Center for Creative Inquiry

Tranquility of Space

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Practicing the “deep tranquility of space” as a “walking around” exercise.

When I walked outside, I noticed it was quite windy; gusts of wind pushed on me and tossed my hair, and made the leaves around me dance with a loud whooshing. At first, this felt like an “impediment” to my practice, but then I became cognizant of the clear open sky, and the invisibility of the wind itself, and these things enabled me to drop into a sense of space that was clear and undisturbed by the wind or any of the other objects around me. At first, I was aware of space as a field “in” which the wind and tree branches moved, but this shifted as I “expanded” the sense of space through an intensification of its felt presence. Then space was a simple, bright, clear allowance of this teeming and jostling thickness of phenomena. The expansion brought this sense of space into my body and also into my thoughts, of inner spaces, so that I was aware of layers of form and being (thoughts, sensations, perceptions, and textures) which overlapped and seemingly interpenetrated without obstruction. As I intensified this awareness, precision emerged as the very rapid, complex lines and flows of this seething messiness of form upon and in form, upon and in form.