Maintaining the view

When meditation teachers talk about "maintaining the view" what they mean is seeing things as they truly are - and that includes seeing ourselves as fundamentally enlightened beings even though we are not fully awake to that reality. Lama Surya Das talks about maintaining the view during difficult times in his book, Awakening the Buddha Within. Here's part of what he says:

For all of us, there are times when it becomes particularly difficult to maintain the view. We can get caught up in our own patterns and lose sight of reality. Sometimes life is hard. We have financial problems, family problems, personal problems... Maintaining one's perspective, one's overarching view of reality, under difficult conditions can be a challenge even for meditation masters.
...
The more we can train ourselves and learn how to maintain mindfulness and "hang in there" even for the briefest of moments, the more we mature and grow in breadth and depth. We don't need to hang out in ghostly cemeteries at night to find things that frighten us. We face such situations every day. Sometimes it is a particularly disturbing person whom we are afraid to touch or reach out to. Sometimes it's something as simple as not wanting to make an unpleasant phone call because we fear what we will hear. At other times it's facing the challenge of a genuine life-and-death problem

We train in maintaining the view in times of crisis so we learn not to shut our eyes and avoid reality or responsibility. It's too easy to rely on fears, denial and other defense mechanisms to shield us from life's painful moments. Maintaining the view helps us open our constricted minds and tender hearts, allowing the world in rather than walling it out.
...
Facing our fears and anxieties is a way of using painful emotions to work any and all situations. In this meditation training, we use passions, illness, crisis, and conflict to cultivate wisdom, compassion, understanding, and fearless courage. In this way we can actually purify our habitual, unsatisfying cravings and aversions (I like, I don't like; I want, I don't want). Thus we loosen the grip of our negative patterns... opening the way for a more open, accepting, and joyful love of life.

I think the point about not avoiding reality or responsibility is so important. Seeing how we have contributed to our own negative patterns and then deciding to make different choices is one way of both cultivating wisdom and taking responsibility. Of course, difficult situations often involve circumstances that are quite out of our control. But our response to such situations tend to follow conditioned patterns that are often negative or unskillful. These we can, indeed, change through a combination of aspiration and diligence.