Deep Gazing
Learning To See The World Whole
Sit still and do nothing. Easy, eh? Maybe, or maybe not. Meditation turns out to be one of the most challenging of human activities. Our internal weather — our thoughts and feelings — perpetually obscures our ability to see clearly who and where we are. And we seldom linger long enough to actually see what we’re looking at. The three-step process that follows cultivates panoramic awareness that enables us to notice the broader context and meaning that tunnel vision filters out. It builds on widely practiced mindfulness meditation techniques but is a step beyond what’s generally taught. Instead of watching a world outside ourselves from an I-and-other perspective, we step fully into that world and become an indivisible part of it, surrounded by its presence, belonging with and to everything. Here in brief is a step-wise description of the practice of “deep gazing”:
Begin by settling into a comfortable upright position either on a cushion or in a chair with good lumbar support. Close your eyes and take in several deep breaths, inhaling slowly with your mouth slightly open to ease the intake of air. Take in somewhat more than you normally do in order to extend the range and amplitude of your breathing. Then exhale at about half the pace at which you inhaled. When you reach the usual base of your range, pause briefly, then nudge your breath a little lower. Pause again. While you’re nudging your breath deeper from above, open the muscles in your anus and release from below to make space for your breath to fall farther. You’re now at the base of your range, trolling there like a goldfish at the bottom of a tank, gills scarcely moving. Don’t hold your breath; just come to rest there, however briefly. With practice you’ll find that you can linger there longer without anxiety. You’re establishing a new default setting for the range of your breath, one that serves to ground and settle you in place. Breathe deeply and slowly in this manner till you feel well-settled in place.
Gradually open your eyes and let them come to rest cast slightly downward. Aim them in a general direction without focusing on any particular object. Retract your attention to the middle distance without blurring your vision. Don’t fix on any especially interesting object since like a magnetic attraction this focus can trigger a fixation that distracts from the wide-angle awareness you’re seeking to cultivate.
Now open to your peripheral vision, the broad field beyond your central locus of attention. Don’t move your eyes or head to focus directly on the periphery but rather use your mind alone to stretch your awareness to encompass everything it can receive. You won’t see things at the periphery with the same level of detail or acuity you do within your central focus but you’ll become more aware of their presence. They set a crucial context for what’s at the center of your attention. They help situate you in space, better attuned to your surroundings. Now focus your mind in each of the three dimensions, stretching the canvas of your attention across the frame of your field of vision. First turn your attention (but not your eyes) left and right, then up and down, and finally near to far. If something moves in one or another part of that periphery you’ll notice, but don’t generally turn your eyes to look at it directly. When once in awhile you do (there’s no rule against it), note that you now see it with unusual clarity and detail. You not only see the rabbit on the lawn but are able to focus on its eye as you never have before. This greater optical acuity may be due to observing with the now relaxed state of your mind and eyes. Your open, attentive gaze is no longer straining to extract something from the object of your attention by fixedly staring at it.
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Once your attention becomes attuned to a non-grasping, receptive habit of mind, this same quality of focus carries over into every other dimension of perception. You “gaze” with equal openness, receptivity and equanimity at the myriad sounds, sensations, feelings and emotions that emerge. You’re not naming, labeling, judging or analyzing what’s coming your way but simply witnessing it as it enters the periphery of your awareness and passes away again. You can now gaze outward and inward with the same seamless, relaxed attention. The boundaries between inner and outer worlds begin to dissolve. Your obsessive attention on yourself as a distinct solitary individual dims as a wider, more intriguing reality reveals itself. You don’t altogether disappear but you merge, inside and out, with everything you witness in the wider world.
It’s no easy feat to unfasten ourselves from the obsessive habits of mind that reinforce the illusion of our separateness, It’s still harder because in the digital world that is increasingly replacing the real world we’re fused to the devices that fuel such self-focused obsessions. Cell phones and computers surely have their uses — I’m using a computer at the moment to compose this essay — but they also rivet our attention for the larger part of our lives on two-dimensional screens that at best convey only digital replicas of real life and are aimed largely at ourselves. What’s different about deep gazing and open awareness is that they don’t attempt to escape from our ever-shrinking shared reality, Instead they enable us to witness and appreciate reality just as it is, not as we wish of fear it is, and situate ourselves in proper proportion to everything and everyone else.
This modest yet rigorous practice holds the potential to transform ourselves (and our selves) in ways that yield the only kind of fulfillment we are capable of achieving in an innately imperfect world. Even if we are committed to changing the world for the better and alleviating its surfeit of suffering, paradoxically we do so best if we first embrace it as it is, taking in both its inescapable discordances and its hidden harmonies as a foundation for cherishing it.
Seeing the world whole may actually not be altogether possible within the limited vision of which we humans are capable, but our ancestors may have seen glimpses of this wholeness for thousands of years before us, as some indigenous peoples still do today. With their limited language (though they had many words for the few things they did label), pre-literate humans guided their lives by the sun and stars and felt the breeze keenly on their flesh. Children too, before they become conditioned to divide the world into categories and focus narrowly to succeed in a highly specialized economy, see it with a boundless curiosity not yet jaded by too much unmediated media. It’s a wholeness of vision that we adults generally lose to the fragmentation of reality that reflects ourselves and the world back to us like a shattered mirror.
Practices like gazing broaden and deepen our awareness, lingering there long enough to gather in the splendor we’ve been missing in our manic habits of distracted attention. What our hearts and minds are seeking in their mistaken obsession with trying to possess and exploit everything we see is the fulfillment that comes from receiving the miracles of everyday experience whole, witnessed and absorbed without being captured or confined. With hearts, eyes and minds wide open we can begin to appreciate the gifts of what life in these bodies, minds and hearts is capable of bestowing.
