Zooming In – Zooming Out

"Zooming In – Zooming Out" explores the practice of reconnecting with our fundamental, unconditioned awareness, which we are born with but often lose touch with as our ego and personal identity develop. This is called "Zooming-In." When we need to navigate day-to-day life, we simply "Zoom-Out" by reaching into our vast unconditioned consciousness and manifesting those aspects of memory, cognition, intellect, creativity, imagination, and relational skills that are required in the moment. We create a temporary “mere I” that is needed to navigate our daily life and we let it drop back into consciousness when no longer needed.  By "zooming in" to this core awareness and "zooming out" to navigate daily life, we can, in time, harmonize our deeper essence with practical, worldly existence.

Transcript

Zooming In – Zooming Out

Our fundamental nature is a simple, innocent, unconditioned, and easeful awareness. This ground awareness is the source of all of our experience. Without it we would not have any experience. We are born into this natural awareness, but as our personal self develops we lose access to it. If fortunate, we will recognize and dwell in it during adulthood, regaining the natural essence of our life amidst the cacophony of a complex personal world.

Consider the world of the infant before the commencement of personality/ego development. It is one of pure awareness without commentary, judgment, or elaboration of its simple and innocent experiences. The infant directly experiences one phenomenon after the other without lingering, emotion, memory, or reaction of any sort. Take the opportunity observe this in an infant – the curiosity, astonishment, delight, and non-attaching awareness.

In the East they use a metaphor. Consider a young infant looking at a complex wall tapestry. The child’s experience will dart back and forth experiencing the colors, texture, and shape, without comment or judgement. An adult viewing the same tapestry will rapidly move into cognition – liking or disliking, seeking a meaning, storyline, symbolism, or comparing it to this or that. The infant has a direct experience unconditioned, unshaped by past experience stored in memory. It is very much different for the adult whose experience is cognitive, conditioned, and far removed from a direct and unembellished experience. There is neither a good nor bad here, but two different ways of experiencing each with its benefits and losses.

For the adult who lives in the limitations of a “thinking and interpretive” world, there is the loss of vitality, freshness, astonishment, and immersion in what truly is

As adults, we may consider the words of the poet T.S. Eliot from Little Gidding.

“We shall not cease from exploration
 And the end of all our exploring
 Will be to arrive where we started
 And know the place for the first time.”

As adults lost in the contracted and worrisome world of the ego “I,” what we yearn for is to re-ground our life in a foundation of simplicity, direct experience, and innocence – but, unlike childhood, know that place for the first time. Our home can once again become an unconditioned awareness that manifests, as needed, access to worldly skills and capacities without the afflictive effects of a concretized and inflated identity.

To know it for the first time is to live from this core essence as a wise adult rather than an innocent infant. We live the essential truth of who we are while simultaneously manifesting, as needed, a simple mere personal “I” to navigate day-to-day life. We can cultivate this ability to zoom in to our true essence and zoom out to navigate the day-to-day world. We seek access to both worlds and the capacity to surf them as needed. 

Our first effort is to recognize and reconnect, to the natural experience of a pure, unconditioned, timeless awareness – our unchanging essence. The movement in this direction can be stimulated by suffering and its vulnerability, frustration with unsuccessful efforts to find sustained serenity and happiness in outer experience, or the subtle yearning for more to life. 

Every adult has re-touched this foundational presence. Perhaps this forgotten moment was experienced in nature, exercise, dance, beauty, intimacy, or other moments of flow. The common thread is a momentary loss of our sense of personal identity and opening into our larger nature at the center of our being. These moments are brief, as our ego structure tenaciously reasserts itself. But they are memorable tastes of our true nature.

It is through meditation that we can, in a focused manner, visit this still center of our life and gradually stabilize its presence. It is important to note that this must move beyond a meditative emphasis on relaxation and a calmer ordinary mind, although this has its own value. Our direction should be toward a simple awareness-based meditation that is absent the focus and dependency of method-based practices.

I have been teaching meditation for decades and regardless of my previous belief that “dropping into awareness” without a focal point is far more difficult the evidence is to the contrary. In practice, with skilled guidance, it is far easier to drop into a simple presence and beingness than it is to set-up an ongoing struggle with mental activity that is too often the result of a focused-based method. Awareness-based meditation cuts through the cognitive mind and takes us directly to the aim of all traditional meditative experience – a direct encounter with the expansive, timeless, and unconditioned awareness that is at the center of our being.

As we zoom in repeatedly and become increasingly stable in our experience of a simple awareness, we ask how can be zoom out to ordinary life and still “hold” our center. When we need to be in day-to-day life we simply reach into our vast unconditioned consciousness and manifest those aspects of memory, cognition, intellect, creativity, imagination, and relational skills that are required in the moment. We create a temporary “mere I” that is needed to navigate our daily life and we let it drop back into consciousness when no longer need.

Our base is our natural unconditioned consciousness and the assembled and transient mere “I,” when needed, comes and goes. Our fundamental source is our broad awareness and the “I” is a mere construction that helps navigate worldly life for the moment.

It is possible to practice accessing and stabilizing our essential awareness through regular awareness-based meditation practice. During the day we can practice zooming in and zooming out. In time we will become masters of two worlds and there will come a time when the final truth emerges and those two worlds will become one unity. There will then be no further need for zooming in and zooming out.