‘Feel of Space’ and music as space

Some thoughts on the ‘Feel of Space’ practice - 

The opening of ‘thought as space’ requires openness of awareness, where preoccupations, plans, worries (i.e. emotionality) do not colour one’s engagement. Whenever I am caught up in the content of thought, it becomes impossible to perceive the spaciousness within thoughts. Only when the content is not all-dominating can my awareness move into this other place, one where spaciousness within thought can occur. When I am in a state of emotional attachment to thought content, it feels like the tail is wagging the dog – the thought controls me, rather than the other way around. Thought processes can be a good servant (enabling us to function effectively in a material world) but they seem to be a very bad master. Stepping away from the feelings caught up in thought to a more detached observation, as described in the commentary on ‘Feel of Space’, seems to help me facilitate this “new approach” (as described in KTS p.208). 

When I attend to space as an entity, rather than merely as background, I really can perceive each object presented by that space as a miracle, a ‘treasure’. Similarly, sound is most magical when it is seen as arising out of silence. Last week, I attended a concert which included some modern classical music. It struck me that within music, particularly with music from modern composers, it is often the space between the notes played, the silence, the ‘pregnant pause’, which creates the music. Such music seems to be appearance ‘silhouetted’ against the space (the silence) from which it originates. 

It also struck me during that concert that, because modern composers often use ‘dissonance’, sounds not usually expected by the ear of a classical concert-goer, some people in the  audience dismissed the intrinsic ‘musicality’ of such compositions. In doing so, they are operating on the basis of filtering ‘concepts’ (TSK p.14) - their presupposition of how music should sound. In applying such concepts exclusively, they shut out the potential for a positive response to the searing beauty that was offered by some of the notes (and some of the pauses) being presented by the performance. 

I think music can indeed be seen as ‘space in action’. 

Gaynor