Dharmette
Spaciousness (Part 1)

by Gil Fronsdal

It might be helpful to consider that some of the things that Buddhism considers quite valuable are very different from what our society generally thinks as valuable. And perhaps some of the most important things that Buddhism emphasises that are extremely valuable in Buddhist practice and maybe for a really happy life — turns out to not be things. Turns out not to be anything that can be called a thing,  and could have more to do with absence, than with the presence of something, and absence is something that you can't sell.

A lot of absence usually means sometimes, you know, like how people pay a lot of money for a big house that has a lot of space there.  So, you can do something like that. But, you know, you don't go sell units of absence. And so, the absence that's important has got to do with absence in the mind. And so for always focusing on things, ideas, experiences, feelings — these are all things that can qualify as things. But you know, maybe what's most important is the absence and that the absence takes a different number of different qualities or characteristics. And maybe it's different people or it's different times that will pull out these different kinds of characteristics of absence. And one of them is spaciousness, to give space to our experiences, to give space to our thoughts. And rather than being in conflict with anything, what happens if you simply give space for it to be there?

So instead of, for example, if you have terrible thoughts: “Oh, no, I'm, what a terrible person I am.” Let's make space for those thoughts, lots of space. Maybe the more difficult the thoughts are, the more space they need. So, there's no conflict in what you've seen and if held in a whole different way. And if there's enough space around those difficult thoughts, they're going to lose some of their power — we're probably not going to believe them as strongly and when we don’t identify with them as strongly, we're not going to hold on to them, or be pushed around by them. There's much more chance for them to have wisdom about them. As you know, to create space around the emotions and space around the situations that we are in, and even into personal situations that are difficult, otherwise, we can get pulled and get entangled in all the difficulty in the conversations and what goes on.

Thus, just kind of in a metaphorical way — step back and make space for anything at all. I mean, I have done this so many times, and the magic of what happens is that the whole thing kind of changes.

Sometimes, if one person kind of relaxes and opens up, with “It's okay. I'm going to have space for this”; but it's a very different language and say you're going to accept something because acceptance is a thing. So then, you're back in the world of things. But just make big emptiness around the absence around it, just make space and then see how things unfold with more space.

Another thing that I associate absence with is stillness. Allow there to be a stillness at the heart in a loving, soft, secure way. Let the heartbeat still work, find the stillness that's within — the stillness that is not reaching for things, pulling away from things, recoiling from things, resisting things, reaching out for things — that place that is still, inside the still-point. And when I hear the expression “still-point”, I think of the centre, like a centre of a wheel and in a certain kind of way, the centre kind of stills the wheel while the rim is spinning around that. You know for a wheel, while there's an actual whole, you know, that there is an absence, right? What happens is absence.

Then, you know, if you take the wheel off its axle and just kind of roll it down the street and there's the there's the hole in the middle. Is that spinning? Is that absence — that space there — is that spinning, or just the wheel is spinning? Or like looking at the eye of a hurricane — which is supposed to be quite still; for those who have seen the eye of a  hurricane, they say it's still.

So can you find the place? The eye of your hurricane — inside the place of stillness.

And the other word that is associated with this absence? "Silence". Have a silent mind? I  think it was John Cage, or I Mozart when asked, “What's the most important most important part of your music?”. And if I have it right, the answer was, “The silence”. You know, we focus on the notes on the page but not the silence on the score. It is actually the silence that highlights the music or the notes and all that. It's possible to have silence and noise, silence and sound together.

Sometimes, it is the presence of silence that makes the noise and the sound that stand out on highlight. So, the same is true about the silence in the mind and silence in the heart, there can be a stillness, a spaciousness of silence. While there is contraction or agitation, there's active movement. While there is noise, or while there are thoughts, it doesn't have to be either because these two can be together. Its kind of like the absence can be what holds everything. You can't have a life without things too.