We’ve recently been exploring Space, and how we can experience it without making it disappear into becoming a thing, and thus losing it’s ‘open Spaceness’? How can we not take the experience of open space and enclose it, objectify or conceptualize it into a pre-measured idea of it…controlled by a self that tends to gather and particularize? It’s what we seem to do endlessly. In one post Eliana, Michael and I discussed ‘Opening the Focal Setting’, here:
https://cciforum.dreamhosters.com/?p=6731
How do we include the self in a more open way of looking that seems to annihilate itself, or better, that doesn’t annihilate the very sense-of-space within which it arises?
I used an example, rather than naming the space we wish to become in-touch, we can…
‘feel’ it’s allowingness, feel the open-endedness, that sense of awareness without object, a sense of non-contracted and de-centered presence out of which the seed of experience unfolds.
It’s something like when a distinctive taste explodes in your mouth, can you sense the space of that sense field expanding with the taste, or only the taste itself? Can you also sense the process going on of making meaning out of the taste? Is the process layers of an organizing tendency, and is it happening in expanding space?
I remember a few years back my wife gave me gourmet jellybeans…So I noticed chewing one, focusing and identifying the flavor as I turned it over on my tongue enjoying the sweet, specific taste, but before I finished it I caught myself picking up another one to pop into my mouth. I hadn’t even allowed the fullness of the first jellybean experience to arise and reveal before something in me was ready to discard the experience and take up a new one. The jellybeans of my life, my moments were being eaten up too fast by a tendency in me to move on. I described more about that experience here:
https://cciforum.dreamhosters.com/?p=581
To counter that tendency I worked with different exercises including ‘The Unnameable’, more fully described here:
https://cciforum.dreamhosters.com/?p=2448
“The Unnameable – As you go about your day, ask yourself what is happening in your immediate experience that you can’t give a name to. Don’t focus on the things you see and hear, or the memories and plans your mind drifts off to, or even the emotions and reactions that shape how you feel. Look for something more fundamental. You might call it the ‘quality’ of your experience, like the quality of a work of art that makes you love it.â€
I said: The openness I’m referring to, if I can even call it that, seems to resist a narrow thing-focus. It’s an occasional all-encompassing feeling/quality that whatever I’m doing, (watching TV, reading, planning, whatever I’m engaged in), I can sometimes be aware of this greater awareness. It is as though my normal thinking activities and structuring processes are occurring on a little surface place within this ‘Unnameable‘ feeling/quality, a wellhead of activity over a vast expanse of my own awareness — the secret pleasure of my whole being.
I also have worked with this exercise, perhaps my favorite for the feel and ‘in-touchness’ with the Zero-point, the non-occupancy of space, the formless openness of that foundational feeling…
TSK Exercise 10, ‘Space Arising’ …a richness that is available to be explored: a quality or feeling linked to the quality inherent in being alive, or simply the quality of being. Within the continuum of stillness, cultivate a transparent quality, as though you were preparing the silence to receive light. As you continue with this practice, you will develop the ability to dwell within the silence in a way that allows for a light and clear awareness. It is like activating a silent witness, whose steady presence we might consider ‘nowness’.
Eventually this presence can become a ‘place’ that you can identify and enter with ease, even though it still has no specific identity or qualities. We might call it the womb of space. Some people may find it fruitful to spend long hours there, familiarizing themselves with the spacious silence it offers, deepening their contact.
As you come to know this foundational ‘place’, you can see how ordinary experience arises out of it. A sense of being becomes ‘being here’; from this arises ‘being here in time’. Presence becomes presence ‘of’ something, which is then established and felt to exist. Existence becomes ‘I am’, which is felt to be identical with the original sense of being.
Tarthang Tulku, ‘Dynamics of Time and Space’, p.281
For me, this cone of knowing, the feel of layers of meaning in the process of expanding… in what? In an expanding focal awareness, space awareness… is the movement of knowing… radiating outward…
