Covering over space

I’ve been remembering my first visit to the Nyingma Institute in the mid-eighties, when Bob Pasternak had me do a TSK exercise (The Marriage of Sound and Breath) every day for a week.  The experience of listening to sounds without immediately labeling the sources of the sound remains for me a strong memory of the spaciousness that can open up when we refrain from identifying ourselves as being in a world of objects.  But it still seems a strange and paradoxical characteristic of our minds that by linking objects and ourselves together through thoughts, which recognize relationships and dependencies, we lose awareness of the very space that makes it all possible.  Positing distance and separation (which seem our main way of measuring out space) has the terrible side-effect of blinding us to the openness and freedom which space could provide for us if we had another way of relating? — Michael