Adventures of Space
This last winter and spring, there were several months where everything was experienced very clearly as space. It is not a new experience for me, but this time the "volume" of it was turned high up. This body and everything else was clearly just space. At the same time, there was a sense of all dials going to zero, of being held by complete neutrality. And there was also a sense of profound fatigue, of inactivity (maybe inviting me to see something I typically don't want to see).
Now, the space is still the same - everything as space. Space is still in the foreground, yet a little more subdued. And the energy and engagement is coming back, yet now within a context of neutrality.
For instance, when I bring attention to the experience of this body, it is space and even the few fragments of sensations arising and fading away are themselves space. Sensations come and go, here and there in space, but they in no way make up a "body". They just arise within and as space, as everything else.
I should also mention that during this period, things got dredged up for me - some deep and stressful beliefs and their corresponding emotions including despair. The intensity got to the point where resistance had little or no chance of working. There was little choice but to surrender to and just allow the experiences. This resistance and surrender happened over and over, and I saw the pattern of resistance=suffering and being with=the experience itself transforming, including finding a quiet joy in the midst of it.
I also see that the word "space" is a rough aproximation. More accurately, it is emptiness, void, nonexistence arising as existence. And then there is a story on top of it making it appear as space and extension, just as there is a story of it as time. And neither of those are really there.
At the time, and now looking back at it, it seems that this was part of the process catalyzed by the diksha.
Labels: space