Space

Inner is outer.

Painting by Park Hang Ryul

The masters of meditation of the past say that we fail to recognize the true nature of mind because it is so simple that we fail to trust it.

So the true nature of mind is simply what we are right now, it is our uncontrived natural state. Since we are in such a habit of living our lives in contrived states, and states where we are always adding concepts onto things, it’s difficult for us to return to the way we naturally are.

— His Holiness the 17th Karmapa

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“ So you want to cry, not like a child, but like an exile who is reminded of his homeland. That’s what Leucon saw when he first beheld Pyrrhus: as if he were getting a glimpse of that other place we were meant to be, the shore from which we were deported before we were born.”

― Mark Merlis, “An Arrow’s Flight”

Creating space in the personal heart and mind is a religious act. It’s spiritual. It’s a process of paying kind attention to the life that flows through us in the form of feelings and thoughts. These energy flows are commonly treated with disrespect and fear. They are suppressed so we don’t have to know about them. The sickness of our civilization is that we are so focused on externals.

Not clearing internal space in ourselves means we have cluttered and confused inner processes…