“You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.”– Alan Watts

Can you realize that your true existence is in consciousness, in your awareness of what is happening? It is not in what is happening. This is so radical a shift in perspective that I will repeat it. Can you realize that your true existence is in consciousness, in your awareness of what is happening? It is not in what is happening. Open your mind to absorb this challenge. Give it deep consideration. Engage your mind’s capacity for contemplation to let go of assumptions to experience deeper truths than you had previously been available to.

Zen poses the question: “Who are you?” And it poses it as the most profound of koans – those unsettling actions, verbal challenges, and questions meant to jar you out of habits of perception and thought into insight into the deeper and vaster dimensions of Reality.  Realization that you are awareness of what is happening rather than the activity of your mind and body is fulfillment of the Zen instruction to “let mind and body fall away.” With this insight we can be increasingly liberated from being tossed about by the passing content of our life experience.

When we identify with what is happening, we are lost in the “good” and the “bad” of things as we think they are, causing us to be emotionally vulnerable to all the comings and goings of situations around us.  Zen teaches us it does not have to be this way. It teaches us that all in the phenomenal world is arising and passing, that there is no permanence to phenomena, whether in circumstance or in the mind. Zen teaches us to step back, to hold perspective, to maintain neutrality and calm while situations unfold, develop, and manifest in ways that we probably don’t anticipate. It teaches us to be patient and judicious in reaching conclusions about life unfolding. It is pointing to wisdom as our essence.

Zen teaches us to be deeply within the moment where the only truth is what needs doing, as revealed through accurately perceiving and meeting whatever situation exists here-and-now, good or bad, easy or hard. It then, paradoxically, also teaches us to hold patiently to the long view where we can see that everything is passing, a flow of events leading to karmic unfoldings where, it is said, “everything is as it can be.” With that, there is the perspective taught of “the ten-thousand-foot view,” sometimes called “the view of the gods,” the non-dual view which transcends the personal, opening us into the experience of being consciousness – within which all phenomena arise and pass. In this view, we are not ultimately a person who has consciousness, but rather, we are consciousness that has a person through which Life (the Universe) is expressed, experienced and lived. And this awakens wisdom and compassion.

Consider this analogy – if you are on the ground in the middle of a street where a riot is taking place, you are jostled about, and you have little sense of control or safety – but if you move to the sidewalk, next to a building, you may have more sense of control and safety, but you are still vulnerable and caught in the situation.  If you go inside the building, you have removed yourself; you are, in a sense, hiding from immediate danger, but you have no idea what is taking place outside, or where it is all going.  You may still be in danger without knowing it.  If you go up several stories in the building and look out a window, you have some better sense of what is going on, yet your view is still limited to the tumult on the street. If you go to the roof of the building, up ten stories, you begin to see the size and direction of the riot, perhaps even who is instigating and fueling it. Its dimension, dynamic, and direction begins to be apparent; it does not take up the whole of what you view. You can see that there is life and activity that is not the riot, that is peaceful. 

If a helicopter comes and carries you off the roof and flies up five hundred feet, you can see that around the riot life is peaceful and normal, the frightening tumult you were caught in at street level is limited and confined.  If the helicopter takes you to ten thousand feet, the riot would disappear and you have a vast view of the Earth below, the tumult only a memory as you marvel at the serene view of the Earth and clouds below.  If you can then imagine the helicopter disappearing and so too your body, so that fear of the body falling was not at issue, you can then experience being just the disembodied view, and perhaps can get a sense of the clarity and likewise the compassion of a god looking down upon the world, populated by confused people caught in ideologies of difference and separateness that create conflict and riots.

In this analogy, we are gifted with a nearly visceral sense of how we personalize what is happening around us when we have our egos – our sense of person in our body, mind, and attachments – caught up in the occurrences in the world, and how, with increased perspective, the personalization diminishes and the sense of the what and why of situations becomes clearer.  We are called in Zen to move in our identification from our ego into our viewing awareness, into the energy of consciousness transcendent of personalization – to the “ten-thousand-foot view.” Zen then teaches us to bring this non-personal view back down to the ground, so to speak, where we live our lives. With that simultaneous mindful immediacy and impersonal perspective, our life experience increasingly opens into the realization of our being awareness, the silent intelligent witness to all that arises and passes, and with this, an unshakable calm becomes available.

“There is a beautiful example that is given in the Buddhist teachings: “namkha tabu,” which means the mind is like a sky, and all the thoughts are like clouds… When we get to that level of understanding, then we will not identify ourselves with all the different thoughts… When we actually understand how we are aware of our awareness… we start to understand how spacious and open our awareness is, then somehow we will rise above… When you are in that state of being aware of awareness—being like the sky—that will help you feel more spacious and open. That is freedom.”  – Za Choeje Rinpoche

In realizing that we are awareness, we are not caught in identification with the contents of the view, whether the view is of what is happening around us or within our own minds.  The paradox is that we realize simultaneously that, yes, we are the contents of the view because within the view, within the energy of consciousness, we are everything, for everything is arising and passing out of that consciousness energy which is the Universe.  We can feel compassion not only for those with whom we personally identify, but for all people, even those we dislike or have considered enemies, as well as all creatures and all life, even what we had considered frightening. This is the Buddhist view, and it gives rise to the Sanskrit phrase “Tat tvam asi,” – “thou art That” – a declaration of the insight into our infinite connectedness with everyone and everything.  Yet, it is not personal, for personal means ego-identified, and our Zen practice is the liberation from ego-identification into awareness that has an ego-mind to engage the world but realizes we are not our ego-mind.

This de-personalized view, quite ironically, then becomes our source of compassion, allowing us to not be lost and overwhelmed by the many outrages and tragedies in the world, for, from the ten-thousand-foot view, we never lose sight of the kindness, beauty, and miracles that are simultaneous with outrage and tragedy.  We never lose sight of the unfolding karma that has the “good” and “bad” intermingled, coming and going in a macro-perspective, not only of space, but of time. And this vast perspective sees that this world is ultimately, in historic time, moving toward the good, and that the “bad” is part of an eternal dynamic which is necessary to keep our intention always returning to the good and the kind, for this is the way that human society evolves. In dispassion we can realize compassion as essential for the harmony that is required for human society and individual human lives to flourish. It is realized that kindness and caring are essential in sustaining individual and collective well-being. It is logical.

Recently, astronauts from the Artemis 2 moon flight returned to Earth reporting, as had astronauts before them, their profound experience of the view of the Earth from tens, even hundreds, of thousands of miles in space. They saw our planet, our home, hanging in the vast blackness and were overwhelmed with its preciousness and the importance of loving and protecting this Eden amid the barrenness of space. Their mission, to prepare the way for humans to colonize the Moon and then beyond, I sensed, had come into question for them. In their post-mission interviews, without them saying it directly, I sensed that questions were arising for them such as, “Must we not care for this precious and unique planet which is our home as our highest priority?” and “Must we not reexamine how we are mired in conflicts and despoiling this Eden, destabilizing the very environment we depend upon with our exploitive and wasteful economy?” Their view from ten thousand miles had changed them, evolved them into deeper, more sensitive people. Buddhism and other non-dual spiritual traditions have been posing such questions for thousands of years, pointing us to remember what is essential – the truth of who we are and what is needed to cultivate human peace and harmony on a healthy and beautiful planet. This is the view we are capable of as, in a sense, vastly powerful yet benevolent gods, realizing who we are – the Universe experiencing, expressing, and interacting creatively with itself through human life in both the immediate and eternal here-and-now. We arecapable of this utopian vision if only we step back, reassess, and take responsibility as stewards of Eden, getting our unstable egos out of the way, leaving all small-minded prejudices, conflict and despoilment behind, seeing that the only logical path forward is as wise and compassionate “gods” employing our immense technological power for the celebration of and protection of Life, all life.