Space in My Head

Imagine you are floating in space, I said to my friend. Except it’s not like outer space (although that would be pretty cool, wouldn’t it, to be floating out there, warm and cozy in the blackness, maybe near a gas giant with beautiful rings around it, with just the pinpoints of ten thousand stars as your companions, and the distant slightly larger orb of a sun?) No, I said, the open awareness of meditation is a sort of inner space that’s absolutely vast but still fits inside your head. In it are all the things we encounter in our life - that tingling on our scalp, the pain in our knee, the feeling of our tongue in our mouth, the noise of the man with the chainsaw cutting down the tree next door, the weird floaty colours behind our closed eyelids. And also our thoughts, of course, they’re in there too.

But then when we watch closely, we notice we’re not thinking them - we realise they are thinking themselves. Just like the noise of the chainsaw. Sometimes it’s like we’re overhearing what the thoughts are saying and watching them fade away, sometimes we’re noticing how they spool on and on, chaining from one to the next. But they’re thinking themselves. All we’re doing is watching. If we want to, of course, we can stir one up, nudging it in a new direction. Or we can summon up an entirely new one - what’s the name of the lead character in that movie I watched the other night? I really must look them up and see what else they’ve been in. We can watch this new thought chase itself for a while, too.

Feelings, they’re in there as well, of course. Emotions are really a call to action, and we can watch them go through the space in our heads, a bit like the weather outside. It doesn’t mean we’re not feeling them, not fully engaged with them in some “Zen” way. These are just as disruptive to our mental space as a bad storm can be to your commute - a huge branch can come down and take out your car, while resentment or anger can knock us sideways for hours. But in the end, they’re just today’s weather, and we can recognise that - or at least try to, goodness knows this is sometimes hard! We care about them strongly, precisely because that’s what they’re for: to drive us to do something.

What is an orange, in this space? Many of us can summon up some kind of picture of an orange in our imagination (although not everyone can do this, which in itself surprises some people who can do it very well). Can you feel what an orange feels like in your hand? Smell it? Taste it? Know its botanical name, or that the word for the colour “orange” in English comes from the word for the fruit in Spanish, and not the other way around? Turns out we can’t really distinguish between the actual orange, and this internal network of sensations and thoughts about an orange. You can’t have one without the other. Just me mentioning the word “orange” is perhaps enough to have brought some of that network online in your consciousness. If there was a physical orange in the bottom drawer of your desk, but you were unaware of it, then that orange truly (for you) doesn’t exist, and you’d be surprised when someone opened the drawer and handed it to you. That particular orange didn’t really exist (at least for you - your friend knew it was there) without it being in your inner space.

It’s the same with mental constructions. You can’t have that thought about last night’s movie without thinking that thought. There is no “thought” separate from the act of thinking it.

And the point of all this? It’s just to notice that none of this is “you”. There is no “you” in there, separate from the space. There’s just the space, or more precisely, all the stuff that’s going on in the space. One of those things that’s going is the awareness of the space and all those things themselves, of course. Not so much the mental dialog of thoughts about thoughts, saying “oh, mental space, yes, I know what this is”, but just the ineffable awareness underlying this all, without any thoughts at all. If you imagine this space completely empty - empty even of the awareness of the space itself - then you’ve just described being unconscious (a word which betrays in its construction exactly what we think is going on when this happens). Dreams inhabit this space, of course, in our sleep. We can dream of ourselves, or of other people. Other people: they’re represented in there, very powerfully. We have a mental model of how other people we know well might act in various circumstances, and that’s all part of that space. We spend a lot of our time ruminating about them, and our relations with them, and what they might be thinking. That’s a million years of evolution as a tribal member right there, and it’s pretty tough to get away from. But it’s just thoughts, or thoughts about thoughts, all in that space.

And this is what the mystics mean by “non-dual”. Recognising that the only thing we truly have is this space, and that we are identical with it, and the whole universe is (potentially) inside it. It doesn’t need years of meditation on a mountaintop retreat to get there: it’s the thickness of a sheet of paper away from where you are right now. You just have to step away from the grabby everyday brain, wanting to claim the importance of the thought of self-ness, wanting to claim that emotions are REAL, and JUSTIFIED, and for goodness sake what kind of weirdo ARE YOU??

So that’s it. Next time you are meditating - or, frankly, next time you are waiting for a the microwave to ping - you can notice that space. Just let go of everything. It’ll all still be there when you look for it.