MINDING CLOSELY:
The Four Applications of Mindfulness
by B. Alan Wallace
more...Dharma Quote of the Week
On Practice Space
I encourage you to conduct your own research on the results of practicing in various environments. Tibetan yogis are especially attracted to places with an enormous amount of open space and distant vistas. I have greatly enjoyed meditating in the high desert of the eastern Sierra Nevada range, where the views extend to peaks sixty miles away. The ability to direct the attention to such distant points gives a very expansive feeling to the intervening space.In such a spacious environment, allow your awareness to come out, with your eyes open and your gaze resting vacantly in the space in front of you. The experience in a vast space is very different from that in a tiny room. Gazing up at a clear night sky studded with stars is a wonderful way to experience the sheer enormity of space.
It is important to distinguish between the contents of a space and the space itself. Colors and shapes constitute the contents of visual space. These are aspects or representations of ordinary phenomena in the visual field. Attending to the space of the mind means attending to that space from which all such contents emerge, in which they are present, and into which they dissolve; it is the space that lingers in between discrete events. (p.220)
--from Minding Closely: The Four Applications of Mindfulness by B. Alan Wallace, published by Snow Lion Publications
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1 comment:
Often, I will meditate during my commute on the L train in Chicago. There's something about being packed into a train car with a bunch of strangers, all standing/sitting still while the scenery outside flies past. It's alternately calming and anxiety inducing. Then when we arrive downtown, all the skyscrapers and noise and people walking in every direction, the buzzing energy of a big city. Everything is moving too fast to fully process. I start to think about the history of how all of this came to be, and all the interconnected lives and processes, simultaneously chaotic and coordinated. There's a moment when the train crosses the river and I start thinking about how this enormous city is connected to the land it's built on and Lake Michigan and the rest of the world. I notice how tiny my sphere of awareness is, how much that is happening all the time that I'm completely oblivious to. Then I get off the train and go to work. As a meditation experience, it's worlds apart from sitting on a cushion in a quiet room.
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