Mindfulness: Zooming in and Zooming out

One day, I was looking at a YouTube video created by Google wherein the video zooms out and takes us on the travel to the cosmos and then it zooms in and takes us inside the human body to the quantum world. Our mind has a similar capability. Our mind makes us think about galaxies in the universe and the very next moment makes us think about the quantum world. 

As an ordinary human being, we get engaged in our daily routine. Kids get engaged with their studies, the homemaker gets engaged with the kitchen and the kids, the office-goers get busy with the office routine and the politicians get busy with the politics. We have to take care of our office work, relations, kids, family, and finances. All these things fill our minds, hardly leaving any space for the other things. Due to thinking day and night, again and again, on the same issues, our mind somehow gets fixated on certain thoughts, almost losing awareness of its innate capacity to zoom in and zoom out. 

While our mind is obsessed with a particular thought, the same thought and its infinite iterations keep coming to the mind. For example, a threat to the job will keep occupying the mind with related thoughts. The mind will keep going to the past again and again on the reasons that led to the threat and will keep analyzing them again and again. It will also keep thinking about the future consequences. That's a quite natural reaction of the human mind.

We know very well that it is not going to serve any purpose yet our mind remains obsessed with such thoughts. In a way, we lose awareness of the capacity of the mind to zoom out. We lose awareness of looking at the larger picture. Zooming out all the time is not going to serve the purpose because we need to zoom in to complete the task at hand. However, continuing in a state of zoomed-in for a long period of time results in obsessive-compulsive behavior and health hazards resulting therefrom.

Zooming out is possible only by somebody who is witnessing the landscape. For example, a camera installed on a satellite above the surface of the earth can zoom out on a wide range of the surface of the earth. If the camera is installed on the surface of the earth, it can zoom out a very limited range. Similarly, zooming in depends upon the power of the camera. Even if the camera is installed on a satellite, its range of zoom-in may still be very limited due to its limited capacity.

Similarly, we lose our capacity to zoom out if we get involved with the happenings in our lives. We slowly get attached to the role we perform in this world and lose awareness of our real nature. Due to this ignorance, rather than living life as a witness, we start living the life of the character we are playing at the grand stage of life. Due to this fixation, we lose awareness of our capacity to zoom out. Similarly, we sometimes get so fixated on the surface that we lose awareness of zooming in. We have a great capacity to zoom in and go to the details of each and every issue. However, due to anxiety and worry, we get fixated on the surface of the problem rather than diving deep into the same. 

Mindfulness Meditation, if practiced properly, can really help us regain the awareness of our capacity to zoom in and zoom out. While observing the sensations in different parts of the body, without a choice or reaction, we regain the awareness of our real nature being a witness. While observing the sensations within the body, we also develop the capacity to become aware of the happenings inside our body. Thus, mindfulness helps us regain our capacity to zoom in and out and live a meaningful life.