Spaciousness

       I've been thinking about space lately – not Star Trek's final frontier, of which I am a fan, but inner space, which is much bigger than anything on Star Trek.

       Physicists tell us that we're mostly empty space and that the space within us, if drawn to scale, would mimic the space between and within solar systems and galaxies.

       Spiritual teachers suggest that space is a sacred emptiness – an infinite, formless, timeless dimension in which all forms and everything temporary (including all thoughts and material objects) arise and subside. 

       We find this emptiness in the silence between thoughts.  It's an exquisitely quiet presence, sometimes described as a noiselessness faintly humming in the background of existence. The search for it is the search for our truest self – that which is vast, nameless and unknowable in us.  It is, I believe, the search for God.

       Sacred emptiness holds us ever so gently.  It's all around us and all within us.  In some mysterious way, a way that feels so true to me and yet so outlandish, we are the holder and the held.