When people talk about their experience when they start zazen, there’s a real commonality: a sense of being subject to a cascade of thoughts, feelings, internal dialogue and so on, most of which is repetitive and banal. And when people persist with zazen – most people don’t – they often report a lessening of this cascade and an increasing sense of spaciousness.
It’s as if, instead of experience just being a jam packed cascade of nonsense, there’s gaps that appear when the mind appears still. And people will almost always talk about that in spatial terms, the “ vast field of awareness” in the poetic image of Hongzhi.
The difficulty with thinking of spaciousness primarily in those terms is that it becomes easy for zazen practice to remain within a self/world dualism. So in another words, I can conceive of this awareness, this field of awareness as being a psychological attribute of me. And even although I may sometimes experience this field of awareness as including everything, even though I may experience this field of awareness as not discerning between inside and outside, of it all just being this one spacious awareness, the default position of the culture that we’re in is likely to collapse an experiential sense of spaciousness into some kind of personal attribute which is internal to me.
And that’s an issue with meditation generally. That, as it were, it changes the person. But the world stays much of the same. And a way around that and a way of escaping from the individualistic picture that we often have of meditation in the West is to pay attention to two other sorts of spaciousness: the spaciousness of the body and the spaciousness of the breath which are very interlinked.
And we experience this spaciousness of the body when we’re sitting in the correct position, our spine is energised, our posture is balanced. And we gradually experience a kind of body spaciousness, which is different from the mind spaciousness that we might be more familiar with. And it’s not that our body ceases to exist but it ceases to exist as an object within consciousness. So it’s there and it’s not there. And very often we will experience our body not in conceptual, fleshy or organ terms, but in terms of charged space.
So we experience it here, this body, this body,this body as a kind of charged spaciousness. And that’s our phenomenological experience unpolluted by our ideas of what our body actually is, made up of body parts, just paying attention to what we’re actually experiencing. And if we do that it seems to me there’s a distinct number of advantages.
Firstly, we can’t think of that body sense of spaciousness as being a psychological attribute. And it’s locational. So we’re experiencing it in this body, in this position. As it were, gradually percolating out into the surrounding space. So spaciousness is actualised but in a different way. And in a way which we cannot so easily falsely attribute to being a psychological quality. So we’re in a concrete sense breaking down that sense of separation which is the foundation for the duality which causes us to suffer.
And the third sort of spaciousness that we should pay attention to is the spaciousness of the breath.
When we’re sitting in the correct posture, our breathing is naturally in our pelvis, we’re naturally pushing down gently on the perineum on an in-breath and there’s an elevation upwards to the crown and again, this is a slightly different sense of spaciousness. So as it were, the breath outside and the breath inside, are not two separate things. And the breath inside the emptiness as it were, the breath is right at the center of our being, it’s like our posture is garments being gently blown by a fluctuating wind. And again that inverts an idea of inside and outside, where outside is space, inside is flesh in favor of something where right inside at our centre is our spacious breath, which in our experience goes everywhere throughout our body is not restricted to what we physically imagine it to be, located in our lungs alone. And so that again breaks down this division between this person and the world.
These three kinds of spaciousness are very important for us to keep in mind if we wish our meditation to be something other than mere self-improvement which leaves the conceptual world intact.