DE Focus

Defocus

The slick new digital camera was very expensive. It had multiple features that made the process of taking a photograph very simple,reducing it to a digitised format and yet delivered stunning images even to a greenhorn totally unfamiliar with the science  of photography. One of its many features included a feature called Autozoom. It adjusted the focus automatically when the camera was pointed to any object by an automatic motorised technology. The instant ability to zoom in or zoom out depending on the distance of the object of interest. This electronic, artifical intelligence of automatically determining the lens curvature,aperture, shutter speed, was a breakthrough based on biomimtics. It simulated the autofocus of the biological eye. This faculty of auto focusing is  applicable to the human mind and intelligence too.
Ever so often we are faced with a problem that fills the emotional screen completely. It occupies our mind so completely almost as if we have zoomed in with our emotional lens to the point of nothing else being visible. Such situations lead to distress, despondency,extreme frustration and utter despair. It is at such moments that one is prone to take extreme steps like committing suicide, or resorting to alcohol or drugs. These are very feeble  attempts to defocus the mind whilst suicide is aimed at ending the very existence of the self along with the problem. In such very vulnerable moments it becomes extremely crucial to zoom out and widen the frame of perception. When a situation, person, or circumstance looms large the virtual increase in the size occurs because of zooming in with our emotional lens. Once that happens, the cognitive apparatus is locked on to the problem and becomes oblivious of anything else, which more often than not includes the solution. There might just be a Law of diminishing proximity in the economics of solving any problem. This law could be scientifically expressed as "The possibility  of solving a problem is lesser with increasing  proximity to the problem. " As one zooms out, one realises hat the problem is not really as big as it appeared initially. As the zooming out process continues, pathways that go around the problem start emerging where earlier all the pathways appeared to lead only into the problem. Zooming in left one only with a head on confrontational  approach whilst zoomng out revealed lesser invasive, non confrontational alternatives. If the zooming out continues further, it generates a larger, more circumspect view in which the problem is reduced to being just one more object in a big wide world. As one zooms out further, one realises the insignificance of not just the objective world but also its transitory nature. One becomes aware of how fast it is changing. The impermanence of the problem merges with the impermanence of the cognised world. What seems permanent thereafter is only the subject who perceives. When the zooming out reaches a supra -threshold level the perceiver realises that the perceived and the perceiver are both transient and virtual and eternity lies only in perception and the consciousness wherein this play unfolds.

Deepak M. Ranade