eThoughts : Expanding vs Narrowing Awareness

One of the ways to know it’s truly safe is the ability to both contract and expand one’s awareness. We all live in some sort of a bubble of perception, yet we all need to know that our bubble is somehow in the same sea as others and their bubbles. That’s a connection expanded awareness can bring, if there is a sense and reality of that connection. In this world at this time, and for so many other times, we do not much feel the connection, just the myriad of other bubbles, either consciously or unconsciously. And so many of those other bubbles of perception seem so malevolent, even if most are simply neutral. Malevolence is clearly not safe, but even neutral is not safe.

So, we contract our awareness—go to a happy place if you will. We hide in someplace or something, a kind of bubble within a bubble. We hide in our house, or maybe our bedrooms, or our beds, our bottles—pills or alcohol—our work, our depression, our anxiety, or in the arms of another—and perhaps another and another. We contract because if we expand, we will be assaulted by so much that is not safe.

This is not to say that some expand their awareness, despite the lack of safety. But in some of those cases, the expansion of awareness is not safe either. Sometimes when one is angry at injustice, they can turn their awareness outward into expansive discontent. In one way or another, such people “take up arms,” whether it is in the word or the sword.

In the midst of all of the orange pylons, sometimes, like today, I marvel at the silence. I can turn my awareness outwardly and expand it to include as much as is available to me, and find that no trespass occurs—only beauty enters. The quiet, the sun after a rain, the trees and bushes and landscape recently attended and majestic in its life. And I can turn my awareness inwardly, to find the words, as best I can, that accurately convey the feelings of me—and another kind of beauty is revealed. There is no journey with awareness that I can take that will force a retreat. I am free, I breathe correctly, and in that time, I am safe and playful and full of life.

Tonight may be different—the trespass may again enter my world and I will be forced to contract my awareness, staying within my house or even wearing my noise-canceling headphones. I will keep the windows closed and run a fan so that the discontented energy that enters my house uninvited will not enter my awareness. One can only hope that there will be no malicious interlopers that come as well, as a contracted awareness is not conducive to knowing they come. And I live in what many describe a rural and quiet area.

And perhaps I will, as I’ve done in the past, expand my awareness outwardly at the trespass and speak up about the unattended dogs, the penetrating bass, the wing-ding of off-road motorcycles, etc, despite living in what many describe a rural and quiet area.

And I will go to work and likely find so many with so little understanding of entitlement. We are not entitled to another’s energy—it is a gift. We are not entitled to trespass with our phones or our conversation or our music or our ambition or our inattention to others. We are entitled to the freedom to practice our ability to both expand and contract our awareness and find the sustenance that nurtures us individually and collectively. That is where we learn to breathe and learn to see and learn to feel beauty and where forgiveness and enthusiasm and wonder for living bubble up and out of us like healthy and unencumbered—worry-free—children. And I work in education, in higher learning—a place where we are supposed to set the standard for beneficial practice.

We all work and live where we have to modulate our awareness to keep out so much. Yet we all know, on some very deep level, the incredible beauty of being free to modulate our awareness not because we have to watch out, but because we want to.

We live in a world where there is really little that one can do, though such a person can do a lot. But if a lot would do a little, we would live in a world that needs a lot less to do and we’d have a lot more to enjoy, whether we contract our awareness to see the doings of an ant or expand our awareness to see the doings of stars—both of which are about turning our awareness to the wonderful mysteries of the universe, rather than hiding or fighting primarily because of the way we treat ourselves and others.

Hmmm, and as always, good luck to us.