Imagine that there is an infinite love in the space around, between, behind and before all objects, all feelings, all sensations. How would it be if the secret to all we are, and all we can ever be is not in the stuff, but in the space between all things? How would it be if the only obstacle between ourselves and this infinite love was our own beliefs in limitation?
Imagine that awareness, or consciousness is not confined within the perimeters of the body and the five physical senses. Imagine that even the secret to our ability to feel, touch, perceive or be aware is found in the space between objects, not in the objects we perceive.
We can try it out. Focus on an object nearby and put the full consciousness there. Perhaps use your hand.
Now shift your focus to the space around the hand, letting your attention move into all that area around the hand where the hand is NOT. Can you sense how your perception of the hand comes to life? Can you sense this appendage, this dear, cherished, sacred human hand of yours comes to life?
We depend on the space between stuff. We depend on it as much and even more than the oxygen we breath. We depend on the empty spaces within out own body and mind – far more than we depend on any one cell or any one organ. Without the empty spaces we would implode. Without the empty spaces, being here would not be possible.
The good news is that each particle that makes up the cells which make up our physical body is over 99 percent emptiness. So this secret – this infinity – is not missing. It is just we that exclude it through a dogmatic addiction and investment in the reality of objects, rather than the deeper truth of the omnipresent, pre-existent emptiness between and before and after every object.
We believe in objects as the source of “objective” reality because from the perspective of the physical brain, they seem to be stable. We can grasp at them. Who can grasp at empty space?
Yet no object is stable. All is in constant transformation – including our bodies, brains, earth, water, wind and anything we could ever create. All is born and all will die in an ongoing circulation against the backdrop of the only stability there can ever be – the backdrop of this infinite, eternal empty space.
Our body is a limitation in time and space. Our minds are limitations in time and space. Even our perception is limited in time and space. Yet time and space could not exist without timelessness and boundlessness. These two parameters of all form, cannot be, or inter-be, let alone transform or heal, without the pre-existent eternity and infinity in which they appear. And eternity and infinity can not birth time and space without that one, prior even to perception, before consciousness, which allows the splitting into these two dimensions.
That one is intimate, all pervasive, alive, powerful and everywhere in the emptiness. It is just so close to home, we fail to allow it. That one is at the source of all we are, the source of the here and now, the source of being, separately and as one. The source of endless love.
Who or what can be afraid of the emptiness? Why would we retract our consciousness or fear this space which is never born and never dies? Why would we shy from it, in our outer and inner perception?
Seen from the perspective of an object – such as a separate personality that believes it must fulfil its agenda, that believes in consequence or good and evil, that believes it can somehow claim immortality even though it doesn’t even know for what – emptiness is a threat. It is a threat because the emptiness exposes the “person” as nothing other than a form in transformation. It exposes that the “personality” that wants, grasps, and rejects in a perennial separation from the whole is in a state of delusion.
Emptiness is the death bell of the person – the bell that chimes through every moment of awakening. So the person is afraid. The person is an object. We watch our persons in their life-time careers. We watch them strive and survive. We watch them grown and die, again and again. But we are not the person. We are not the object, but the subject – the one that watches through the heart of the emptiness.
Yet this person, believing in itself too much, has no idea of the blessings that rain down out of its own demise. In the agony of survival in separate form, it fights, cries out, and screams in pain. It regresses back to seek justification in the wounds of childhood, it runs forward to seek status in the thwarted ambition to become “somebody”. It contracts itself in a dark freeze of rejection of it’s own holy loneliness, a loneliness created by this very investment in absolute separation. It becomes blind to others, deaf to itself, and cruel.
All around this person, the love is waiting. The supreme friendliness of the universe, and all we are which is free of being anybody, is waiting to receive this contraction called “somebody” home into its infinite and eternal core – not as a malformed individual, but as the supreme individual – an inextricable part of the source of it all.
Loving awareness is everywhere in the emptiness: familiar, intimate, timeless and patient. All we have to learn to do is to allow it. Allow the empty space between all phenomena as being the one causal presence of all we are, and all we ever could be.
All we need is to softly let our personal awareness fall back into that greater awareness of awareness. To let ourselves expand beyond the limitations of thought and feeling into this boundless, inner and outer awareness of being aware. Here, in this infinite space, our small, transient struggles are tenderly held and unjudged: here, our body, minds, thoughts, sufferings and fears can find liberation and peace.
We are held in a refinement of care which needs no mental control. Through the allowance of our own infinite awareness, the smaller forms of us can rest in the heart of the greatest healer of all – the life that runs through the emptiness, through every molecule of this transient, sentient, physical body, and through every moment of this awesome service to creation which is the agreement to be here, now, for real.
