How do you appreciate space?

Photo: ‘Space Zero’ by Min An – Pexels
https://tinyurl.com/y87cnax5

PRACTICE… appreciate space, focus on breath, and breathe in space and breathe out space… Nourishing, healing, calming, breathe in the cosmos, now add everything that occupies space, the entire environment…all there is…

In my last posted practice I experienced ‘Space’ as an expansive moment. Space was NOT nothing, it was a nourishing, healing, and calming…a clearing, expansive, allowing vitality…

Described at this link: https://cciforum.dreamhosters.com/?p=7606

So, we were (practicing) inquiring into space to counter the usual way we engage it, as distance or separation between objects, or as a background for a narrowed focus on objects, and ideas, and stories and emotions about them. We habitually focus on the surface of ‘things’ and relate them to other things…it’s a ‘thing’ oriented perspective, where space as an experience, is largely ignored…and in doing so we miss an important quality of life…the freedom to be fully present.

The freedom to be fully present…What is THAT experience? For me it’s often seeing ‘how’ things are coming to my attention, not just the reasoning of cause and effect, (this happened because of that), but rather, FEELING the arising of whatever is happening. For instance a string of thoughts arise from somewhere, eventually dissipating and vanishing somewhere… or when writing this, what to say now is arising from, as Rinpoche says, “Beneath the surface interactions of entities situated in a presupposed field, prior to the pre-established knowings…”

Can you ‘feel’ the nothing from which things arise? I can intellectualize and identify that feel as ‘my’ sense of self, this is what I feel like, my total somesthetic sense, or I can feel but NOT identify with it. In that non-identification… flavors arise in the feel prior to the pre-established knowings of the tasting space… sound arises before naming the musical facets in the felt silence of the listening space… the visual of windblown emerald and jade colored leaves waving outside my window impacts my heart in the open allowing space of knowing prior to my descriptions of it, in the immediacy of inhabiting…presence is being the moment…time, space, and knowing all together…