Linger Longer
Gazing Deeply Instead Of Glancing Or Grasping
Have you ever paused long enough while looking at something — say a street, a tree, a building or a face — to notice all that surrounds it? What do you see?
In our grab-and-go, warp speed world we post-moderns manage to achieve the seemingly impossible — to be obsessed and distracted at the same time. Our eyes fixate on our strobe-light cell phone screens, fastened to one fleeting image then another without ever really absorbing any of it. We swipe through channels of narrowed perception, eliminating the crucial peripheral vision that conveys their essential context and meaning. We don’t watch so much as glance or grasp.
I recently began an experiment, slowing down my tempo to deliberately broaden my visual perception. The results have been illuminating. I’ve been practicing meditation for fifty years and ordinarily I meditate with eyes either closed or cast down at a 45-degree angle. As an anchoring practice I follow my breath, slowing its rhythm and deepening its reach as the stillness settles in. But nowadays I keep my eyes open, look for the farthest horizon I can find, retract my focus to the middle distance and let my eyes come to rest there.
Then I place my attention equally across my full field of vision. For most of us that’s about 120-180 degrees. To stretch the range of my awareness I consciously include everything out to the periphery of my vision. I turn my mind but not my eyes to the left edge, then the right, upward and then down, near and then far. As I move my mind from the center towards the periphery the detail I detect diminishes exponentially till I’m only vaguely aware of what’s happening at the perimeter of my view. Yet even with this marginal awareness, I find that my peripheral vision is crucial to gaining an accurate perspective on the meaning and implications of what I’m seeing.
Cultivating Panoramic Awareness
The world I’ve been discovering since starting to practice this panoramic awareness is vaster and more vivid than anything I’ve experienced since the psychedelic journeys of my adventurous youth. But unlike drugs, this mode of perception is firmly grounded in a shared reality — a luminous version of the ordinary world — with the added sense of more truly belonging to and in the world I’m witnessing.
As infants we begin life with panoramic awareness, but over time we tend to narrow our minds and eyes to focus on specific objects and objectives at the expense of the whole. Neuroscientist Alison Gopnik and and computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith describe two different kinds of perception they believe differentiate adults from infants — the spotlight and the lantern. “As we know more, we see less,” they write. In their view, infants and children perceive the world through an uncritical, open awareness relatively free of exclusionary categories. With lantern consciousness, writes Gopnik, “you are vividly aware of everything without being focused on any one thing in particular. There is a kind of exaltation and a peculiar kind of happiness that goes with these experiences.”
But as we become acculturated and educated to make distinctions (and in the process develop biases), our awareness narrows. The hyper-specialization of our economy and educational system funnels our perception of our options and opportunities, channeling us into work with little room for exploration and personal expression. We learn to specialize at the expense of a wider awareness, coming to know a great deal about just a few things and very little about most others. Spotlights fix one’s attention on one object at a time and leave most everything else in the shadows. Lanterns spread a pool of light across a broader field of vision.
Today, moreover, our metaphorical spotlights have been honed to a laser-like beam in a still narrower and more piercing focus while lanterns have been supplanted by floodlights eliminating the shadows that reveal the three-dimensional nature of our world. This narrow focus, more a glare than a gaze, creates an addictive relationship between us and the objects of our attention, obsessive yet ultimately unfulfilling. The ramifications of this narrowed perception extend to every dimension of our lives, truncating our family and love relationships, polarizing our politics, and diminishing our self-worth through fawning worship of celebrity culture. It also clouds our judgment and distorts our decisions, both personal and societal, by eliminating the crucial context that enables us to choose wisely.
Is it possible to regain the open awareness and wide-eyed wonder we instinctively knew as children without losing the adult’s steady focus and concentrated intelligence? As a young man I studied Zen Buddhism with Shunryu Suzuki-roshi and his followers. The “zen mind” he sought to cultivate in us was not an esoteric doctrine but an open, non-judgmental awareness he called “beginner’s mind (shoshin)” or “original mind.” It was by no means confined to youth but was a consciously cultivated state of mind for those of any age. “If you can keep beginner’s mind forever,” he told us, “you are Buddha.”
In other words, the highest attainment of enlightenment is not the mastery of a doctrine but a capacity to see, sense and experience the world whole in such a way that we’re no longer separate from what we see but integral to and inseparable from everything else. Beginner’s mind enables one to see and experience everything afresh each time we turn to it, to be startled into wakefulness by its vividness and immediacy. It’s a form of higher naivete fueled by boundless curiosity and creativity, a perpetual capacity to rediscover the world as if for the first time. It’s the impulse to ask the big questions without insisting on final answers, knowing there are none. It’s this openness of heart and mind that enables one to combine mature experience and expertise with childlike wonder. And it’s this blending of two complementary forms of intelligence, employing both the left and right hemispheres of the brain in balance, that enables us to witness and savor the world with the wide-angle awareness that makes for a fulfilling life.
Living in the Timeless Zone
It’s not inevitable that consciousness narrows with age. After a lifetime of pressing responsibilities that kept us narrowly on task, those of us of a certain age and the blessings of a semi-retired life are given a rare opportunity to broaden back to panoramic awareness. We can finally make the time to linger longer, to gaze at the world at our ease and contemplate our place in it. Wonder, awe, appreciation and gratitude move to front and center and busyness to the periphery. We enter a “timeless zone” where we’re driven less by clocks and more by curiosity. Liberated at last from the imperative to perform, we experience the spaciousness of mind that is true freedom. We can reopen to the boundless wonder years of early childhood before school and work narrowed our options and imaginations. And to the innocence of childhood we can add the wisdom of experience and open more deliberately to a wider, deeper appreciation.
With a practice of contemplative gazing the double vision that causes us to see ourselves as painfully different from everything else begins to dissolve into a seamless, indivisible unity. This is not the loss of personal identity we fear it to be, not the disappearance of self that we fight so desperately to avoid, but a blessed reunion with an infinitely larger universe. We retain our idiosyncratic personalities just as every other living thing remains unique, but we no longer insist on our specialness. We give up the futile struggle to assert our self-importance in return for a more secure sense of belonging with everyone and everything else.
Yet paradoxically, though we experience a deeper unity, we must continue to function in this world as if we are sovereign beings. And we must do so in order to deal with everyday tasks and obligations. Life presents its familiar challenges — taking care of the business of maintaining an individual identity, tending to a body that is constantly demanding our attention and addressing its unavoidable needs. Despite our widened awareness our minds continue to wrestle with thoughts, feelings and emotions that seem specifically addressed to our personal selves. The world we witness as one is not suddenly transformed into a continuous spectacle of beauty and harmony.
Where we saw ugliness and suffering before, we see it still, but now with a new degree of clarity and detail. Yet it’s no longer separate from us. It’s our world now, belonging not just to our personal selves but all of us — human, animal and otherwise. It’s simply home, with all the complexities that accompany family and neighborhood, yet with a deeper sense of belonging with one another than we’ve ever before experienced. Empathy and compassion are no longer merely intellectual and spiritual commitments but real felt sources of mutual recognition: there is no they there, only we here. Everything from birds to water to rocks bears the same familial relation to one another that we in our smaller selves experience in identifying with our hands, faces, minds and hearts.
This visceral sense of indivisible unity relieves the most anguished of human emotions — isolation and loneliness — as we come to our senses and realize we are not only not alone in this vast universe. Half a century ago the sage Ram Dass wrote a book and coined the invitation that launched a generation of spiritual seekers on a lifelong quest: “Be here now.” Today, when we find ourselves more divided than ever before at just the moment when we most need to act together, we must urgently cultivate a new depth and breadth of awareness : “We Here Now.”
With the practice of contemplative gazing, looking both inward and out, we discover a profound sense of fulfillment in seeing and experiencing our indivisible unity with everyone and everything. There is no longer any “they” there, no “other” to fear and hate, just “us here,” we humans together with the rest of nature, animate and inanimate, supporting and being supported by one another. “We” replaces “me” as the center of this boundless universe, and that center is everywhere within and around us.
