Principle behind getting closer to your CRUSH: Early age tutorials
When I stare at a point my visual span suddenly increases. You must have done so many times knowingly and unknowingly. For instance, recall the moment in pre-high school when you had a crush on that boy/girl in your class. You sat at the desk where you would have to turn your head forty five degrees to look at him/her. But remember how smartly you would simply look at your teacher, defocus and actually look at the boy/girl without actually having to turn your head. That was a smart utilization of a skill we have. As you grew older you must have solved stereogram puzzles and that was as much of defocusing to reveal the picture behind the lines.
Let’s get into the details of what might be happening. At any moment our pupils dilate to focus on anything close and constrict to focus on anything at a distance (for those who constructed any models of pin-hole camera at school this shall be easier).
Let’s go back to the classroom. You are sitting at ‘Y’, your crush is ‘C’ and your teacher is ‘T’. You have had sleepless nights, pangs, a heart full of tears aching to burst out. You have done everything to feel the love but you haven’t told ‘C’ anything yet. You feel ‘C’ doesn’t even look at you. The classroom is the closest where you can look at her without her noticing. Now what do you do?
You look at your teacher because she is talking about ‘Illtutmush’ and his exploits. Suddenly she blurs out. Your pupils have dilated and a bigger picture is created on your retina. Instead of physically focusing at the teacher by controlling your pupils, now you can pick and choose from the bigger image on your retina. Now you give the job to the electronics behind your eyes. The neurons carry the information on your retina to the processing units that process only the image on your crush.
I as ‘Y’ am grown up now. As I live my life I desperately try to focus on specific things. When I focus, suddenly the information accessible reduces. My processing unit no longer has a choice. However, if I can defocus again, my span of information going in increases and my processing units have more information to work on.
Now let’s try to understand the difference in meaning in both the cases. I have two aspects to myself, physical (involving all motor movements) and non-physical (all information transfer and processing, involving neurons, memory units, etc.). Our physical units are strongly controlled by the behaviors we manifest most as humans, eg. anger, jealousy, hatred, curiosity and every behavior that we demonstrate in haste. For instance, the moment somebody that motorcyclist brushes against your side view mirror in Delhi, you give him a dirty stare, or when the car that hits you at the back, you stop, get out and scream at the top of your lungs, or the urge to thrash anybody who just abused your mother. That’s how our voluntary motors function, more as a response, the conscious choice. Surprisingly, we don’t have a choice either. Our non-physical entity has information that is too limited to churn out any alternative possibility at that point of time.
On the other hand when we defocus, suddenly we have more information, like the bigger picture at the retina. We get into the partial sub- conscious choice mode. Now we look at the same motorcyclist and give him the advantage. ‘He must be in real hurry’ or ‘He must be worried badly to distract him.’ Now instead of wasting time being angry at him, you can hasten the process by quickly getting to the crux of the issue, ‘the damage’ and work that out. You can make better suggestions as you are not ‘hung up’ about a certain conjecture. Also you are attempting to understand what you can’t see, feel or hear at the first instance, by defocusing.
Everytime we focus, we inherit a lot of characteristics about that thing or person which might only be a perception we impart. For instance a lady living in my building criticized me once for carrying my bike in the elevator. I have personified her as a vamp ever since. Everytime I look at her, all I feel is hatred; I reinforce the image. I give wings to my imagination to justify my thought and she ends up having fangs, bloody nails, and a shared edged devil’s tail. What happens if I defocus for a while when I spot her next? Will I be able to see anything other than the devil in her?
Human ancestors prayed to Sun and heavenly bodies before any religion came into existence. How does that help in defocusing? Everytime you look at the Sun as it emerges at the horizon or with your eyes closed in the noon you are trying to establish a connection with it. Everytime you look at the moon you inherit the tendency of being that soft and comfortable self cuddling in the night. You suddenly get transformed into the image you have, even if it’s momentary. This also means that you will certainly fail to notice the moon if you are going out on a murder mission.
What is the difference? Sun is harsh, hot and it burns. Unless you defocus you can’t get to what you like about it. For the same reason then Indians like the Sun much better in Winters than in the Summers, the Sun however has never changed. This is because I judge and classify the existence of the Sun with my respose system. The moment I defocus, I will end up liking the Sun as much in Summers as I do in the Winters.
The next step to defocusing with the Sun is being like the Sun beyond the heat and light, the strengths that I appreciate and things that I want to emulate. What does defocusing on the Sun bring me to then? The cognizance of the Solar System that it keeps warm and together with the gravity, as the central hinge; the first realization of the galaxy being a small speck in the universe. Now Copernicus, Newton, Aristortle, Einstein, they all defocused to understand the universe and her principles. The first man who suggested the existence of a galaxy won’t have been able to do so unless he had gone beyond the obvious response system. The non-physical entity in Newton played a major role in dissecting the defocused phenomenon.
As the first instinctive lessons some animals learn fright and flight. Lion cubs know how to be silent and motionless in bushes, responding only to their mother’s calls. Human babies on the other hand cry harder to demonstrate hunger, discomfort and need. All animals including human beings use accessible response system to survive. As we grow the ‘cry’ transforms into other acceptable mechanisms that work, still an active response system. We find it difficult to hold our responsive emotions with our loved ones and in the society unless we are barred from demonstrations. Some people can defy laws. At work place where defying can cost you your job, the responsive emotions get transformed into stress. When it’s too stressful we end up making some hasty decisions.
Everyday instances bring us as many reasons for pain and agony, as for happiness. Our ‘munis’ and ‘rishis’ said that to be detached from the daily misgivings is to free ourselves from our emotional bondage. In other words when we issue the pink slip to our response system in our waking stat, we stop coloring the information intake. We are not much different from the bull that charges at ‘red’ repeatedly. The only difference is that we are the ‘Bull’ and the ‘Matador’ and the ‘Red’.
‘Match Point’, a movie Woody Allen directed in 2005 revolves around Chris, who just falls short of the fame dreamed about as a tennis star and marries his best friend’s rich sister. He then falls for his now brother in law’s fiancé and murders her when she gets pregnant with him. There were two turning points so far. First being Chris’ focus on wealth and then the unwanted pregnancy with another woman. Both situations were hard facts in his life and perhaps the only choices he had. But, had he defocused, he would have had more options that he might have found viable.
During my high altitude trekking and expeditions, many a times I have felt as if my mind has stopped thinking. Once I faced delusions while sleeping and felt extremely claustrophobic. I woke up, distraught, only realizing that I didn’t have a choice other than going back to sleep and feeling claustrophobic. It was -40 outside my tent. Movement meant losing a whole lot of heat that I had generated in my last hour of sleep. The mind receives a whole lot of deceptive information for change of pressure and lack of oxygen. It takes a while to get used to extreme circumstances. The extremes are simulated in real life when we seem to run out of choices. At 21,000 ft you know you are stuck in a blizzard. The only escape is your survival skills. At 1000 ft we experience blizzards that challenge our survival as well. In other words, everytime we experience a blizzard we take it as a challenge to our survival. Our focus gets narrowed, relying entirely on our response system. A seasoned mountaineer knows what not to do at such an altitude. Our panic system loves to take charge. It has off the shelf answers to everything. Over the centuries it has learnt that health is directly proportional to symbolic power, as in wealth, status, etc. So our focus system has narrowed down to the same, like Chris in ‘Match Point’.
The last forty years however has seen a growing band of minorities rebel against the narrowing of choices. They have broken out from the imposed patterns to search for the connection that seemed to be lost. A small proportion of old and an increasing number of the young are not ready to lose their placenta, the accessible connection with meta-life, the first hope to beat the response mechanism, the only window to defocusing the chimera.
What’s life in television? A detailed focused recording.
What’s tele-vision in life? Defocused Possibilities.