MIND GAP, from ‘MIND SPACE’ by Ron Purser

[David Filippone]

Space Between, Image by Darko Mladenov from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/person-silhouette-sky-clouds-5495054/

 

I wanted to share this here with our Monday TSK Study Group, and anyone interested in the TSK Vision. Just reading ahead in, ‘Mind Space‘ …so many lovely passages, and ‘pointing‘ metaphors. This one caught my eye and I wanted to share it because of the similarity to what we do in the group meetings when engaged in those Edge of the future exercises, such as Welcoming Each New Arising [from ‘Gesture of Great Love,’ by Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche]… not so much ‘doing‘, but just noticing what appears without naming it or conceptually framing or manipulating it.

Chapter 9, MIND THE GAP
Subtitle: Contemplative Reflection, p.126
The Silence Between Notes

Listen to a piece of music with pronounced pauses. Notice how each shapes what follows. As you listen, notice how the silence is not separate from the music. Each pause is charged, preparing the ground for what follows. Without the rests, the notes would blur into noise. Then sit quietly and let thoughts arise. Instead of focusing on the thoughts, tune into the spaces that surround them. As in music, the pauses are not empty but alive, already part of the rhythm of mind.

Let thoughts continue to arise as they will. Do not try to a stop them. Instead, tune into the spaces that come before and after each thought. Just as in music, the “rests” are already shaping the melody of your mind.

Notice how these pauses are not blank; they carry a clarity, a lucidity, a presence that is not owned by any “thinker.”  They are not your achievement. They are simply there, surrounding each thought. Stay with this for a few minutes. Let the rhythm of thoughts and silences play like music in your awareness. When you open your eyes or shift your attention, sense how the silence between thoughts is not a rare absence but the very ground of experience.

THE PRESENCE OF THE PAUSE

If the space between thoughts reveals a silent lucidity, what does that suggest about the thoughts themselves? We usually treat them as solid building blocks of experience, the furneture of our inner world. But perhaps they are more like notes in music: arising from silence, fading back into it, never seprate from the spaciousness that frames them… Presence is already there. The vision invites us to recognise this presence in the space between thoughts… What we find if we are patient, is not a blank, not a mindless fog, but rather a quiet spaciousness, vivid and self-sufficient, that does not belong to any ‘thinker.’

 

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