When it comes to the idea of zooming out our focus – not into becoming cluttered, mixed focus, but just expanding what we’re paying attention to – we can imagine the continuum of possibilities for our focus.
So the narrowest would be focusing on a very specific task, and we’re completely zoomed in and focused on one task, maybe whatever we’re working on.
And that seems to be the best way to get work done.
You know, there’s the planning part.
We can plan, we break our work into steps and pieces, but then when we’re doing each piece we can be fully focused on one little piece, and that’s the full zoom in.
And then zooming out, to the next level, we could be looking at maybe the bigger picture, maybe planning out what we’re going to do, looking at the whole situation overall.
But then imagine continuing to zoom out this object of focus, so that we could really be focused on our entire surroundings, everything that’s around us.
That is the object of focus.
That can be the object of attention and concentration and awareness, our entire surroundings, so that we can sort of take them as one piece and just be aware, like feel OK, be aware of being in this place, surrounded by this room or whatever is around us, and focus our attention on that.
Sometimes I like to imagine like a 360 awareness.
Imagine it as being fully surrounding me, and sort of feel the environment.
And that can be a very useful thing, I think, to pull us out of focusing on specific narrow things, and instead have this wider view of the situation we’re in, and that can leave us open to many new ways of looking at things and many new observations of the environment.
But it can go even further.
Imagine zooming out further, so we’re not focused on our specific environment that we happen to be in, but we could zoom out to the entire world.
Everything that we know about the world, we can just sort of have that as our object of focus.
Now, it would be interesting to to see how this is for different people.
Because of course, each of us has a different idea of what “the world” is.
Based on everything that we’ve learned about, and the way that we imagine things, we can have sort of this idea of what it means, “the whole world”, everything that we can imagine.
You know, we can think of it in more physical terms, like think of it as the spinning ball and where all the on the the oceans and the continents and where things are, and just imagine this whole earth, and have that as the centre of attention, and just think about wow, I’m a dot on the surface of this spinning ball, and it’s all happening right now.
So that’s really- that’s pretty zoomed out.
I mean, I don’t usually think that way.
Usually, you know, you can’t get much work done when you’re thinking that zoomed out.
But it’s amazing how it leaves us open to seeing things differently than if we’re all zoomed in on one task, we just don’t really think about the whole world going on at this very moment.
[…]
And then you could imagine even zooming out so far that it’s not even about anything in the physical universe, any of this space or spinning planet or whatever.
But imagine an object of focus that’s so empty that you’re simply aware of the fact that you exist.
Like there’s something here.
I am existing.
I have some kind of consciousness.
Some kind of awareness.
And that’s it.
All the details of, you know, what the earth is like, and the details of my particular part of the earth, and the room that I’m in, and my own concerns, and the plan for the day, and all these things: they’re all little unimportant details if we really zoom out to the bigger picture, as far as we can go, to the point where everything disappears and it’s just “OK, I exist.” It’s like an empty focus, an empty mind maybe that is one way that we can clear our minds and have this kind of empty background of thinking and awareness, that just the simple fact that we exist at all.
Imagine thinking about that.
But then of course, after all this, we zoom back in in order to get work done.
Can’t stay in space all the time, can’t stay zoomed out all the time.
But you know, I like to think that- I enjoy the fact that, you know, that is there for us at all times.
At any time, we can choose to have this zoomed-out thinking and we can expand our object of focus as far as we want to go.
#emptyawareness #awareness #expandawareness