Adventures in Space

Today I feel I am wrestling with reality /the angel/ every second. Every second I see some way I'd like to edit what is, and a second later wonder what exactly reality wants, and find that I have space for it to be as it is and curiosity about where it is going, on its own, without being checked by my neurosis and hangups.

Yesterday was a day for me to learn about humility, humility in the face of reality, to start to see all the automatic screening devices with which I keep reality /and myself/ at bay. Raw reality, what does it want?

I was thinking about Jesus and his suffering. He had to find space in himself for all he endured. He became a master of space. And Padmasambhava, burned at the stake 3 times, must have gotten to know fire very well.

And me, I notice that I run from myself every minute, unable to control all that I feel I should be able to change in myself and in the world, unable to live up to my standards. There's so many Atlases like me paralyzed in some degree by the weight of our grandiosity, always running, running away from the reality of ourselves and our helplessness. It makes you hornery.

Internalizing Space

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Healing with Form, Energy and Light, page 128:

Space is the ground of everything, the fundamental reality. We generally think of earth as representing groundedness, and it does as long as we believe ourselves to be one thing separate from everything else. In duality, earth is the ground, space is the absence of ground. But in Dzogchen, space is the ground. The practitioner merged with space is more grounded than earth because he or she is the space in which earth exists; is more comfortable than water because space has no obstructions; is more flexible than air because air can go no place that space is not already; is more creative than fire because space gives rise to fire. Space is what we truly are.

one small thing

The statue of Prajnaparamita has a strong symmetry which draws one's mind to the center, her hands are posed in the dharma wheel mudra and her face appears in such absorption that I wonder where here mind has gone. The mudra draws my mind to the central point, where the thumb and index finger appear to hold something incredibly small and precious. What is that tiny thing?

In my meditation last night I tried to hold this thing. It appeared to me as a tiny spinning bead filled with light, shimmering a blue light. A pearl, perhaps, embedded with endless dakini script. It hangs there spinning the past to the future to the present and around again, like the Gaykil hangs inside the Dharmacackra, a tiny seed of spontaneous arising the emanates dharma, heart work, bodhichitta. Is it the atom and its components, the nucleus, ever reconfiguring and creating matrices of life? Is it the nuclear burst that lies within?