View from the Porch by David Filippone
DTS Ex. 9 – Generating Space
While sitting under the trees on a sunny afternoon, I focused on the intervening distance between me and the tree line at the end of a field. That space opened to the blue sky above, while peripheral vision provided opening to surrounding space. While holding this awareness of spaciousness, I noticed smaller spaces, such as gaps between pine branches, tree trunks, and leafless branches, the spaces of light and shadow playing off  a multiplicity of forms.
While aware of those openings I noticed the colorings of sound in the listening sense field; vehicles passing near and further away expanded that space. That space was accommodating, allowing bird songs, blustering winds, even an underlying ringing in my ear. To these spaces I added the tactile field and what was being felt; the chair beneath me, the cool air on my arms, my extremities, my breath, and all tactile awareness. I noticed how the visual spaces overlapped with the field of touch, and how that felt as an expanding of mental space.
Next, I looked to mental space and to thoughts. I had a thought, ‘I want more tea’. I glanced and reached for the glass to my right, lifted it and took a sip, tasting the sweetness and feeling the coldness, noting the opening space of those sensations. I looked into the thought ‘I want more tea‘. It was lightening fast. I asked how this thought was ‘dressed’, and how far could it be traced? It seemed to arise while I was looking in space for a thought to explore, but nothing was appearing, there was little defined, just the complex sense feelings of ‘I am,‘ and the spaciousness of overlapping sense fields. When the thought arose (perhaps out of a habit of filling space) it was as if I narrowed my focus on spaciousness, like a laps of attentiveness, a ‘coming-out‘ or a collapsing into a specific position and idea — the arising assertion of ‘I’ projecting ‘tea‘ measured out by the intensity of desire for it.
Subject, object, the desire and intent were all the ‘thought characters‘ in my stage play. If there was a residue of the thought, it was the memory of its content, but also the knowing of the process of its arising and dissolving; recognizing the content was based on positioning and asserting of the self, and both content and process were appearances of aware spaciousness. There was something about how noticing the space of my physical surroundings easily transitioned into that same allowing in the sense fields, and to the knowing of knowing space — they all seemed to partake of the same space, the same glowing or luminous knowingness.
David
P.S.
As I continued to examine thoughts in space, some were ‘dressed’ in or ‘charged’ with varying degrees of emotional energy. For instance, in a previous exercise a future thought of being an invalid was charged with the energy of anxiety or fear. A memory of the loss of a loved one was charged with sorrow that was physically connected to the gut. Â However, examined in spaciousness, looking into the feeling of these emotional dressings or connectors to thoughts led to an underlying spaciousness and flow of feeling that at different times felt simply open and clear, to happy, to even exquisite.Â
