The body, spacious, timeless

• Are we certain that all we can ever know is, in the first place, Awareness, our direct raw experience?
  “Awareness” meaning sensory awareness including our mental sense: all our “input” as we would say, speaking dualistically.
• Does the full realisation then strike us that all we truly are is Awareness? Even any idea of what we are is itself a thought, Awareness.
• This uncontrived, uncomplicated, unthought, unfiltered, natural immediate Awareness is Emptiness, this is Awakened mind which we then conceptualise, frame, elaborate,and believe, thus obscuring its Awake-ness.

To break through to this recognition, freeing ourselves of the usual view we take on our experience, we can approach through appreciating spacioiusness, and timelessness. Meditation can allow us to notice the edgeless, boundless, spaciousness of experience, as its inherent quality. If we meditate with bodily sensations as our focus, we feel them as an abstract display, distinct spatially. Staying with this mysterious wonder, we actually experience something quite different from our usual idea of what our body is: solid, continuous, a fixed object.

We could also become focussed upon the impermanent aspect of these sensations, their continual change. They are so instantaneous, spontaneously arising like a firework display or a piece of music, an unstoppable flow, never still, without any fixed present moment we could isolate. LIke a river or a sound, the flow IS the body. Everything is so immediate that all that appears is instantly gone, nothing there to fix upon. Again, this contradicts our notion of our body as a mass of physical flesh and bone.

These meditations can undermine our belief that our view of the body is the ultimate truth of it. Not that we need abandon our material view, rather we can notice that it is a view, a way of seeing, of approximating a concept from our uncatchable experience. We know now that the raw experience is the ground upon which any view is constructed, even if we only have the briefest of glimpses of it.

We can observe our body as sensation-space and sensation-instantaneousness at the same time, becoming familiar with how sensation fundamentally is. Of course this is true for all our experience: could we stop an instant of thought? Or see it as a solid thing? We can discover ourselves as such an evanescent, unfindable, unstoppable, spacious, timeless experience. Everything, body, thoughts, and our “world” are just this.