Gazing
An interview with Rod Taylor
by Eduardo Sierra for Mutuality Matters Issue #10
Eduardo — Initially, I was uncomfortable with gazing. It seemed so intimate and heck, you don’t have sex in public right? Now I see it’s a mysterious communion we share through the eyes from the heart. At last year’s Transfiguration Retreat, I was gazing with Rod Taylor, he’s a Waking Down in Mutuality teacher from way up north in Canada. First I was relaxing and wondering what form God might take in Rod; we’d not had a chance to relate before. Even though it was only a minute or two our gaze quickly went cosmic; I found myself in a timeless space. I remembered what I’d read about the eyes being the window to your soul, and that your soul is eternal. No wonder I felt like I was looking into eternity! The experience was mind-blowing, and afterwards I asked Rod how it had been for him. He said it was very strong and then went into a fascinating rap, with nifty little terms and very clear understandings about the nature of gazing. But, I didn’t have my voice recorder going! So we promised to pick up our enthusiastic exploration of gazing at a later date. We talked November 15, 2008.
Eduardo: It was an amazing experience for me Rod, when we were together at the last Transfiguration Retreat (TR), in one of those medium-sized groups, you teachers were up front and we were all gazing. I have a certain kind of antennae for brightness, for radiance embodied as the filament lights up. You and I had met briefly a few years earlier at a previous TR but only had a small chance to get to know one another. In that moment of gazing I found it went really quickly from a sort of personal level to a transpersonal level, then beyond, into the eternal! So anyway there was some of that going on in our gazing and that totally fascinated me and compelled me to approach you afterwards. I wondered if we could pick up that thread now?
Rod: That’d be great.
Eduardo:So what happened, in your opinion, when you and I met at a recent Transfiguration Retreat, when we were gazing and it got so deep?
Rod: One thing I feel is a deepened, empowered quality about gazing in groups like that. When you have quite a number of teachers gazing with quite a number of people gazing back, it creates a deeper environment of transmission than I feel anywhere else. So that’s one thing. Another is that within that deepened experience I am individually able to reside more completely in that wholeness of our Being.
Eduardo: Um hum, yes, beautiful!
Rod: In the gazing setting… there’s an attention to that space and that place that people naturally find themselves deepening into. There is a quality of holy stillness or silence that becomes noticeable when you’re being totally present with whole=Being.
Eduardo: I can dig it.
Rod: Gazing is a way the other person is able to open and connect. I say it that way because sometimes people will feel like, you go here and this teacher is doing such and such to me. It’s so valuable for people to realize that this is their recognition, their realization. It’s a setting in which there’s a teacher connecting deeply with whole-Being within them, and in gazing is open and available to seeing and connecting with the student, and the student seeing and connecting with the teacher. That is the transmission or the resonance that is going on.
Then some people will find their personal stuff coming up. For example, they may feel unworthy, or perhaps angry towards their father, etc. It’s appropriate to recognize it is not the teacher doing that, it’s the resonance of Being that allows personal material to come into the light of awareness.
So likewise, a profound experience of the infinite may emerge during gazing in that deepened inner connection in resonance with the other. In the gazing experience you and I had, in that deepened space, we had an opportunity to allow the experience that our resonance in Being offered us in that moment.
Eduardo: Right. This matter, that you can gaze deeply into a person, finally into their soul, and you can see that the soul is eternal; do you get a sense of these dynamics?
Rod: Yes . . . during gazing I feel a strong sense of the ground of Being, which is in its essence a field of love, emerging within my heart and enlivening me from the soul level up. In gazing with the other, I experience this enlivened soul level of my being connecting with the soul level of the other, in love. It feels to me like loving the other from the inside out.
Contact Rod:
http://www.awakeninginwholeness.com/contact
