Space Inside, Space Outside: the Non-Locality of Mind
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MINDFULNESS IN PRACTICE
Space Inside, Space Outside: the Non-Locality of Mind Ajahn Amaro 1 Accepted: 14 October 2020 # Amaravati Publications 2020
At the beginning of the day, in the cool of the early morning, as light and color are beginning to come back into the world, bring attention to the quality of inner space, the space in this room and the space in the world around us. Developing that attention, we notice the space that’s always here, the space around things, the space within things. This helps us to recollect, to awaken to the inner space, the space of our minds which receives and contains, which encompasses all thoughts, feelings, perceptions, moods. Bring attention to the inner sound. The sound of silence directly supports the attending, the awakening to the quality of inner space. Awakening to the sound of silence helps remind us that the quality of the heart’s awareness is infinitely accommodating. It has room for everything. Allow the heart to rest in that quality of open awareness, spacious awareness, receiving the experience of sound, sensations in the body, feelings of warmth or coolness, light or dark. Allow the heart to be that receptive, spacious, accommodating awareness, receiving all things without bias, without partiality. The heart is an infinite open space which accommodates all things, rejects nothing, allows everything in and holds on to nothing. Space does not hold the objects in it. In the same way, the space of our minds receives all things, lets go of all things. Sound arises and passes, our moods arise and pass, a feeling arises and passes—there is nowhere for them to land, nothing for them to stick to. Let the moods and feelings be known as they take shape and do their thing, and then as they dissolve, leaving no remainder. We talk about letting go, we use that kind of language, but notice how it also implies that there has been a holding on, a “me” who has been doing some holding. But more truly, in a more real and complete way, it is not so much a matter of Excerpted from The Breakthrough by Ajahn Amaro, Amaravati Publications, 2016 * Ajahn Amaro [email protected] 1
Amaravati Buddhist Monastery, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire HP1 3BZ, UK
letting go but of training the heart not to grasp, not to identify, not to create that illusion of ownership in the first place. A sound arises and passes with no remainder. A word is spoken—we hear it, it arrives, it is known, it is gone. There is silence before the word and silence after it. There does not need to be any kind of remainder. We do not need to let go of a sound. A sound comes and goes on its own. We know we cannot own it, hold it or keep it. So rather than letting go, recognize the truth— nothing is ever really owned or possessed by an “I” or a “me”. The practice is sustaining that awareness of the inexorable, incessant flow—the change, the modulation of perceptions, patterns of consciousness, patterns of nature, arising, blossoming, dissolving, following their own laws. A star a cloud or a sunset cannot be possessed, but
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