Stretching or expanding space — Reflect on this question experientially and experimentally, not in order to solve it, but as a way of engaging the question of how space ‘operates’.
Experientially, I find this a warm and inviting practice, it seems to have a restorative quality. When busy or under pressure to get something done I often feel squeezed or compressed, as though there’s not enough time, space, or opportunities. When I calm myself, sitting quietly, for instance, time seems to ‘space-out’; my tendency toward a myopic focus loosens and expands. That ‘expansion‘ of focus has a spacious quality. Noticing space becomes enjoyable, even while thoughts drift in and out of focus, data from the senses float in and out too as I become aware of feeling tones, like flowing liquid currents that seem to temper the ‘aware‘ space. Space can then feel like a warm glow of arisings.
Experimentally, when I think about or remember space, I attempt to structure it, sometimes as a dark blank, like a place-holder to be filled in later, like a not yet fleshed-out concept or memory, not yet logically constructed for telling, a kind of a blank ‘thing’ in waiting… something like the way the blank page is to my attempt to describe my experience of space. It comes after the immediacy of the experience itself.
Expand the whole ‘situation’ in which you find yourself.
I am sitting quietly on the back porch in an overstuffed easy chair, looking out on a rolling field under a sunny sky. I can imagine expanding beyond my location, within this neighborhood, beyond this city, in this state, beyond this continent, on this planet, which is the third of eight that revolves around our sun. That sun and its solar system spirals within the Sagittarius Arm, approximately 25,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, a galaxy speeding ever outward in expanding space and time.
As I ponder this expansion into unknown space, I seem to be peering into the edge of the future, where my location and identity seems to relinquish itself to an unexplained openness. Experientially, I find the same warm and inviting glow of awareness.
Also, in terms of the quality of this more fundamental space, not space-holder or conceptual space, but ‘aware‘ space, the warm-glow feel seems to pervade.
Space Eyes — When we try to look at space, we see only the absence of substance; we ‘draw a blank’. Yet this unknowing is itself something we can know, through the manifold mysteries of experience. This well-known ‘unknowness’ confirms that space is available and accessible in the infinity of manifestations it carries, in the emerging echoes of the field communiqué. Can you evoke and activate this mystery? Can you see with space eyes?
Connecting the dots of a particular concern (my choices in a situation for instances, likes and dislikes), reveal unseen patterns pointing to unseen relationships between things (memories of past experiences and expectations of future ones), brings me face to face with my own knowing space that allows for the dynamic unfolding of events.
David
