10. Space, Time, Awareness

We are.  I am.

But the sense of "we" or "I" is a construct, an identification that we carry around, something we have, not really what we are.  Where does that leave us, when we drop the "us"?

Are.  Am.

Be.

Being.

Of course, these are all just words, but they point to what we began to explore in all seriousness in the previous chapter.

10.1. Being

Just to explore what "am" can mean, can be very profound, in any way we do it.  When we seriously try to explore "am" we may fall through an unexpected trapdoor in the ground floor of our belief system.  Just try it, exploring a naked "am", stripped from the "I" and the "X" we use when we tell ourselves and others "I am X", where X can stand for a name, a profession, a gender, etc.  No "I", no "X", just "am".  Just "IS", Being.

Being.  What IS.  Beyond hope and fear, beyond any kind of need.

Being is beyond all concepts, all constructs, all contrasting notions.  In short, Being is beyond duality of any kind.  Being is not personal, and also not impersonal.  Being is neither alive nor not alive.  Being is neither one nor many.  Being doesn't do anything, but Being isn't passive either.  And so on.

To just be is enough.  Being is all there is.  But perhaps just one word, Being, is not enough.  If we want to say a bit more, we can make a compromise, introducing a kind of minimal action, namely "resting".  It's not quite right: Being is beyond the duality of resting and not resting, but as a compromise it's not bad, since it does give a feel of what it can be like to be more in tune with Being.  So let's construct a short sentence.

10.2. A First Compromise: Resting in Being

Starting with a naked "am" we don't need anything else: no handles, no steps, no stages, nothing.  We can just rest.  Resting in what IS is enough.  So here is our short sentence "Resting in Being".  We can carry this sentence with us throughout the day, letting it inspire us in the middle of all our activities -- in the middle of what may seem like activities, but what is ultimately empty and open, and on the level of "IS" already beyond active and passive.

However, for most of us, that's just too easy, too simple.  We may get frustrated, finding no handle on "IS", like trying to grapple with a flat polished iron wall.  We crave for something more, a program, something to do, some way to try to reach out for some goal, some way to improve ourselves.  Just resting may not cut it, may make us restless instead.  In that case, let's move on to a further compromise.  Let's do something -- but not too much, and not too intensely.  Let's just do a little bit without much fixation on what it is we do: in other words, let's play!

10.3. A Second Compromise: Play as Being

In the previous chapter we ended with a compromise: if you feel an urge to do anything at all, why not just play.  Resting in Being is the most direct way to approach Being.  But if you don't know how to do that, or what Being is, the next best thing is to play as Being.

Even if you don't know what Being is, you can start with your best understanding of what Being may be, and play with that understanding in anything you do, say, think, feel; in short, throughout your daily life.  While playing, you may well get closer to Being, getting more of a sense for Being, perhaps in ways that you cannot express in words.

However, even that may be hard to do.  How to play as Being? What if you don't have any good starting idea of what Being could be?  What if you don't know how to start playing?  Well, in that case let's downshift once more: from just Being, to resting in Being, to playing as Being, to playing as various aspects of Being.

10.4. A Third Compromise: Playing with Aspects of Being.

Since Being is beyond all opposites, Being as such has no parts, no sides, no facets of any kind.  Yet Being shows itself in and as all phenomena of this world.  In that way, Being seems to present or project all kind of appearances.  All that is still part of sheer appearance, appearance as such, without any need to posit anything deeper, like for example objectively existing matter or energy.

Whatever we say about sheer appearance is not quite correct.  Being doesn't project or present, strictly speaking, since either notion would imply a separation -- between presenter and what is presented, or between projector and what is projected.  But as long as we use these words cautiously, we can use them as pointers to deal with the phenomena that we encounter, all appearances in our life, whether related to ourselves as the subject, or whatever objects we encounter.

Being is such a paradoxical notion.  Each appearance, each phenomena as such, cannot be a small part of Being, since Being doesn't have parts.  Therefore, each phenomenon, as such, is all of Being.  Period.

Yet, phenomena are also distinct, and of course we don't want to deny the differences between them.  We're not trying to get into some kind of amorphous bland state of mind where we try to ignore or deny or erase differences.  On the contrary.  The more we are in touch with Being, the more creativity can flow unhindered, and the more we can appreciate the exquisite richness of difference, on many levels.

Given that all phenomena are Being, we can play with the phenomena, playing as Being by viewing ourselves as Being and simultaneously viewing everything else as Being as well.  But that may be difficult for a different reason that it was difficult to play as Being directly.  Being as such may be too simple to work with; but trying to work with all that appears may be too complex.  Where to find a place to start, to get some handle on this whole exploration, some kind of traction?

If we could find some intermediaries between Being and appearances, something in between Being as such and its myriad manifestations, that might help.  That might give us the compromise we were looking for.  It may allow us to move from playing as Being as such, to playing as/with some aspects of Being instead.  By definition, an aspect emphasizes something more than something else, and therefore provides at least some kind of contrast or handle, making it easier to play with.

As long as we remember that "aspects of Being" is strictly speaking a contradiction, and as long as we don't take the word "aspects" too seriously, we can tentatively play with the notion of aspects of Being, in order to make our playing as Being a bit more accessible.  The question is now: what are helpful candidates for us to explore, as "aspects of Being"?

If we start with the conventional picture of the world, as a collection of things in space and time, we could choose space, time, and matter and/or energy  as important aspects or facets of reality; perhaps we could add information as well.  But all of that has a degree of arbitrariness to it, and in any case, it is all based on a notion of existence that we dropped quite early on.  Let us not hurry, and explore at our leisure to see what options we have.

10.5. What Contains What?

Physicists try to track down what the world really is, ultimately, by modeling what appears in space and time: matter and energy described in ever finer detail as molecules, or atoms, or subatomic particles -- or perhaps quantum mechanical wave functions, or entities described by string theory or similar attempts to find a unified description of all forces in nature.

For Newton, space and time were like inert rigid containers, in the form of absolute space and time, as a sensible and practical first try to organize material phenomena in a mathematical way.  Einstein improved on that picture by viewing space and time as aspects of a unified spacetime that is not inert, but rather stands in dynamic relationships with matter and energy.  On the one hand, the presence of matter and energy causes spacetime to be curved.  On the other hand, the curvature of spacetime determines how matter and energy moves through space and time, under the influence of what we interpret as forces of gravity.

Quantum mechanics provides an even more dynamic picture of space and especially of time: there is a fundamental uncertainty, noticeable on microscopic scales, that may even reverse the arrow of time, for a while, in a small region.  And future theories of quantum gravity, if successful and convincing, may tell us how to view the interplay between matter and energy, on the one hand, and space and time, on the other, in more realistic ways, dropping more of the currently understood limitations -- limitations that are not as rigid as those imposed by Newton, but no doubt are still reflecting our own limited understanding of nature.

How does all that compare with our own explorations?  We started out with an investigation of sheer appearance, as given in timeless awareness, that is, in awareness that went beyond the limiting concepts of past, present and future, and subject and object.  Within timeless awareness sheer appearance still shows the familiar world, which we can choose to view as a play of matter and energy in space and time.

So what contains what?  In our current scientific picture space and time contain matter and energy, some of which somehow produces consciousness, through the material structures of human brains.  The simplest way to interpret all that is to view our conscousness as contained in or near our brain or at least our bodily existence, which in turn is contained in the world of matter and energy that is contained in space and time.

In contrast, in our exploration we have found the space and time of the physical world to be contained in awareness, together with all phenomena that play out in that physical space and time.  And in addition, awareness contains dream spaces in which dreams unfold, and presumably some kind of space in which memories arise, and some kind of space in which fantasies present themselves, and so on.

But even if physical space and time as we normally experience those are seen as contained in, or given by, awareness, there is still the question of whether there is not a wider space in which awareness is given.  Is there some kind of basic space in which all phenomena appear?

An example is that of a movie theater: within the movie there are the space depicted there and the time in which events in the movie unfold.  Yet there is also the wider space of the movie theater, within which the movie screen is given on which the movie space is depicted.  Similarly the time in which events in the theater unfold is also the time in which the movie projector does its work -- projecting events in a movie that unfold in their own movie time.

10.6. Three Aspects of Being

As long as we deal with phenomena, two candidates for rather fundamental aspects of the way in which phenomena appear are the space and time in which they are given.  So we can extend that idea to the notion of a kind of overall Space, in which all particular spaces are given, and similarly an overall Time, in which all particular times unfold.

Put differently, any specific space can be seen as providing the potential for particular objects, fitting to that space, to appear.  Similarly, any specific time provides the potential for events to happen, appropriate for the kind of realm that is governed by that time.  So Space, with a capital S, could stand for the potential to let any specific space appear, hence for the potential to let anything at all appear, any phenomenon whatsoever.  Similarly Time, with a capital T, could stand for the potentional to let any event of any type in any kind of realm happen, whether the physical realm of every-day reality, or the realm of dreams, realms of memories or of fantasy, etc.

So that gives us two candidates for aspects of Being: Space and Time.  However, as mentioned already, we started with timeless awareness, timeless in the sense of going beyond past, present and future, and beyond subject and object.  Without trying to tackle the question of what contains what here, it does seem that timeless awareness is fundamental enough to be a candidate for an aspect of Being.  Following the same convention, let's drop having to write `timeless' each time, and instead let's capitalize the first letter, introducing Awareness as an aspect of Being.

So there we are: let us see whether we can work with Space, Time, and Awareness, as aspects of Being.  And remember, we went onto this whole detour as part of trying to make a third kind of compromise.  Instead of playing as Being, we wanted to see whether we could play as aspects of Being.

So here is the challenge.  We can try to play as Space, or play as Time, or play as Awareness.  At this point we have no clue yet what that might entail, where it will lead us, or even whether it makes any sense at all.  But hey, let's playfully explore these three options, and see for ourselves what they will present for us.

10.7. Getting Our Feet Wet

Why not just jump in, and at least get our feet wet!  There are three obvious explorations that we can carry out, one for each aspect of Being.

First, let us spend a few minutes, or longer, to "Play as Space." Try to see yourself as given not only in space, which in turn is given in Space, but also as Space.  And try to see everything else and everyone else also as given as Space, in Space, by Space.  Imagine that Space is a kind of (empty and open) `stuff' out of which everything is made.  It may help to start with the analogy of a movie, where all that we see is made of light, even though all kind of material objects seem to appear in a movie.  Try to see daily life as a movie made not by light, but by space.

And, of course, be careful at first where you do this: better not to try this while in heavy traffic, for example, or any other situation that might be dangerous.  After doing this Space exploration for a little while, it would be a good idea to make some notes in your journal, treating your own life like a lab in which you make lab notes, something you can later go back to.  And even if you don't reread them ever, just making those notes will help paying more attention to subtle details of what is going on during your explorations.  Then take a break, and get some rest and relaxation before moving on to the next step.

Second, when you are ready, spend a few minutes, or longer, to "Play as Time."  With the arising of each and every phenomenon, you are the Time that empowers that arising.  And that what arises is still you: Time letting Time play as phenomena.  Time as the canvas, Time as the brush, Time as the painter painting Time on Time as Time.  How does it feel to watch all that appears in that way, largely detached from the usual concerns that, as concerns, are just phenomena among phenomena?

Third, after taking another break, spend a few more minutes to "Play as Awareness."  Now you are the Awareness in which everything arises, as Awareness.  Awareness as the fabric of all that appears.  Awareness arising within Awareness, communicating Awareness to Awareness.  How does that feel? And how do these three ways of playing compare, playing as Space, playing as Time, playing as Awareness?

It would be fun to experiment with these three forms of play for a while, say another two weeks.  We can then get back to each of them, to investigate each one in more detail.