Here’s a simple exercise that I find myself doing at odd moments, during those “spaces” between events, while “waiting” — for something to happen — for sleep to take me, to move to the head of the line, for an event to start, etc.
Rather than pay attention to people, or things, I focus on the spaces between and among them. Moving from room to room in my home, I observe the seemingly frozen lake of space in which material objects are held in suspension.
Sometimes I try this exercise at different scales, macro to micro.
Macro: rather than pay attention to earth as a planet, I notice the space in which she is held, seemingly suspended, in relation to other planets, each unique and apart and yet all together in the womb of space.
Zooming further out, to our solar system as a tiny cluster around a single star in the starry night sky; if I am quiet enough, if I can deeply listen, I seem to be attuning to the harmonics of (infinite? It seems so) space in which light beings sing like angels.
Sometimes, glimpses into the vastness make me dizzy, or give me a strong shock. My child self can’t help but ask: Why don’t they fall? What holds them there, or rather, here? If they fell, where would they go? Is there a bottom to the sky?
(Aaaaah! Too much! Too much! Please, I need to frame up my experience, carve boundaries, set limits, decide what I believe, attain certainty . . .)
Whoosh back down, and in . . . to Earth. Here, landed, feet on the ground inside this, “my body.” Feel my own, unique body upon Her. Feel the minerals and chemicals and other nutrients that make up my body as those that make up Her body. Feel this body as “my” tiny portion of Earth’s body, a living, breathing antenna for Her watery feelings . . .
Micro: Penetrate further and further in . . . to a single cell, notice the space within that cell holding atoms and molecules and electrons, like planets, or galaxies, suspended . . .
See that cell’s membrane as a circle. Take any circle, see the points within that frame. Rather than focus on the points — describing them, counting them, grouping them, analyzing them, or snapping them into a gestalt — notice, become aware of, attune to, the essentially mysterious space that holds them all in fine array.
Circles within circles. Larger and larger, smaller and smaller. Circles intersecting with circles, arcing bounded spaces within the void.
Focus in on the line forming the circumference of any particular circle. View this line with a microscope. Notice how it, too, is composed of points in space.
Aaaah! The boundary of any circle is porous, permeable. At every level, space holds points in space, and with greater magnification, it still does. No matter how “close” the points appear to one another in “real life,” they are evanescent, incandescent . . .
For the point itself — has no dimension, does not “take up” space! At the bottom of the within, there is nothing, no thing, just space, the plenum, an etheric ocean, the flux from which “things” arise and fall, form and unform, in endless, fathomless, spiraling mystery. Zero equals infinity. Both exist on either side of “any series of numbers.” Both indicate the plenum that holds any number of dots.
I do this exercise to let go of desire.
I do this exercise to jostle loose the seemingly dense, stuck, material structures that our collective minds have created and hold in place.
I do this exercise, of seeing spaces between and among points at any level, to disconnect the dots and open, wide, to the multiverse and her infinity of dimensions beyond and within the three-dimensional one in which we appear to be living.
Hey Ben! Remind me of our connection. When and where,…