“Awakening Wholeness” is a book focused on young leadership driven by compassion for oneself, others, and the Earth. This book encourages youth leadership by emphasizing mindfulness, mental wellness, and holistic living. It promotes young leaders making a positive impact through emotional well-being and mindful living.
In the article let’s get into a small thought experiment? It’s called the ZiZo Experiment. ZiZo is not a new virus from some part of the world, but the name of an experiment in which we will first zoom in (that is the Zi part) and then zoom out (and that’s the Zo).
Let’s first zoom in.
Imagine you’re a tiny point of light — a light of awareness — resting on the skin of your body. You look around as a very, very small, infinitesimally tiny point of awareness. You see different bacteria and viruses roaming around in a forest of hair follicles. You burrow deeper through the skin and come to the layers of fat. You also come across blood vessels and capillaries. Going inside the capillaries, you come upon the red blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles, and the plasma. You continue zooming in, going deeper inside your body.
As you zoom in deeper, the scale also becomes progressively smaller. You now enter into a molecule, a protein molecule, in one of your muscles. You go in there to find atoms of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen. As you stream forward into an atom of hydrogen, you find that in the atom there is a nucleus and an electron shell. Nuclear Physics tells us that if the electron shell of an atom is the size of a house, then the nucleus of that atom, made up of protons and neutrons, will be the size of a pinhead. This means that every atom is 99.99999% empty space!
And these atoms of empty space are making up the molecules, which, in turn, are making up your muscles and your organs, including the brain (!) and your whole body. So, when you zoom in (Zi) to the deepest core of your body, what you find is a lot of empty space — completely empty. You might wonder that if this body I call “me” is all made up of empty space, what exactly is the place that I can say is me? Stay with this question until we reach the other end of our journey.
Now, let’s take the same voyage in the other direction —
zooming out (Zo). We zoom out from our body to our neighbourhood, then to our city and our state. From our state, the view expands to include our whole nation, then on to our planet Earth. As we keep zooming out and moving outward into space, we begin to see that our Earth, which seems so large from one perspective, suddenly becomes smaller and smaller. When you’re looking at the Earth from the perspective of the Milky Way, it has dwindled to a tiny, almost invisible speck.
As you zoom out even more, past the different galaxies and different clusters of stars, going thousands and millions of light years away, the Earth has vanished into the vast emptiness of space.
So what thoughts and feelings does the ZiZo exercise leave us with?
When we zoom in, we find that we are finally left with emptiness at the end. And again, if you zoom out, the Earth becomes a tiny, insignificant speck — almost nothing in the vast expanse of the universe. In this whole spectrum of nothing to everything, where exactly are we as human beings?
The answer is not easy to find. It is all mysterious. At one level, we are nothing, while at another, we are the awareness that can hold in its limitless sweep, the trillions of stars and galaxies that abound in the whole universe.
