Space
There is a quality of existence that doesn’t come, go, or stay. This quality has no shape, colour, or size. It manifests completely as the smallest things as much as the large. No location to this quality can be found.
Space is a good likeness to this quality. If you are sitting in a room, you might think that the space in the room is confined by the walls. Look more closely, and you may see that not only does the space in the room include the walls, it includes the objects in the room as well, and it includes you. Also, everything outside of the walls is included and there is no place for a line to be drawn, where this space quality stops, and something else starts. Space has no limit, your immediate environment has no limit.
Further still, space doesn’t just include and permeate you and things, it is you and things. Where then, can restrictions arise?
Just like you might think that the walls contain the space in the room, what you think about reality, is not what reality is. Restriction is created through this misusing of thought, and body and mind suffer as a result. This suffering is naturally the appearing of signposts, signposts pointing to where to look within yourself. In looking, the problem is immediately cut off at its root. Only when you look does this happen. Over time it may become clear that this looking has no beginning or end. Looking is seeing, and seeing cannot be manipulated by thought.
The space like nature of everything and the release of suffering, can only be experienced in surrendering the need for a point of view. Though this is not easy, it’s quite simple, letting of thought allows the true nature of everything to show, and this allows the vital rigour of nirvana to reclaim body and mind, even as it has never been anywhere else.
As my teacher once said to the community, many years ago, while we were sitting in the meditation hall, “Most of you are terrified of real freedom.”*
There is no condition that can impede space.
There are no buts in this generous, uncompromising, compassionate existence.
What are you doing with your mind?
* My apologies to Rev. Master Daishin Morgan, I suspect that he won’t appreciate being quoted like this. His words are relevant to this essay, as they were in that moment. The only purpose for giving the quote and it’s context, is for what it might say about the reader, not for what anyone might think it says about what they imagine ‘the community’ to be or to have been.
Willard Lee 28/10/2024