trek to and from their car at a rest-area or hotel or restaurant. Growing up, they saw representations of the Sonoran on TV, where it was presented as a vast, wide, scorching expanse peopled only by a few ranch hands and the cattle they were driving to market… or a few ragged Jicarilla Apaches being chased by a troop of Army cavalrymen in pressed, neat, and oddly enough, dry, uniforms. They learned to expect an empty, lifeless expanse good for nothing but sandstorms and cacti. But they’re wrong.

Had they broken away from their expectations for even a few hours to sit and watch and listen and smell, they’d have caught the sweet aroma of sage, the quietude and solace that can be transported only on a whispering desert breeze. Had they climbed a mountain, they’d have discovered that most desert mountains encourage company by providing natural stairs from bottom to summit. Had they reached the summit, even on an otherwise still day, they’d have been rewarded for their effort with a cooling breeze and a view that would take their breath away. And if they glanced around even casually, they’d have been treated to the sight of roadrunners, cactus wrens, sparrows, snakes, lizards, spiders, hawks, eagles, and all sorts of other life. In many places, near sunrise or sunset, they could even have seen mule deer and mountain goats, rabbits, prairie dogs and others. And if they’d listened for a few moments, the animals and even the plants in the desert would have whispered things to them that they could never glean from watching a movie or driving past in their cars.

Realizing we have certain expectations and preconceptions automatically sets them aside and enables us to sense beyond what we expected.

Routine

Stepping out of your comfort zone, out of your routine, is one of the most difficult things to do. Most of us are used to going to sleep at a certain time, waking at a certain time, and eating at a certain time. We sleep in a certain position in bed, follow the same general routine between the time we rise and the time we go to work, and generally eat the same breakfast and lunch day to day. We most often drive the same route to and from work or shopping, and that route is lined with the same buildings and the same houses and lawns and vacant lots. During our trek, we’re generally accompanied by the same people in the same vehicles. We get irritated if someone’s taken the parking spot to which we’ve become accustomed. We most often get home at about the same time each day and go directly into our routine there, reading the newspaper, watching the TV news, working a crossword puzzle, preparing supper, and so on. We might have a scheduled movie night or workout session or whatever.

Scheduling our time is a good idea for many reasons, but certain routines become routine because we’re used to doing the same things in the same way at the same times. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, except that it tends to put us on autopilot. When we’re stuck in a routine, our brain begins to automatically screen-out anything that isn’t part of that routine. In other words, the routine itself can cause us to miss what’s going on around us. That’s not a good situation for an observer.

The last time you followed a different route to work or shopping, you probably felt almost excited. Think back about it. Everything seemed new and unusual. There seemed to be a lot more detail along the route. There wasn’t, really, but it seemed that way because you weren’t used to the route. You were subconsciously forced to notice your surroundings in order to stay on track. You can consciously notice your surroundings as well, of course, even along a well-traveled route. Once you’re aware of the routine, you’ll begin to notice there are different people and other beings and things along that route.

Normalcy — When in Rome….

Nobody likes to be thought different, unless they really are different, and even then they don’t really care for it. Different is lonely, at least with anything that truly matters. Many fake being abnormal or slick or cool or Bohemian, but they can’t maintain it.

But in this venue, we’re talking about not doing something you’d like to do because you fear being thought abnormal. If a peculiar attribute of the bark of a tree attracts your attention, you might get very close to study it. You might even look at it from different angles, even remove your glasses and put your nose against the tree to get a close-up look at it. But would you do that if you suspected someone were watching you? Or if there were someone coming toward you along the sidewalk? Most of us would not, and that’s a shame.

Most of us want to be considered normal, but paradoxically we also want to be considered abnormal, or at least unique and even possibly worthy of a superlative. Humans, individually and collectively, always want to be considered the best or the worst or the biggest or fastest or slowest or thinnest or prettiest, as attested to by the Guinness Book of World Records. That publication is practically a record of both the individual and collective human ego.

Canto VII of my long poem, “Residua,” speaks to that overblown sense of self-importance as it’s expressed in our desire to be described in superlatives:

 

Just as a mirror, closing on itself,

reflects itself and everything and nothing,

having also shut against the light,

so might this mirror work either way,

providing reflection or reflexion,

what you need or what some others need

….

This simple mirror shadows your dismay

that what you thought a special, secret sin

for which you might never be forgiven

is also special to some million others

who, like you, thought themselves the special sinner,

who thought themselves at once the best and worst,

who thought themselves not worthy of the mill,

the gizzard of humanity’s last chicken,

the chaff remaining when the wheat has gone.

 

If you desire to be considered unique and, as a dear friend put it, live an “authentic” life, you must heed the call of your spirit to satisfy your curiosity. As singer/songwriter/poet Willie Nelson put it in his song, “I’d Have to Be Crazy,”

 

Been days when it pleased me to be on my knees

Followin’ ants as they crawled ‘cross the ground.

 

If you’re a writer and the neighborhood busybody catches sight of you on your knees “followin’ ants as they crawl ‘cross the ground” or studying the bark of a tree from an inch away or lying face-down on your lawn in an attempt to get a prairie dog’s perspective of your lilac bush, it will only enhance your reputation. And best of all, people will leave you alone, which of course means you’ll have more time to write.

Adulthood — Act Your Age….

This flows nicely from the veil of Normalcy. If we see a child down on his knees witnessing a life-and-death struggle between a spider and a wasp, we think nothing of it, and we certainly don’t think it’s inappropriate. But what might we think of an adult doing the same thing? If you see something that piques your interest, say the unique colors shimmering on a fallen dragonfly, will you stop and squat or kneel on the sidewalk to get a closer look? Probably not. (If you would, you’re already my kind of writer.) Most people wouldn’t because they would fear what others might think and, in a way, they’re right. At best, other adults would think you were behaving like a child, something that, in my opinion, would only improve the world. At worst, someone from a government office would consider locking you up for a psychiatric evaluation.

The simple fact is, most of us wouldn’t notice the dragonfly lying between the sidewalk and the grass in the first place because it isn’t supposed to be there. It isn’t the norm. It doesn’t fit our expectations. The fear of being labeled keep us from more intimately sensing and observing our world.

Time Constraints — I Just Don’t Have Time for ….

Yes, you do.

You might not take time to do what you’re missing, but you do have time, and the art of observation is a gentle, understanding master. You feel a need to “set aside” time to write or work-out or see a film or eat — working those things into your schedule is a matter of priorities — but observation becomes a way of life. You practice it while you’re writing or working out or watching a film or eating or driving or walking or…. So you don’t have to prioritize or set aside time at all. As is the case with overcoming most of the veils, you have only to be aware that you’ve been somewhat ruled by time constraints to get past them.

The easiest and quickest way to make yourself aware of your enslavement to time constraints and set those constraints aside is to think. Don’t force yourself to rush through creating a character, for example. Don’t stop with a description of what they do. Rather, think…. If your character is a vice president in a bank, what does that mean to his life, his personality? What does it mean to his wife and children? Does he have one or two strange little quirks that don’t befit his status (or the stereotype) of a bank vice president? If the character is a “soccer mom” or a “PTA mom” or both, what does that mean to her life? And again, does she have a strange quirk or personality flaw that doesn’t fit the stereotype?

Don’t force yourself to rush through a scene. This is where many writers get overburdened with “state-of-being” verbs. It’s takes less time and much less thought to write “John was madder’n hell” — a truly boring sentence — instead of “John kicked the door down, stormed across the room, and punched Joaquin in the mouth.” Think. See the scene. Be the character. We’ll talk much more about this in “Chapter 2: Enabling Observation for the Reader.”

Finally, and most importantly, slow down. Don’t rush through your life to the detriment of the sensory experience of living life. On the Definitions page of my website, I define writer in the first instance as “One who writes at the expense of living.” All too often, that’s true. All too often writers are tied to their desks or their deadlines and don’t return to the well of experience. They don’t take the time to go out into the world and notice what’s going on around them. They don’t glean new ideas. In the second instance, I get a little more serious and define writer as “One who notices what others do not and is not ashamed to admit it, in writing.” This is what a writer should be.

When you do go outside to refill your mind from the well of experience, notice what’s flashing past on the side of the road. When you walk down the sidewalk in the old downtown area of a city, don’t be so single-minded that you fail to look up at the building façades. There’s often some beautiful architecture up there. There are often stories or story ideas or poems up there. Study the faces of the people you see in passing; they are characters, every one of them. When you see a tiny plant struggling for sunlight in a crack in the sidewalk, give it a little silent spiritual encouragement. Take off work an hour early one day, buy two ice cream cones, and then surprise your significant other with it at his or her place of work. Note the reaction of the co-workers. There’s a story or article or idea there. Notice things and think. Don’t rush. Celebrate life. After all, it’s your life or, as a friend pointed out, it’s your life. Either way, live it and write it.

Humanity’s Sense of Superiority

I’ve saved this greatest, most burdensome external veil for last in this chapter because an in-depth discussion of it will come in the third chapter. This brief discussion will serve only to introduce you to the concept so you don’t leap into “Chapter 3: Welcome to the Wholeness” without having at least gotten your feet wet.

The best way to introduce and explain this external veil is by comparing it with the others. You know now that the other external veils are similar to each other, and in many cases the distinction between one and another is blurred. For example, the diversions I account for as resulting from routine might also be the result of normalcy or expectation. Humanity’s sense of superiority, though, over-rides all of these because it causes us to view the world from a different perspective, one of… well, superiority.

Now, I know you probably don’t consider yourself personally superior to others and I’m not trying to claim that you do. (In fact, if you do consider yourself superior to other humans, in the first place you’ve set your aspirations far too low, and in the second, you need much more help than I can provide in this book.) I’m talking about humanity’s collective sense that we’re the superior beings on this planet, that all the other beings (animals, plants, insects, microbes, and so on) exist to serve us, or otherwise exist at the pleasure of humanity.

Here’s another comparison: As I’ve mentioned, you can at least lessen the effects of the other veils on your perceptions by simply being aware of them. In most cases, being aware of them enables you to eliminate them. But resulting as it does from the collective human ego, humanity’s collective sense of superiority is not only the greatest veil, but also the most difficult to overcome. In fact, I suspect it’s impossible to eliminate it and still actively participate in life. Developing the ability to sense beyond this veil is not so much a goal as a journey, so we won’t talk about eliminating it, but managing it.

Managing this veil requires you to align the two halves of a seeming paradox. First, you must recognize yourself as an independent entity and the most important being in your personal sensory universe. Notice that this is not the universe you ponder when you look up at the stars, but the universe that consists of everything within your sensory range at a given time. Your personal sensory universe fluctuates, of course, with your physical location and position. If you’re in a closed elevator, your sensory universe is small. If you’re on a mountain top, it’s much larger. In this book, the terms universe and sensory universe are synonymous. Neither means the vast, natural universe, the heavens, unless specifically indicated.

The second part of the paradox is that you must simultaneously recognize that you, along with all the other independent entities on Earth, are an integral part of the huge, great entity that comprises everything. For reasons that will become clear as you go through this book, I call this entity the Wholeness. As a working definition for now, let me say that the Wholeness is nature, everything, all of creation and existence.

A sentient being is one who can sense and respond to external and internal stimuli. It is a living thing, a being (animal, plant, insect, microbe) who enjoys a voluntary or involuntary symbiotic relationship with the Wholeness. That is, it takes from the Wholeness what it requires for existence and gives to the Wholeness what it has to give. Sentient beings are alive and in a constant, symbiotic relationship with the Wholeness. Trees, grasses, shrubs, dogs, humans, cows, snakes, lizards, insects, and microbes are sentient beings. Inanimates are not beings. They are the integral parts of the Wholeness that are not alive. Rocks, stones, dirt, and water are inanimates.

The fact is, every being and every inanimate on this planet is an integral part of the Wholeness. Every sentient brings its own strengths and weaknesses to the mix, surely, but the point here is that our strength and weaknesses — human strengths and weaknesses — are no greater or lesser than those brought by dogs, cats, cows, snakes, lizards, insects, trees, grasses, and so on. They’re just different strengths and weaknesses. In the Wholeness, what one being lacks, another provides, and most often does so without realizing it, in the aforementioned involuntary symbiotic relationship. You’ll see a great deal more about this in “Chapter 3: Welcome to the Wholeness.”

Internal Veils

As I wrote earlier, your experiences create your internal veils, and your internal veils make you who you are. They cause you to perceive sensory input as you do, and they are what enable you to bring your unique point of view to the reader. They are derived entirely from your own experiences, good and bad, and are unique to you. Internal veils include childhood and life experiences, and communication filters.

Childhood and Life Experiences

Your experiences are what cause you to have certain expectations. They cause you to see life in a certain way. A person who was abused as a child might have trouble trusting authority figures. A person who always received everything she asked for from her parents and never wanted for lack of money might see a homeless person as someone who just needs to get cleaned up and get a job. A person who’s been trapped in a tunnel or an elevator might have a fear of small or dark spaces. A person who survived the Great Depression or the Dustbowl might take a dimmer view of teenagers hanging out on an inner-city street corner than would a person who was born and raised on the south side of Chicago. A person who was born and raised in Hitler’s Germany or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Pol Pot’s Cambodia will experience America differently than will the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant born in Kansas to an upper-middle class family or in Marin County, California or in Brownsville, Texas.

Communication Filters

 

Our experiences and how we experience life are vastly different, yet our communication filters are remarkably similar in the effect they have on our perceptions. Communication filters are those mechanisms in your mind that were formed as a result of your personal experiences. They cause you to speak, write, listen, and read selectively. They are the reason the speaker’s or author’s intent doesn’t always match the listener’s or reader’s perception or interpretation. The author’s experiences (and the resulting communication filters) almost always are different than the reader’s experiences (and the resulting communication filters). The author’s work is filtered through her experiences when she writes and through the reader’s experiences when he reads.

The concept of communication filters is most easily explained with an example of two people conversing. Both parties have communication filters and the elements of those filters in place. Of course, the roles of speaker and listener alternate from person to person as one person speaks (sends) and the other listens (receives). In every case, the speaker encodes the message he wishes to send and the listener decodes it, then encodes a response and sends it back. The components of the communication filters that directly affect the decoding and encoding processes are the defense filter, the adjustment filter, and the area of shared experience.

The defense filter is a necessarily complex apparatus that constantly adjusts to fit both sent and received messages. The components of the defense filter are the defense mechanism, which causes the defense filter to be larger at the reception point and smaller at the transmission point, and internal noise, the collective name of the variables that affect the defense filter from moment to moment and day to day. The defense mechanism is composed of the self-image, how you see yourself in various situations with different people; the belief system, which is constructed of the various schools of thought to which you subscribe, including your own political, religious, and philosophical ideals; and instinct, which causes distortion of images among beings of different species, genders, sizes, races, geographical locations, and belief systems. Internal noise includes your current mood, current physical health, time of day, weather, the argument you recently had with your significant other, that novel you’ve started, your upcoming vacation on the beach, and other details that tend to fluctuate and affect how you perceive various stimuli.

As you might imagine, the defense filter affects outgoing messages very little, except that it occasionally causes us to “watch what we say.” It has a much greater effect on incoming messages, distorting them to such a degree that we often experience misunderstandings and arguments. The density of your defense filter depends entirely on how much you trust the person with whom you’re talking. If you’re certain the person will not lie or attempt to mislead you, your defense filter will weaken of its own accord. If you suspect the person might lie to you or attempt to mislead you for whatever reason, your defense filter will remain strong, at least until you become more familiar with the person.

An excellent example of this is the dissension that sometimes occurs between genders. First, let me quickly issue a disclaimer here: Of necessity, because I don’t want to spend an entire chapter attempting to cover every conceivable situation and then fail in the attempt anyway, this example speaks in generalities. I am aware that not all women or all men react in certain ways in certain situations. That having been said, if a woman has been treated badly in any way by even one man in the past, her first instinct, generally speaking, is to mistrust men. Her defense filter will remain strong against any man in any situation until she comes to trust him. By the same token, and with the disclaimer still in mind, a man who has been treated badly by a woman most often will tend to distrust any woman until he eventually begins to believe there might be one out there somewhere whom he can trust.

The point is this: Defense filters weaken when they can, but they tend to err on the side of caution, remaining strong until they’re certain the trust will not be violated.

The adjustment filter acts as a safeguard between the defense filter and the encoder. It receives the interpreted message from the defense filter and tempers it with variables. For example, it takes into account the possible or certain internal noise of the sender, as well as his or her physical health, the weather (if it’s unbearably hot, the sender might be grouchier than usual), the current physical environment (the sender’s loud voice is more appropriate in a noisy, crowded venue than in the stacks of a library), the area of shared experience, and so on. In short, the adjustment filter makes excuses for the distorted message it receives from the defense filter, then sends the “adjusted message” to the encoder, a response is encoded and sent, and the cycle repeats until the conversation terminates.

Finally, our mind contains an area of shared experience, which is composed of shared or similar experiences, beliefs, likes and dislikes. The area of shared experience fluctuates with different people. For example, you share a greater area of experience with your partner than with the neighbor who just moved in across the street. Depending on the size of the area of shared experience, the sender’s defense filter might be all but eradicated; however, the receiver never allows complete eradication of the defense filter. That is, we don’t always “watch what we say” as closely with people we know and trust, but we always keep our guard up when receiving messages, regardless of the source.

How Your Communication Filters Affect Observation — It’s interesting to note that when you’re one-on-one or in a small group, the above is almost a perfect model of what will ensue between a speaker and a listener. Your defense mechanism will be “on” at all times because the other’s comments are directed at you. Even in a small group, your defense mechanism will filter comments that you overhear even when they are not aimed directly at you. How strongly you filter general comments from a small group depends on your self-image, your belief system, and your actual experiences. Finally, if you happen to be eavesdropping on conversations in a crowded location — for example, in a bar or restaurant or train station to get ideas for dialogue or intonation or dialect — your defense filter will be almost non-existent because the comments are not being said to you or about you. (These are the times when, if you hear someone say something with which you vehemently disagree, you might grimace and mutter something under your breath.)

Since they’re created by your experiences, your communication filters also are tied to memories. Often, certain sights, sounds, smells, textures, or even tastes key those memories. In the extreme, these are called flashbacks. If a combat veteran slams himself to the ground when a car half a block away backfires, it’s because the sound of the backfire evoked the memory of gunfire. Smelling or tasting kimchi, a particularly pungent kind of Korean sauerkraut, a mixture of shredded cabbage, peppers and other ingredients, might remind someone of Pusan, Korea. Seeing a star hanging just below a crescent moon might remind a JRR Tolkein fan of Rivendell or the high elves or Lothlorien or the elven moon itself in The Lord of the Rings. The smell of a newborn baby’s skin might evoke a memory of when your child was an infant, or of a trip you took to the Grand Canyon while your child was an infant. The possibilities are limitless.

By now you’ve probably noticed that the ways in which your communication filters can color your perceptions are practically endless. Being aware of that effect will only serve to enrich your observations.

Sensing Beyond the Veils

What good is recognizing the veils if we don’t strive to sense beyond them? Here we’ll focus on the veils and provide specific examples and exercises you can use to hone your physical senses. We’ll also work to hone your intuition and imagination so you will become adept at sensing beyond the veils and conveying what you sense to the reader.

You will remember that the external veils are the expectations we have of the world, the routines in which we find ourselves mired, what society suggests is normalcy, what others expect of us when we attain adulthood, the time constraints that seem always to be nipping at our heels, and the big one, humanity’s sense of superiority. We will begin managing that one in Chapter 3.

Our internal veils consist of our experiences and the communication filters we establish as a result of those experiences. We’ve learned that our communication filters are actually good to have, even though they color or distort what we hear when we listen and, to some degree, what we say when we speak. To more fully observe and absorb what we experience in light of those filters, we simply need to be conscious of them, aware that we have them. Later in this chapter and the next, you also learn to use your internal veils in a positive way, through intuition, imagination, and your ability to empathize, to render your work more readily accessible to the reader.

Now let’s turn our attention to the actual art of observation and some techniques for sensing beyond the veils.

Using the Physical Senses

Sight — Zoom-in, zoom-out on the world around you.

When you look closely at another sentient being (animal, plant, insect), remember that you’re looking into the center of another sensory universe, one miniature world among the billions that exist. Remember hearing “I know ___ as well as I know the back of my hand”? Question that adage, literally and otherwise. Look closely at the back of your hand. Did you know it at all?

Look closely at the trees in your yard. Pick out the various colors in the bark and put names to them. The trunk isn’t just brown, is it?

Pick one of those minuscule wildflowers that you routinely walk over every day and look closely at it.

Lie on your stomach and look as closely as possible at an active ant bed. Watch an ant take individual steps; watch it pick up an object; watch his joints flex as he lifts and balances it, whether he’s steady or unsteady as he begins to haul it off.

If there’s a place to pull over safely, look at the underside of a bridge or overpass through which you regularly drive. Look for plant, animals, burrows etc. in that miniature world.

If you go outside during your next lunch break from work, instead of just glancing at the woods across the road (or the lawn or the pond, etc.), look more closely. Look at the individual trees (blades of grass, other plants, rocks in the pond, etc.) and try to pick out nests, unusual limb formations, etc.

Look beyond the facades you normally see while driving or riding to and from work, the grocery store, etc. You’ll see a lot of things you hadn’t noticed before.

How many colors are there, really, in your front yard? What are they?

If you find an old rock wall, it will be peppered with plants, crevasses, and holes. Study it for awhile. Look closely for creatures, real and imagined. There might be a tribe of ½” cave people living in there.

How long has it been since you specifically noticed the tiny specks floating around in a ray of light? Are you absolutely certain some of them aren’t tiny worlds populated with even tinier creatures?

Touch — Feel what you touch; touch for the purpose of sensing.

 

Putting your hand on a wall to sense its texture, temperature, and maybe even its vibrational frequency is far different than putting your hand on it just to steady yourself or to check and maintain distance as you round a corner into a hallway. Touching another human’s skin to send or receive messages is far different than patting someone on the back.

While concentrating on your ability to perceive things through your sense of touch, place your hands a few inches on either side of a living tree and sense its energy (life force, radiant heat). You will feel it, almost physically. Most likely it will be closer on one side than on the other. Try the same exercise on a dead tree. You will find that what you felt near the living tree was not simply a reflection of the sun’s rays. After all, the sun’s rays reflect off dead wood just as they do off of a living tree, but the dead tree will not emit its own energy.

Are there physical things in this world you can’t actually feel? A dandelion seed? A fiber from a wisp of cotton? How do you describe these?

When you touch something, notice its texture and the features of its texture. Is it rough, coarse, dense, fine, damp, cold, warm, smooth, etc.?

If you’ve learned to “touch type,” you’ve come to think of typing as automatic. Cover your fingertips with Band-Aids or those little rubber fingertips and try again. Is it still as automatic as you thought?

Smell — One of our more finely honed senses.

We subconsciously, instinctively, and constantly test the air around us, and we recognize most of the scents we encounter, but unless a scent gives us a strong indication of danger or otherwise piques our interest, we process and discard it subconsciously. The key to further honing your sense of smell is to be aware of it, to pay attention to it, to make it more of a conscious exercise than a subconscious one. Focus on the odors in the air around you. Consciously work to sense one odor from another. You can do it with practice.

Our sense of smell doesn’t focus on an odor to the exclusion of other odors either. We can simultaneously enjoy the rich aromas of a pine forest and remain on our guard for the source of that ever-so-slight scent of skunk we just picked up.

As you gain practice in sensing various aromas and odors, try to be aware of your sense of smell continually. Simply being aware of it will greatly enhance it.

Taste — More a combination of smell and touch than a sense on its own merits.

Like the senses of touch and smell, the best way to get beyond the veils with your sense of taste is to be consciously aware of it. We already know our “sweet” taste buds are nearer the tip of the tongue and that the “bitter” ones are further back.

The next time you eat a meal, try savoring each bite. Try to notice not only the overall flavor, but the individual flavors that make up the overall flavor.

Let’s test how closely related are the senses of taste and touch. Taste an empty spoon. Does a spoonful of nothing taste different when the spoon is warm than when it’s been chilled?

Another test — hold your nose, cutting off your sense of smell, as you taste something. It will taste different if you can’t smell it.

Hearing — As finely honed and used as instinctively as the sense of smell.

Again, our primary task is to be more aware of our sense of hearing and to practice using it consciously. It’s important to any observer to listen attentively to the things that are going on around her. For a writer, it’s equally important to listen to the nuances of the language itself as its being spoken, especially if you write dialogue. Eavesdropping is not a crime in most cases; for a writer, it’s essential.

Sit in a booth back in the corner in Denny’s or a similar restaurant at 3 a.m. and listen to the mishmash of conversation among cops, drunks, bums, lawyers, et al. Pay attention to dialect and catch phrases and the other nuances of language as it’s being used by these real characters. Write it.

Tie-in your sense of hearing with what Poet John Keats called negative capability: “… capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason….” Instead of researching a character or situation to death, the writer becomes the character in the situation, lives it in his imagination, then writes about it. In describing negative capability to a confidant, Benjamin Bailey, Keats wrote “… if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” In other words, if you want to understand a particular character, first practice being the character. Think your way through who he is, complete with all his attributes and in the same situation, then write it.

Learn to eavesdrop on more than one conversation at a time in a grocery store. Relate it in dialogue.

The next time you hear a bird singing outside your window, consider the song. What do you suppose it’s singing about? What is its purpose in singing? What specifically is it saying?

Does your vacuum cleaner roar, hum, or whine? What’s the difference? What would you experience if you were a dust mite being sucked into that vacuum cleaner?

What are those little peripheral sounds that seem to dance around the radio frequency to which you’ve dialed? Can you name them? I don’t mean the collective “static,” but individually? Would they make a difference to one of the characters in your stories? Would they calm him? Would she identify with them? With one of them in particular?

Using the Mental and Emotional Senses

We’ve long been accustomed observing with our physical senses — sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste — at least somewhat consciously, but we also sense with our intuition, imagination, and empathy, or negative capability. Please don’t begin by shutting out the notion that you can empathize with animals, plants, insects, and even microbes. As you will begin to see in Chapter 3, we are connected and interconnected and inter-interconnected to everything else in the Wholeness. Depending on your experiences, your sense of that connection might be strong or considerably less than strong at this point, but it will deepen as you learn more about observation, about being an observer.

Intuition — Noticing without noticing that you noticed, and maybe more….

The American Heritage College Dictionary defines intuition in the first instance as “The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition,” and in the second instance, in part, as “… a perceptive insight.” I define it for our use in this book as “sensing the emotion, mood, or feeling of another being or the gist of an event or situation without obvious, outward clues.” By either definition, it is the finest form of observation.

Many believe when we intuit an emotion, mood, or feeling in another person, we’re subconsciously, reading physical signals that are emitted by the other person, also subconsciously. Of course, others believe we’ve managed to tap into the other person’s consciousness. When we intuit particular events or situations, many believe it’s because we’ve sensed some physical stimuli that have given us clues, which our subconscious mind has then pieced together. The subconscious then nudges our conscious mind as if to say Hey, look what I found here! Others believe we’ve tapped into the collective consciousness in the second example.

We’ll talk much more about the notion of collective and individual consciousness in Chapter 3, but the mechanism by which we intuit certain events or moods really isn’t important. That we manage to do it is important because as writers we can make good use of that ability.

Imagination and Negative Capability

I almost waited to present these concepts in the next chapter, “Enabling Observation in the Reader,” but decided to introduce them here first, then further clarify them in Chapter 2. Imagination and negative capability aren’t often considered senses, but they might as well be. Imagination is both needed as much and used as little by most adults as are the physical senses. It can be developed with practice. And negative capability, the ability to empathize, can be developed through honing the senses and combining them with imagination.

Once again I turned to the American Heritage College Dictionary, which defines imagination in the first instance as “The formation of a mental image of something that is neither perceived as real nor present to the senses,” and in the second instance as the “ability to confront and deal with reality creatively.” That second definition really piqued my interest, but I suspect the perception spoken of in the first definition is the “normal” perception, a surface perception, what we perceive before we’ve practiced sensing beyond the veils. Believing a tree trunk is any color other than brown, by this definition, might be considered a function of imagination. So for our purposes, imagination is “the ability to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste beyond the obvious.”

Negative capability is the ability to empathize, to experience an event as someone or something else — in the case of a writer, to experience as a character something you’ve never actually experienced — and then relate that experience to your reader convincingly. I consider negative capability person-to-person imagination.

You must do two things to achieve negative capability: You must practice actually being your character in your mind, if not physically, and you must practice layering on detail after detail (verisimilitude) to illustrate the experience of being the character. The details, the nuances, are what subliminally convince the reader that the character is real.

Remember Keats’ definition of negative capability: It is your ability to portray the character “without… reaching after fact and reason….” The reader suspends her own disbelief when she decides to read your story or poem. You need only not interrupt that suspension of disbelief by boring her to death with unnecessary facts. Instead, entice her by layering on interesting and necessary details.

We’ll deal with negative capability again in Chapter 2, but from the perspective of how to use it to enable observation in the reader.