In one respect, at the heart of our predicament as a species of beings -- because it negatively impacts our possibilities -- is that we do not see the big picture.
For most of us, the big picture is our problem, our heavy heart, our irritation with somebody else, or our own sense of inadequacy. The big picture is the weight of our past. And that's not the big picture at all. That is a self-pitying picture. It has nothing to do with what it is that we need to understand. Instead, we're being fed a surreptitious understanding by our identification with a false sense of self that keeps us captive of a level of consciousness from which there is no escape given who our informant is.
How many times in your life have you acted not just against yourself, but perhaps against others because your actions were misinformed and you were prematurely moved into a conclusion? Too many times to count! And most of these premature conclusions had some negative taint to them, such as judging somebody and arriving at some insistence based on incomplete information.
But doesn't it feel like a big picture when you're angry or frightened or lonely? Your mind fills in all the things that make it so impossible for you because you have identified with a conclusion that was handed to you by a world that is incomplete by its very nature. It's a world of forgetfulness itself -- of a mind and thoughts that only know themselves through division -- where the smallest part of yourself presents to you what only appears to it to be the big picture. And it never stops acting on you in order to get you to forget that there is a bigger picture in a world above you that could show you that.
The ability to remember yourself means the big picture is with you. When you don't remember yourself, it's because you only see the so-called big picture that something is giving you and telling you is the big picture so that you can't remember yourself, or at least your wish to be present. The problem is that you are not aware of the fact that living in you is a world that wants nothing to do with you being aware of its activity in and upon you.
So, it becomes a question of not trying to pick some small part of the picture and then working towards some possibility that seems inherent in it. Instead, it becomes your willingness to be the big picture -- to lay yourself down for the sake of the world above you so it can act directly on the world below you. You stand as the ground between these things where the true fruitfulness of the world above is nourished by the world below. Then you begin to recognize that if you're not aware of the worlds beneath you, you're not going to know anything about the world above you.
But your attention can't be just on the worlds beneath you, because if you do that, then all thought is about identifying something that created resistance: "I wish I wasn't this"; "Why did I have to be like that?" and on and on. Your attention has to be on both worlds, and the presence of both worlds simply requires a living meditation, an open-eyed meditation, a living prayer, a ceaseless prayer. You are present to yourself, watching for something that tries to draw you into its world. The world above doesn't try to draw you into its world. It reveals its existence to you, and you are drawn to it. The world beneath you only wants to draw you into it. Beware of the draw. How do you stay aware of the draw? By living in the world whereby the very action of it, you're made conscious of the draw. You're made conscious of yourself.
As an exercise, make it your intention on a daily basis, on a moment-to-moment basis, not to be something, but to see something. If you're suffering, all you have to do is turn around and notice, "What am I suffering? Oh... I'm identified." If you can see that you're about to be identified, how many times are you going to go for that? Just want to see the big picture more than you want to be an important person. That will change everything.
So the task is to watch for these moments by seeing before trying to be something. If you'll place seeing before trying to be something, trying to get away from something, or trying to get something, in that very wish to try to see something before you try to be something you will discover an order of being that holds all the worlds in it in their perfect fashion, and the completion of all possibilities that moment produces.
