Inner Spaciousness
It is our experience of essential space that puts our petty attachments and the self-imposed limitations into perspective, like the vastness of Outer Space reminds us that Earth is but a speck of dust in a universe of billions of galaxies. At phase FIVE the old boundaries of the way we have thought about, and interacted with, the world continue to dissolve or fall away. It is in space within which our mental activity of generating images, sounds, words and sensations occurs. Thoughts manifest into space and dissipate back into space. A narrow mind has a very limited perspective on life and is confined by mental frameworks that we can become attached to and identified with. A spacious mind is open to seeing how things really are. Space holds the awareness in which thoughts and perception come and go, and frees us from the thoughts and perceptions we have become identified with.
Meditation
It is common in meditation practice for thoughts and emotions to consume our attention. By trying to avoid or push away the thought they tend to only consume our attention more. When we cease to struggle with or indulge them they tend to dissolve back into the spaciousness of mind. Sogyal Rinpoche guides us.
“Rather than suppressing emotions or indulging in them, here it is important to view them, and your thoughts, and whatever arises with an acceptance and generosity that are as open and spacious as possible. Tibetan masters say that this wise generosity has the flavor of boundless space, so warm and cozy that you feel enveloped and protected by it, as it by a blanket of sunlight.”[i]
Space is empty of meaning or concepts, but is full of infinite potential. Out of space everything all objects of our perception arise, then play around before dissolving back into it. It is our concepts that organize the essential spacious wholeness of the universe into form or matter. As Einstein said, ‘There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.”
When lost in our concepts, we are not directly experiencing the nature of things. We have separated ourselves from experience, and are thinking about it in order to understand what is happening so that we can better learn how to survive. Thinking about life is essentially a defense mechanism against the conditions that could cause us pain and ultimately death. Scientific understanding of the world has enabled technologies to be created that have generally enabled us to live longer and safer lives.
Nothing wrong with this. However while we are engaged in this process we are identified with matter rather than the field (space). We are identified with relative truth about various particulars rather than the wholeness of our being. Scientific thinking has tended to see nature and the universe as something separate from us. We have become preoccupied doing things for survival of the world rather than experiencing being with the wholeness of creation. Many of us, even with all the affluence we have, spend a vast majority of our time struggling, or recovering from the struggle, to survive. We allow little space in our lives to just be.
A spacious mind is an open mind into which new ideas and understandings can be formed. Space allows us to see more clearly the patterns of evolution over time. As astronomers gaze into the vastness of space they are able to see events that happened seconds ago in our own solar system right back to events that may have occurred shortly after the Big Bang in distant parts of the universe. Taking the space to stand outside time enables us to better understand the patterns of the universe, the world we live in, as well as, our individual lives. By taking space from the activity of our lives we can reflect upon the outcome of the decisions we have made and why we made them.
Within essential space we can transcend time and experience the eternal now.
In meditation we take space from doing what we need to survive or escaping into entertainment and open ourselves to the experience of being alive. By embracing our experience of space, we begin to realize we are the unified field within which the activities of our minds give rise to the perception of matter. And what we think matters. We are wholeness and therefore there is nothing we need to do, we can just be. We also begin to realize that the sense of struggling with or against life is our doing.
Emptiness
Emptiness is not a vacuum; it is the unified field, unconditioned undefined. My experience of this is best described as infinite loving-light beyond time and space at one with the universe. Emptiness is another name for essential space. In order to perceive the empty spaciousness of the objects of our attention we must allow ourselves space.
Seng-ts’an, the third Zen Patriarch, describes the space nature of mind.
On Trust in the Mind
The way is round, a vast emptiness
Nothing lacking, nothing left over.
Only because you choose and reject
Does it cease to be so?
The viewer disappears along with the scene,
The scene follows the viewer into oblivion,
For scene becomes scene only through the viewer,
Viewer becomes viewer because of the scene.
If you want to understand both,
See them as from the first single Emptiness,
A single Emptiness in which they are both identical,
Embracing all the ten thousand forms alike. [ii]
In meditation we can become aware of the emptiness, or the space into which our perceptions emerge. If thoughts are like clouds, space is the sky in which the clouds form and where they dissipate. As we identify more with the sky of our mind we are better able to observe thoughts without getting cloudy and being carried off by them. We only experience our thoughts or other objects of our attention as separate entities, because of our experience of ourselves as solid discrete objects.
Trying too hard to get space from thoughts and feelings can lead to a detachment or dissociation from our experience; it can make everything seem like nothing. We can get stuck in witnessing reality rather than surrendering to the nothingness that accepts everything as it is. Let spaciousness be effortless.
As we open to Spaciousness we are able to perceive the emptiness of the objects of our attention and our objective sense of self and other fades back into the essential wholeness of Being. It is only in our subconscious habit of perceiving ourselves as separate that we feel we are lacking in any way. As we embrace our Spaciousness there can be no lack, because we are at one with all things and what is there not to accept.
[i] Rinpoche, Sogyal, (1992) The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco (p. 61)
[ii] Seng’Ts’ An, translated by Watson, Burton, from Edited by Bercholz, Samuel and Kohn, Sherab Chodzin (1993) Entering the Stream, An Introduction to the Buddha and His Teachings. Boston: Shambhala (pp. 148–9)
This is an excerpt from Essential Wholeness, Integral Psychotherapy, Spiritual Awakening and the Enneagram
“Eric definitively captures the essence of integration in this treatise on psychotherapy and spirituality. This impressive work well demonstrates the many layers of understanding and experience that are necessary for psychotherapists attempting to navigate the challenges inherent in working wholistically. Eric expresses the deep appreciation of the human condition that can only come from many years of self-reflection, learning and practice as a therapist. Anyone fortunate enough to encounter Eric, either as a reader of this enthralling work or as his clients in psychotherapy will undoubtedly benefit in significant ways.” LIONEL DAVIS, PSYCHOLOGIST, EDUCATOR AND FOUNDER OF THE AUSTRALIAN COLLEGE OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
