When you find yourself zoomed in on a journeying object, a return to vast open awareness can make seemingly-mysterious things abruptly clear and obvious.
It’s a truism because it’s true: everything is connected. Maybe more accurately, everything is everything — it’s all a single fabric, not a bunch of separate things. Of course, it’s necessary to treat things as separate, so we can navigate the world (whether inner or outer) and find ways to work with it; but too often, we get stuck in treating things as separate, and we lose track of the obvious because we’ve lost track of the whole, the gestalt, the interconnection of what we’re focused on with everything else around it.
This can feel abstract in the outer world, but in our inner wilds, it gets much clearer.
The previous two moves we’ve discussed — Crystallize and Merge — both involve zooming in on something, narrowing our attention onto it, whether to give it form or to explore the contents of that form for ourselves. Those moves make certain things amazingly clear, but they can also obscure our view when we get stuck in them.
It’s like you’re focused on the workings of a single tree, amazed at the mystery of how it survives, how it grows, how it gets nutrition and water, and you’re trying to answer these questions while staying focused on the tree itself. It’s a hard question. Answers are nowhere to be found. Then, with a flash of insight, you open your awareness to the forest around you and the whole inquiry seems silly. The soil, the air, the sunlight, the rain, the mycelium, the other trees — they’re all a part of this tree, that’s how it got the way it is. All you can do is laugh at yourself for somehow narrowing down so much that you forgot that simple fact.
On a practical level, some open awareness is covered in the Basic Imaginal Journeying section, as well as the Somatic Resonance course — and I’ll include a few more pointers in the practice section below.
Open awareness practice can be tricky, because the point of doing it is to let any kind of “techniques” or “instructions” fall way, and simply be open to the vast, simple right-here-ness that’s always with you. That said, here are some of my favorite prompts to drop back towards that simple right-here-ness.