Stage Two — PERCEPTION

How should one see?

A Word Before the Second Stage

My friend,

Something changes here, and I want to prepare you for it, because the change is not obvious and people miss it.

For five chapters I have asked you to do things. Choose the Way of Life each morning. Hold your tongue. Audit your speech. Return the same day when you fall. All of it was conduct — visible, checkable, the sort of thing you could put on a list and tick off.

Now I am going to ask you to see differently. And there is no list for that.

This is the stage where a certain kind of earnest person becomes frustrated. You cannot practice perception at four o'clock on a Tuesday the way you can practice restraint. You cannot measure it at the end of the week. It arrives, when it arrives, sideways — and mostly it arrives as a gift rather than an achievement, which is precisely what makes it so uncomfortable for those of us who prefer to earn things.

I want to say two things before we begin.

The first is that this stage is not optional, and it is not decoration. It would be very easy to skip it — to keep on doing the practical work of Stage One for a lifetime and never bother with any of this. Many good people do exactly that, and they become reliable, decent, and slightly brittle. What they lack is not effort. What they lack is depth of sight, and without it the moral life eventually hardens into rule- keeping, and rule-keeping without vision goes cold. You need to be able to see why the road runs where it runs, or you will not stay on it when it becomes inconvenient.

The second is that you are already seeing less than you think. This is the hardest sentence in this stage and I will spend three chapters on it. Not that you are foolish — you are not. But every one of us walks around inside a picture of the world assembled from our own history, wounds, and preferences, and we mistake that picture for the world. I did this for years with great confidence. The confidence was the problem.

So the work here is largely subtractive. We are not adding a faculty. We are removing something that has grown over one you already have.

Go gently. Do not expect to feel progress. And be especially careful of the moment when you begin to think you have started to see clearly — that moment is treated at length in Chapter Six, because it is the trapdoor of this entire stage, and I have fallen through it more than once.