Get Wider and Wiser by Inhabiting A Cosmic Perspective

If you are feeling stressed, you must think something is really important. Maybe it is your job on the line, or your life, or the life of loved one. I offer the following exercise to give you a sense of peace and let your incredibly important actions be guided by a wider and wiser perspective.

I want you to imagine in your mind that you are looking at yourself from above, in your stressed state. Wherever you are reading these words, imagine seeing yourself from the vantage point of a butterfly floating a few feet above your head, looking down. You are a dispassionate observer. If you feel anything, it is curiosity.

Now, you zoom out and see the whole city you are in as if looking down from the window of an airplane. You have really good vision, so you can still see the individual you, stressed and reading this article, but that creature is hardly a speck in the sea of other humans surrounding it, the animals, the plants, the buildings, roads, waterways, etc.

Now you zoom out even further, and you can see the whole state, and finally the whole country you currently reside in. Looking down from this super-high vantage point, you can see the city you were just looking at but it is little more than a dot on the landscape of your vision. And the little individual you, reading this article, is but a dot inside of that city.

Continue to zoom out. You see the whole earth now from outer space, and you see that the country you were looking at is but a fraction of this globe. You probably see mostly water, and some cool looking storms. Perhaps these storms concern you, because you see that they will soon cover that country, inside of which your city is a dot, inside of which your person, reading this article, is but a dot.

So you keep zooming. Because you have REALLY good eyesight, you can still see that storm you were worried about on planet Earth, which itself is but a dot in the solar system. But even the storm you can still see is one of hundreds of storms you can see on the other seven or eight dots in the solar system. It does not see so scary from here.

Let’s go ahead and zoom out one more time. Now our solar system is but a dot amongst thousands of other solar systems in our galaxy. Our whole planet is but a dot in the dot of a solar system, your country is but a dot jn the dot of the planet in the dot of a solar system, your city is a dot on that dot of a planet, and you are dot in that city. Oh, and did you know that our galaxy is less than a dot amongst the 100 – 200 billion estimated galaxies in our universe?

That thing you were stressed about, what does it look like from this vantage point?

I do not mean to minimize the relative reality of your suffering. I mean to put it in perspective, because the resulting sense of peace is a really nice place to make decisions from. From this expanded vantage point, can you choose what to do without fear? Can you connect to your purpose? Can you let the vastness of existence inform your actions?

Instead of zooming back in to your life, see if you can pop open a new screen, so to speak, where this cosmic view stays with you, even as you look at your city, in your state, in your planet, in your solar system, in your galaxy, from your own two eyes.

Image: Some rights reserved by Sweetie187

Originally Posted on DailyHap.com