The physicist David Bohm said that matter was condensed light. Frozen light.
In Sanskrit the word for space is Akasha.
Akasha also means ‘sky’ and ‘ether’. In Hindu philosophy it is one of the elements. It’s positive, not negative.
When we think of space however, we’re likely to see it in abstract, Newtonian terms. We’ll think of space, as we think of time, as a kind of container that we live within, rather than something that lives within us. And we’ll think of it in terms of absence, vacuity. A negative.
Zazen is a way to recover an embodied, felt sense of space. And that’s important, because if we don’t have that, we’re liable to construe meditation and Buddhism in purely psychological terms. While we tend not to talk of space much, a word that we talk about ad nauseam, awareness, is very often expressed in spatial terms: the space of awareness. But this is often collapsed into something psychological or internal.
But because when we’re meditating we’re not crumpled around the sense of self, an embodied sense of spaciousness becomes eminently achievable. Which has a number of implications. Firstly, the boundary between body and world becomes much more fluid. Secondly, the connection between space and breath – breath as activated space; breath as energetic space – repatriates space from its false mental home. And thus we can see that underlying our mental chatter, our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations is something very very subtle. It feels tremulous, a sort of vibratory aliveness. Like condensed light.