Open Window: Teaching and Practice

We have been hearing from people in our global community how much the tumultuous international events of this time are impacting them. So again this month we are sharing  a teaching excerpt and practice from the Spirituality in a Fractured World course that you can do at home today. We hope this supports your inner journey including how you process and respond to the difficulties happening in the world. 

In this article Karen Johnson teaches us how we can learn to perceive and engage human life as an “Open Window.” She highlights how true openness within ourselves is our ally in healing discord. She then provides instructions for an exercise to help us examine your positions on current world issues, explore why you may not be open to other points of view, and experiment with new methods of accessing true openness. 

Your body, which you usually feel as condensed and solid, is mostly space. We know that to be true. In fact, every object you see in the room around you is more space than it is object. However, in this world and in this vessel that so magically navigates through this world, we see things as solid objects. Scientifically, it’s proven that they’re not, yet we insist on perceiving them that way and we need to perceive them that way. But it’s also possible to experience the spaciousness of our nature, the spaciousness of a fundamental reality, that’s not just physical.   

Many of you have had the experience of moving into inner territory where you experience yourself as vast, open space where you don’t feel the limitations of your skin. When you perceive the world from there, you see its harmony, beauty, and the unity of all things. When we encounter the spaciousness of our nature, we feel a kind of openness.   

Many of you along the way may have also encountered all kinds of obstacles that didn’t let your consciousness expand completely to the point of you being able to see or become that spaciousness and that’s also fine. Those are the emotional and mental obstacles that we need to deal with as human beings.  

We can’t think our way through the fact that this body is not a condensed object. We need to have experiences in our direct felt sense that convince us otherwise. In spiritual work, an important element is learning what is means to be open to different and novel experiences. 

We may know there’s something other than what we encounter and are open to every day, yet we don’t always know how to step into it or step through it. And that’s what spiritual practice is all about.   

In our everyday lives, it’s common for us to have convictions, positions, attitudes, and beliefs about reality that prevent us from seeing things freshly, outside of our fixed view, or as they really are. Experiencing openness in our spiritual practices helps us embody spaciousness in our worldly interactions. From here, we have the room to explore: 

What does it mean to be truly open to a conflicting perspective? What does it mean to listen, to be open, to open that window and let some fresh breeze come in, and think about things differently?  And what is actually happening when we lose touch with that openness? 

Say you experience a realized condition of being very spacious in a way that opens up to different kinds of beautiful qualities. Then, you have an encounter with somebody who voted for the “wrong” person…where does beauty go? Feeling the spaciousness while sitting on your zafu is easy until you are confronted with a difference. In an instant, the spaciousness and beauty disappears and a rigidified perspective takes its place. It might be accompanied by feelings of anger and thoughts of, ‘How could they do that?’ Or there may be glee and the view that “They did the right thing, we’re winning.” All of a sudden, the world gets polarized again.  

The human mind is an incredible mapping and anticipatory organ. We are programmed to actually draw conclusions from a very small amount of information. We’re also programmed to believe that the conclusions we draw are accurate and our survival depends on it. Instinctually, our minds adhere more and more to their positions when we feel challenged and threatened. Our minds do much, much more than that, but generally, our minds have been programmed and developed in a way that still expresses very animalistic tendencies. It’s just different than the way animals do it. They just threaten, snarl, and growl. It’s simple.  

In contrast, humans build very elaborate cases against one another filled with incredible ideas, mazes of fascinating factoids and diagrams, and all manner of things that fortify our positions. We are able to come up with reasons why we have the position we have. You have strong positions—and that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to have a position. We have beliefs, ideas, feelings, and ethical and moral perspectives that we feel are important, but the reality is that everyone is different in the way that those things are interpreted.  

To have a spiritual life—to live a life informed by our spiritual experience—means we can move beyond the triggers of our biology. We need to be able to have that bigger, more spacious attitude because the alternative is to fortify positions that actually are based on a survival mechanism, not our spiritual realization. And that will always bring in and create polarization.   

It’s going to bring in the fight, the fright, the flight, the whole business of reactive survival, but couched in civilized debates that are looking a whole lot less civilized these days. To learn to really listen means temporarily setting aside our notions of what’s right long enough to give space to deeply hear another point of view. 

So, you’re invited to take a breath for a moment. In this moment, feel into where you are and what we’re playing with here. It’s natural for the human mind to struggle to hold conflicting concepts, but what’s more natural (that we tend to not know about and aren’t always able to really contact) is the truer, deeper thing: the openness and spaciousness that is necessary for us to have an open mind.   

You can actually feel the openness of mind in your direct experience and you can feel that spaciousness is more ground than any of the polarized positions. Positions are fine, but when we adhere to them as if our identity, life, and very consciousness depend on them, we end up wrapped around them in a way that is like making a fist around it.  

When we get attached to our positions in this way, we can become unable to even have a dialogue and be informed by another point of view. Understanding who that person is as a human being and why they’re doing what they’re doing is extremely important if change is going to happen.  

George Bernard Shaw said, “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” This applies to learning what you are beyond your ideas and the self-images you maintain to convince yourself and the world that you’re a certain kind of person. We need to be open to the possibility there are other things waiting to be discovered, both difficult, painful, or aggressive things and beautiful, wonderful things. By being open to new ideas and beliefs, we find all kinds of interesting secrets that we’ve been hiding from ourselves.   

The same is true in the outer world. So, if you’re a Trump supporter and you only watch Fox news, you will not find out what’s going on and why some people are upset. If you’re not a Trump supporter and avoid talking to people who are, you won’t understand what called forth this person to be in the White House. To be able to make a change means being open to information you’ve attempted to keep away from yourself. 

If we’re not willing to listen, to try to understand the other, to see what kind of struggles might be happening for others, then we are voting for polarization. Everybody thinks they’re right. We need to find out what they’re looking at. Also, everybody’s view is limited. The more we open up, the more we’ll get a holistic view of what’s happening.  

So, let’s give it a whirl. Here are three repeating questions to help you open to some new, unexpected perspectives and experiences.