In a separate session today, I started out with the warm up exercise (attending to the ongoing transitioning of experience), and then continued to explore DTS Ex 7, this time trying to be aware of space at several different levels of magnitude. In the warm up, which I did while I was walking, it was easy at first to nice the many changes; the dry fall leaves were chattering all around me, an ongoing, restless rubbing and murmuring, and there were all sorts of other changes going on, in the color of the light, the movements of people around me, the feelings and images arising and passing within me, etc. But doing this, I noticed also the mind’s tendency to reify, because as I focused on the transitioning, the transitioning itself became a kind of permanent or stable “object” for me. Noticing this, I felt it also then open as I saw transitioning getting “set up” as a new “thing.”
After walking for awhile, I switched my attention to space, attempting to experience several different magnitudes of space at once. Shortly after beginning, I rounded a corner and the sun was right in my eyes, and brilliant rays were filling up much of my field of vision, obscuring the trees and houses around me. I felt “crowded” by the light, as if space around me had shrunken to that small bit that was not overwhelmed by the light rays. And then a tree blocked the sun, and the space opened up around me to the full size of the neighborhood park through which I was walking. This experienced challenged the sense of the “reality” of space as distance for me, since space had just a moment ago felt so crowded and shrunken by something as insubstantial as light. Later I tried seeing my movement from micro, meso, and macro perspectives — from the point of view of the atoms within me, from the ordinary point of view of my body moving down the street, and from a high satellite view. From the micro view, the space I was traversing was vast, galactic; from the macro perspective, I realized I would almost appear to be standing still. These experiences too showed up space-as-distance as relative, as constructed or emergent in some sense. I recalled the TSK term, allowing, and touched space as the non-dimensioned allowingness of these overlapping, creative juxtapositions.