=kit108.txt
KIT 108 - Finding A Wider Perspective

 If we look at Notre Dame in Paris from only one angle, we haven't
seen Notre Dame. Likewise, if we look at a problem from our
personal vantagepoint-what we think we are-then we can't have a
real sense of what the problem is. Just to say, "It is not what I
think it is" is a negative statement. The positive way to do it is
to start looking at the problem from alternative points of view to
our own point of view. What I suggest is to think of a problem,
but as seen from the point of view of another person who's
involved with us in that problem. That doesn't mean that another
person's point of view is more valid than our own, but at least we
now see the situation from two angles instead of one.

Generally we think of another person as the object of our
awareness, but in meditating, we discover we are literally able to
transpose our consciousness into that of another person. That
person's way of looking at things may be as limited as ours, or
may be better than ours, or more limited, but it does alter our
perspective. For example, if that person were attuned to a very
high state, then what we grasp of that person is going to be
different from the way that person would be if s/he were dealing
with the nitty-gritty of human problems. We can imagine how we
appear to that person, and we realize the image that person has of
us is not what we think we are and neither necessarily better nor
worse, but then, I am not saying this is the real thing. No, I'm
saying that we then the ability to see something about ourselves
that maybe we didn't see when we were in our personal perspective.
Our eyes can't see themselves.

The next step is to expand our consciousness to more people-three
people, four people, and many more people-and eventually, we can
just feel the joy of our consciousness expanding. It's like, for
example, we have been sitting in the office or in the house the
whole day, and then we have the opportunity to make a trip to the
mountains and sit on the mountaintop and watch a fantastic dawn.
What a joy to be out of that prison! Marcel Marceau does a famous
mime routine. He's walled in, and he keeps on pushing the walls
and they get further and further away, and the further away they
go, the better he is able to dance, and eventually he dances the
dance of freedom. Now that is essential to our work, pushing out
our limitations.

There is another way of doing it. We imagine the starry sky,
clusters of galaxies, and realize that the very fabric of our body
is the fabric of those galaxies. The fabric of our body originated
in the Big Bang as a pure outbreak of light, of pure radiance, and
this light crystallized itself into what we call matter-although
for a physicist, light is also matter-imagine light that has
gelled into a crystal. Our bodies are much more elaborate than
crystals. They are not frozen as a crystal, so from the moment we
reach out in our thoughts to the vastness of space, and we realize
that we ourselves, our body itself, is part of this starry
universe-they can't be separated-that has a dramatic effect on our
way of thinking of ourselves. We no longer see ourselves as a
discrete entity with a boundary, the skin. We are not just
expanding our consciousness; we are altering our sense of
identity, or rather gleaning awareness of the vastness of our
identity.

It is true that as we extend our consciousness, we lose the sense
of our individuality, so it's good to balance that with the
opposite. When we exhale, we experience this wonderful expansion
of our consciousness reaching out further and further, losing the
sense of our individual center. We then do the opposite as we
inhale; we see how the totality of the universe converges as us.
It converges just like a three-dimensional panorama converging
into a two-dimensional photograph. The consciousness of the cosmos
has become focalized, like light is focalized through a lens. We
are focalized as our consciousness. Our consciousness is not
different, not other. It is the consciousness of the totality.

We have the ability to toggle between an all-encompassing setting
of consciousness and a personal one. For example, when we read the
pages of a book, our eyesight is highly focalized, but when we
look at a panorama, our eyesight is all-encompassing. We could
toggle between the two. We could read a book while sitting in
beautiful mountain scenery, and then look at the panorama, and
look at the book again, toggling between the two. We can do the
same thing with our consciousness.   When our consciousness is
expanded, we can see our problems in context. That means we can
see the implications of our problems instead of just seeing them
from our limited, personal bias. Then we realize that what we
thought was our problem, is simply our participation in the drama
of the universe.

That is a way of liberating ourselves from the constraint of our
commonplace assessment of situations, and our self-image that we
carry in our psyche throughout our lives. We are carrying in our
psyche a false assessment of our situations, of ourselves, of our
relationship with the universe, convinced that that's the way it
is. We suffer because of it. We are confused because of it. The
expanding of our consciousness does have an effect upon our
identity. We can expand our consciousness like our eyesight. We
then have a wider sense of our identity. It doesn't seem logical
to think that we are a fraction of the totality. We think, "How
can you say that? I am a totality." Some mystics say that, but we
wonder if they're crazy. We can't understand how they could say
anything like that. It's something we have to gradually train
ourselves to in meditation.

We would never, for example, be able to make sense of radio waves.
The radio processes those waves by impoverishing them, so we can
make sense of them-by limiting them. The same thing is true of our
lives. We have difficulty in extrapolating between different
situations. Remember Cinerama, where there were three screens in
the cinema, and idea was to grasp this wide panorama, and we found
that in fact we were scanning anyway. We didn't have the faculty
of being able to encompass all this richness, If we trained
ourselves, we would be able to extrapolate between those different
images and make sense of the whole. That's what we do with our
eyes. The vision of each eye is different, but we are able to
extrapolate between those two visions. This is what we are
learning to do in mediation, to be able to make sense of our lives
in the context of the whole humanity, instead of being caught in
our personal trip. That makes for maturity. We become a mature
being. We become more and more cosmic, and less personal. That's
the reason we use the word Tatagatha for Buddha instead of
Siddartha or Gautama, because Tatagatha means "Thus." We become
Thus. Impersonal.

What we are doing now is to try and reach beyond our narrow self-
image, which not only distorts our understanding of our lives, but
also affects our self-esteem. Our self-esteem is important,
helping us to to find fulfillment in our lives. We are proceeding
in a counterproductive manner in our lives by standing in the way
of the fulfillment of our lives-by limiting ourselves to our self-
image. We need to notice that we are always relating our self-
image to the totality, and totality to the self. We are always
connecting the two. That is why the Sufis speak about the Divine
Consciousness. It seems at first, in our minds, (because we think
in categories) that the Divine Consciousness is out there
somewhere, and this is my consciousness. In our meditation, we
start working with expanding our consciousness over a period of
time. It might take months and months, even years. We might reach
that point which St. Francis talked about when he said, "I thought
I was looking at the universe, but the universe is looking at me."
That's a breakthrough in meditation. The Sufis would say, "I
thought I wanted to know God, but it is God who is discovering
Him/Herself through me." Or "I can only know myself by trying to
have a sense of the knowledge that God has by discovering
Him/Herself as me." That's Sufism.

Maybe it's difficult. In theory, in poetry, it sounds beautiful,
wonderful, and paradoxical. We have the faculty of transporting
our consciousness into that of another person, then the capacity
of transporting it in the consciousness of more and more people,
then in infinite regress, we are able to transport our
consciousness into the consciousness of the universe. In order to
do that, we have to downplay our personal consciousness, or the
purpose of our personal consciousness, and highlight the
consciousness of the universe. That's what happens in a very
advanced state of meditation.

There is a difference between the cosmos and the universe. The
cosmos is the body of the universe. Think of the universe as a
being, composed of lots of cells-just like the cells of our body-
which are endowed with a certain amount of consciousness, and
will, and awareness. Our consciousness is the focalization of this
total consciousness, this global consciousness. That means it is
part of that global consciousness. That means our knowledge of the
cosmos makes a contribution to the knowledge the cosmos has of
itself. When we are looking at the stars, the stars are
discovering themselves through our glance. Now perhaps we can
better understand the words of Ibn 'Arabi, who says "God discovers
Him/Herself as you", meaning the way the totality is actuated in a
unique way in each fragment of itself. It's not God static, it's
God dynamic.

Discovering God awakening by becoming existential-that is
activating Him/Herself as us-is a very different way of thinking.
We no longer think of God up there and us down here as miserable
worms. It's a completely different way of looking at it. This way
of thinking is going to open the door to having a sense of the
sacred, because we respect each being as an expression of the
Divine Being. This is what is called God-consciousness. "Is it
possible that the being of God, whom I imagined to be up there
somewhere remote, is present within my own being?" We realize it
is only our concept of ourselves-self-image we call it, our
refusal to accept the Divine gift of our being-that stands in the
way of our ecstasy, that makes us low key. The breakthrough of
ecstasy-realizing that the totality of Being at all levels, not
just the physical world, but all levels, that is coming through
us, or is us, or is being aroused as us-is an incredible thought.

Imagine Einstein pushing a pram in streets of New York. A lot of
people pushed prams in the streets of New York, but while he was
doing it, he was thinking of space and time and galaxies. Most
people think that they're pushing their pram, right there in the
streets of New York. They cannot see that that is only a very
small piece of the totality. It is so easy to be caught in a
perspective.

The first American astronaut who landed on the moon gave a seminar
at the Zenith Institute. He said, "You can't imagine the thrill of
hurtling back home through space at tremendous speed and thinking,
'my family down there, right down there on that planet, over there
it is very far away,' and thinking, 'well, yes, I am looking
forward to meeting my wife and children and all the circumstances,
but I just hope that I won't lose that sense that I have gained of
the vastness of reality.' " In fact, he never lost it.

We don't have to take a space ship to gain a sense of the vastness
of reality. This is what we are doing in meditation now. It's a
matter of our realization. That is the way out of the prison, and
it makes for the maturation of our being. We can't come back from
the door through which we came to this state. We can only come
back through another door.

==================================================================

NO SOS 

==================================================================
