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| Consciousness wrapped in thought acrylic on canvas 26 x 32 copyright Dee Rapposelli 2015 |
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Popular spiritual teachers, such as Pema Chodron and Eric Tolle, talk about spaciousness and
presence. Spaciousness is what you basically feel when you are truly present .
. . when you are not spinning stories, judgments, and comparisons about what
is happening to and around you. When you access your spaciousness, then you are
who and what you really are and you experience Reality. You find “the face you
had before the world was made,” in the words of WB Yeats. The experience is one
of fascination and contentment. In Sanskrit, the ecclesiastic language of
Hinduism, this is called ananda, which
translates as “bliss.” It is the conscious experience of being. Along with
Consciousness and Being, this Bliss-Experience
is said to be the nature of God, and so God described as
Satchidananda—Existence-Consciousness-Bliss in Vedic Hinduism. God is also called Brahman in this system, and this word is so old that the original meaning is unknown. It is thought to mean “That Which Spreads Out.” That which spreads out in
both vast spaciousness and also creative potential and actualization. It is All
This and what underlies and transcends all this.
I have come to a place in my life and practice in which the
flux of thoughts, feelings, judgments, etc. feel like heavy, gripping
impositions on “me,” and so I experience myself as consciousness wrapped
(instead of rapt) in thought. It is an excellent place to come to. I think I
can “work with” this condition more than I had the insight to in the past
despite how much more spiritually nerdy and disciplined I once was. My present
experience helps me distinguish consciousness and true will from habits and
conditioning that run their programs and are expressed as the incessant
barrage of reactive thoughts and emotions. It causes me to be very open and
kind to myself—and to others—because I can divest myself of the burden of
judgments and expectations.
