Defocalization

Relaxing into the blur

Me! Portrait by Stella Andre

Right now, I am defocalized.

I first encountered this idea in Chapter Five of Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent where he draws a connection between the entwined serpents that many people encounter while on ayahuasca and the double helix coils of DNA, which hold the code for biological life. Narby describes how he reached this insight: First he had to learn to defocalize. He wrote about his process, seeking to integrate his mindblowing, hallucinatory experiences of ayahuasca with the Ashaninca with his rational, quotidian, somewhat dry, Swiss worldview:

My wife and I visited friends who introduced us during the evening to a book containing colorful  “three-dimensional images” made up of seemingly disordered dots. To see a coherent and “3-D” image emerge from the blur, one had to defocalize one’s gaze. “Let your eyes go,” our hostess told me, “as if you were looking through the book without seeing it. Relax into the blur and be patient.” After several attempts, and seemingly by magic, a remarkably deep stereogram sprang out of the page that I was holding in front of me. It showed a dolphin leaping in the waves. As soon as I focused normally on the page, the dolphin disappeared, along with the waves in front of it and behind it, and all I could see were muddled dots again.

This experience reminded me of [anthropologist Pierre] Bourdieu’s phrase “to objectify one’s objectifying relationship,” which is another way of saying “to become aware of one’s gaze.” That is precisely what one had to do in order to see the stereogram. This made me think that my dissatisfaction with the anthropological studies of shamanism was perhaps due to the necessarily focalized perspective of academic anthropologists, who failed to grasp shamanic phenomena in the same way that the normal gaze failed to see “three-dimensional images.” Was there perhaps a way of relaxing one’s gaze and seeing shamanism more clearly?

Generally, as a thinker and writer, I am a dedicated practitioner of defocalization. I was regularly defocalizing long before I knew it was a thing.

Sometimes, defocalizing leads to great results and creative breakthroughs. At other times, you have the vertiginous sense of being suspended in the void — between ideas, concepts, models, constructs, paradigms, or outcomes — that can be terrifying as it goes on, and on. It is a bit like finding yourself high up, suspended on a wobbly tightrope between two skyscrapers, with no idea how you got there or how to take the next step.

Part of my problem (and sometimes my value) is that I am an eternal beginner, curious dilettante, intellectual thrill seeker. I like to hop from lily pad to lily pad of subject matter. I never got a BA let alone a graduate degree or PhD, which would have forced me into one discipline or line of inquiry. Later in my career, I enthusiastically embraced Buckminster Fuller’s perspective, that our world suffers from too much specialization and what we lack are “comprehensive generalists,” systems thinkers, who can step far enough back to perceive the pattern as a whole.

There is still time to join our Future of Consciousness seminar.

Many examples reveal how a focalized gaze can miss key information that can be totally obvious from a defocalized viewpoint. One example is the infamous "Invisible Gorilla" experiment, conducted by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in 1999.