Univision: Seeing Ourselves and the World As One
An Elder’s Lifelong Double Vision Finally Finds Its Focus in Learning to Gaze Instead of Grasping for Clarity
From my earliest memories I recall seeing two moons at once. When I was just six years old the optometrist prescribed glasses for me to correct my newly discovered near-sightedness.
“How long will I have to wear these?” I asked my mother, feeling like I’d just been thrown in jail.
“For the rest of your life,” she pronounced with a grimly pleased finality, condemning me to the same life sentence she had served behind glasses. Only many years later did I discover that my myopia may have been due less to genetics than to the blurring effects of panic as I squinted to see the blackboard at a school I was made to attend two years too soon. For the next six decades I wore glasses that corrected solely for nearsightedness while in fifty-five annual vision tests a deeper optical dysfunction went undetected. Not till I was in my mid-sixties did an alert optometrist’s assistant diagnose me with binocular diplopia — double vision. Once it was discovered, an attempted surgery made the condition still worse. The resulting vision left me feeling upside down in an altogether new and still more distressing way. But the solution turned out to be surprisingly simple — prismatic lenses that correct for both myopia and diplopia.
So it’s with a certain irony that I find my eyesight, now finally corrected, becoming the path to a deeper kind of vision. Double vision as I knew it for nearly my whole adult life not only made it challenging to catch a ball since I didn’t know which of two to aim for. It disabled my ability to see in three dimensions. Instead I saw two two-dimensional realities laid one over the other — in my case the dominant image generated by the right eye and the recessive left image fainter and positioned halfway below and to the right. So the world I still see without corrective lenses is not only flat screen but split-screen. It makes driving especially challenging. Late at night driving down a four-lane highway through deep woods I saw two highways at once. Fortunately, I eventually figured out that if I was on the right side of the first of the two highways I’d be on the right side of the second. More crucially yet, experiencing a flat screen, split-screen reality made me feel altogether separate from everything “out there.” There was “I” and there was “other” or everything else. Whatever way I looked at it I was unable to perceive myself surrounded by and belonging to a wider world.
Beyond finally receiving a proper eyeglass prescription in my mid-sixties, two events have ushered me into a fully three-dimensional world. The first was an assault and beating four years ago in a San Francisco subway station. An unseen assailant struck me with lethal force in that very place on my forehead right between and slightly above the eyes known to mystics as “the third eye.” I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital, where I received a brain scan that indicated I had experienced traumatic brain injury (TMI). “We don’t know yet how serious it will be,” the emergency room doctor told me. “Time will tell.”
Time did tell, and to my enduring surprise and relief it appears to have knocked some sense into me. I’ve come to feel that in wielding his fist or my trekking pole (which shattered in pieces with the force of the blow), my assailant was actually waving some kind of wand. Whatever the case may be, it appears to have opened up that third eye to give me access to deeper states of consciousness that have continued to reveal themselves in the years since.
The second event occurred just a few months ago in the form of an extensive encounter with a mountain lion — not the kind of fleeting glimpse that with (mixed) luck one might experience on a backcountry trail but a full 15–20 minutes in silent communion. I was kayaking in the burnished light of late afternoon on a remote Pacific coast lagoon ten feet from shore when I noticed something moving. Her coloration so perfectly matched the tawny grasses and rocks through which she was moving that at first I didn’t realize what I was looking at. Then, to my astonishment, I noticed that she was a female mountain lion, moving with feline grace and infinite precision by the water’s edge. I stopped paddling and simply watched. She ignored me altogether.
After ten or fifteen minutes she slipped into the undergrowth and I thought I’d lost her. But then fifteen feet or so up the cliffside she reappeared. This time she turned in my direction. With eyes set farther apart than we humans she gazed at me, eyes alternating between wide open and altogether closed for several seconds at a time. Her gaze was calm, steady and seemingly all-encompassing. She evinced no startled or predatory impulse. Eventually, in her own time, she turned slowly away and disappeared again, this time for good.
I’ve encountered wild creatures before while living in the woods for two decades — bears, rattlesnakes, foxes— but always either glimpsing them from afar or fleetingly up close as each of us sought an escape route. With this cougar it was different. In retrospect it seems to me that in her placid gaze she bestowed on me what Buddhists call a “dharma transmission” — an ineffable passing of wisdom and insight that leaves one’s perception of the world forever changed. The lion’s transfixing gaze left me wondering what wild creatures see when they watch the world around them. How encompassing is their view and how quickly can they refocus on an object of special interest? Do they possess panoramic awareness? Can they see everything in their viewshed at once?
With such questions in mind, a few months ago I began to modify the morning meditation I’ve been practicing for the past half century. Till recently I’ve meditated either with eyes closed or partially open and cast down at a 45-degree angle with a focus midway between my eyes and the object, usually a blank wall. Now, inspired by my dharma encounter with the mountain lion, I continue to follow my breath as an anchoring practice and instead of facing a wall I gaze at a longer horizon, eyes cast slightly downward without focusing on any specific object. Instead I retract my focus to the middle distance and let my eyes rest there. Then, without moving my eyes I place my mind’s attention on my full field of vision, which for most of us is about 180 degrees. To stretch the range of my perspective I spread my attention to 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, and near to 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 edges of my viewshed. Yet this kind of vision is crucial to sensing the broader context and gaining an accurate perspective on the whole.
Cultivating Panoramic Awareness
The world I’ve been discovering since starting to practice this kind of panoramic awareness is both vaster and more vivid than anything I’ve ever experienced other than in the psychedelic journeys of my well-spent youth. But unlike drugs, this mode of perception is firmly grounded in a shared reality and a heightened sense of belonging to and in the world I’m watching. We moderns largely ignore everything in the penumbra of our peripheral vision. The pace at which we live our lives, our fixation on the narrow-gauge range of digital devices, our addiction to hyper-stimulating experiences and our obsessive habits of mind make for tunnel vision. When riveted on our screens we even forget to blink, which is essential to clear vision. Both TV and action films blink for us sixty times a second in the staccato rhythm of a strobe light. They bombard our minds with shifting images every few seconds. Struggling to process the images and information coming at us at warp speed we hardly have time to notice anything beyond our laser focus on what’s right in front of us. We thus lose the broader perspective that enables us to anticipate both dangers and opportunities and thus make wise decisions.
Spotlight vs. Lantern Awareness
Neuroscientist Alison Gopnik and and computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith describe two different kinds of perception they believe differentiate adults from infants — spotlight and 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 narrows our perception of options and opportunities, funneling us into jobs with little room for exploration, growth and personal expression. We adults learn to specialize to the degree that we 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, however, our metaphorical spotlights have been honed to a laser-like beam in a still narrower and more piercing range of focus while lanterns have been supplanted by floodlights eliminating the shadows that delineate the three-dimensional nature of our world. This harsh, narrow focus reflects the obsessive nature of our adult consciousness and creates an addictive relationship to the objects of our attention. Its ramifications extend to every dimension of our lives, including our family and love relationships, our politics and celebrity culture, even our perspective on ourselves.
There is surely a functional purpose in being able to focus intensively on one task or object — our data-driven economy and culture depend on it — but it is too often stripped of the broader context that enables us to put it in proper perspective. As cultures both west and east become ever more fixated on profit-driven tech innovation, we make ever less room in our lives to consider the best uses for the devices we invent. Lacking the context to evaluate the likely impacts of our innovations we end up making choices that while profitable for those who own them are highly destructive of our collective well-being. There is no better example of this tragic misuse of our cleverness than the perverse directions taken by social media that in the process of developing new forms of communication and convenience have spawned hate and distrust that now threaten democracy, civility and life itself.
Is it possible as an adult to regain the open awareness and wide-eyed wonder one instinctively knew as a young child without losing the elder’s hard-earned discipline of steady focus and concentrated intelligence? As a young man I studied Zen Buddhism with Shunryu Suzuki-roshi and his followers in the Soto tradition that sprouted in the fertile soil of bohemian San Francisco during the Sixties. 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.” In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, he said, but in the expert’s there are few. “If you can keep beginner’s mind forever, you are Buddha.”
In other words, the highest attainment of enlightenment is not mastery of doctrinal minutiae, an erudite footnote to add to the vast knowledge base of a field of study, but a capacity to see, sense and experience life whole in such a way that we are not separate from it but integral to all that is. 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 propelled by boundless curiosity and creativity, a perpetual capacity to rediscover as if for the first time. It’s the inclination 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 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 the world with the full dimensionality that makes for a fulfilling life.
Linger Longer: Living in the Timeless Zone
It is not inevitable that consciousness narrows with age. Those of us of a certain vintage (in my case 75) are given a rare opportunity to broaden back out to panoramic awareness after a lifetime of pressing responsibilities that kept us narrowly on task. We finally find the chance to linger longer, taking the time 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 the “timeless zone” where we’re less driven by clocks and more by curiosity. Liberated at last from the imperative to perform, we experience a spaciousness that is the essence of true freedom. Instead of conventional retirement with its early bird specials and miniature golf links, we can choose reopening to the boundless wonder years of early childhood before school and work narrowed our options and imaginations. But to the innocence of childhood we can add the wisdom of experience and open more deliberately to a wider, deeper awareness and appreciation. Consciousness can indeed broaden with age.
With a practice of contemplative gazing the double vision that causes us to see ourselves as fundamentally distinct from everything else finally begins to dissolve into a seamless, indivisible unity, a kind of univision. We experience ourselves, both our bodies and our minds, no longer as separate entities but as one and the same as all else in the universe. This is not the loss we fear it to be, not the disappearance of self that we fight so desperately to avoid, but a blessed reunion with the larger universe. We retain our idiosyncratic personalities just as every other living thing remains unique, but we are no longer obsessed with insisting on our specialness. We give up the futile struggle to assert our paramount self-importance in return for a more secure sense of belonging with and to everyone and everything else.
Yet paradoxically we continue to operate in this world as if we are sovereign beings — and must do so in order to maintain our unique roles in the grand dance of creation. In my own experience, in the wake of my recent discoveries life continues to present its familiar challenges based on having to take care of the business of maintaining an individual identity, tending a body that is constantly demanding my 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 glory.
We Here Now
Where we saw ugliness and suffering before, we still see it, now with a startling clarity and detail. But we no longer see it as separate from us. It’s our world now, not just our personal selves but all of us, human and otherwise. It’s simply home, with all the complexities that accompany family and neighborhood, yet with a deeper sense of belonging than we’ve ever before experienced. Empathy and compassion are no longer intellectual and spiritual commitments alone but real felt sources of mutual recognition. 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. We are all one. Half a century ago Ram Dass wrote a book and coined the gentle commandment 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 of awareness : “We Here Now.”
With the practice of contemplative gazing both inward and out, we discover a profound sense of fulfillment in seeing and experiencing our indivisible unity with all else that is. 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 all around us.
