I'm in Yellowstone National Park, at the Mammoth Campground, enjoying a slow morning. I wanted to talk a little bit about what it means to be open—to have an open state of awareness.
The Brain's Illusion of Distance
Often, our perception creates distance. Our visual field and the sounds we hear are processed by our brain in a way that makes the world seem separate from us. If you're a healthy human with two eyes and two ears, your brain has learned to mesh the inputs from those two sources. It composites the two images from your eyes to get a sense of depth perception. It uses the tiny delay between a sound hitting one ear and then the other to figure out where that sound came from.
Right now, there are birds chirping over to my left. My brain makes that assumption because I hear the sound more strongly in my left ear than my right. When I look out in front of me, I can see my legs are closer than the dirt below them. The grass and trees across the way are in a sort of middle distance. Farther off, there's a hill, and beyond that, a mountain. Beyond that, the clouds in the sky.
There is an illusion of distance and separation between all these things. It seems my visual field extends out that far.
The Projection of Perception
But what do we know to be true here? I'm really just seeing an image in my brain. When I look out, there is no distance between me and this image in front of me. It's just a projection that my brain is making in real time from all these sensory inputs.
And there's no limit to this field of vision.
It might feel like my vision stops at that mountain, but if I just look above it, I'm looking much farther off into the clouds. On a clear day, I'm looking into the blue sky, which is only an appearance of a wall. Really, I'm looking out into space. You can see that at night when you see stars shining or when you look at the Moon. You're looking potentially light-years and light-years away.
But it's really just right in front of you. It's that light contacting your eye, and then your brain creating the illusion.
What It Means to Be Open
So, when I say "open," I mean recognizing that this perceptual field extends as far as it can. The infinity of distance you can be aware of is also no distance. It's not even "in front of you."
Let me put it this way: Where are you in your awareness? As I'm talking, I feel very much at the center of it. I can approximate distances: the table is a few feet away, the road is maybe 20 feet, that tree is a hundred feet, the mountain might be a quarter of a mile away. I can feel that I am separate from this space.
But really, I am inseparable from this space. It is just here.
Now, I'm not talking about the material of these things. As far as we can tell, there is actually a bench, a road, and a tree, and these things actually are spatially far from me. What I'm talking about here is just a matter of perception, the matter of my experience of these things. The intellectual and perceptual knowledge that a truck driving by is "far away" exists alongside the reality that the experience of that truck—the sound, the sight—is happening right here, in the space of awareness, in my consciousness.
An Invitation to Openness
To appreciate that open space—to be open in meditation and in life—is to be aware of that infinite space that is also immediately present.
If you close your eyes, see if you can notice that expansive space. While you don't have eyes in the back of your head, you might find that the quality of awareness can just shoot behind you, or around to the side. You can expand this space of awareness as far as the mountains, as far as the sky, as far as the stars.
But that space, too, is just immediately what you are in.
So, for a moment, as you're looking out now, see if you can pick something—something very distant or something super near, like your own hands. Look up at the sky or out at the horizon.
Just open yourself to that feeling of zero distance and infinite distance at the same time. Be aware of the duality: that you are sensing and experiencing this material world, but you are also inside this perceptual space that is just inside your head.
This open state doesn't take years of practice to feel or access.
You can just arrive instantly. There's no journey to take, No path to walk. Simply open your awareness and rest as that state of openness.
I have to go clean up the campground and get ready for some hikes today, but that's really all I wanted to share. Maybe after this ends, if you have some time, just rest as that open state. Or any time you remember throughout the day, even if it's just for a moment, just take a moment to rest as that open awareness.
