Photo: ‘Pine needles Zone’ by pisauikan -Pixabay
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In class today based on the book, ‘Dimensions of Mind’, we were working with Zones, and also practicing looking into them… Inquiring into zones involves understanding how we set them up as thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and so forth, as they arise in aware space… how we structure them with meaning and language, and how with our presuppositions we contextualize them. We practice how to stay in the center of the zone to observe what happens… staying in the center is staying present with the ‘feel’ of how we tend to ‘materialize’ openness into a zone of significance. Rinpoche says:
“Appearance is just appearance. It’s bottomless and seedless. Whatever appears is a projection, or a reflection of a projection… Something begins. Something moves ‘to’ somewhere else, but that ‘to’ is not necessarily ‘there’, not necessarily anywhere at all. The subject becomes the object, and the object become the subject.†p. 117
I remember from awhile back one particular inquiry into a zone. So I’m sharing it here…
The sun is descending. Light is reflecting off pine needles out the window…there’s an ever so trifling breeze titillating needles…they shimmer in the setting sun. A stirring sight, palpating something in me, energy is shared…a ‘ZONE’ is established within this perception…between me and shimmering needles, culled from an indistinct background of browning field and blue-dome sky. Soft piano jazz filters in…an easy fluid ambience, the ripple widens as feeling fills space like slow-rising water…body can scarcely contain affection for the endearing moment…
There’s a radiant quality to the feeling of AFFECTION… and it’s carried along rippling out to new arising events, like awareness of light tipping edges, a breeze nudging needles… other risings are imbued with affection and deepening joy…
