The Space

 The unborn is not something difficult to attain.

 

It’s not something distant.

 

It’s not something we have to search for.

 

It’s not something we have to discover.

 

It’s something we already have, right here, right now.

 

Bankei Yotaku (1622-1693)

 

Awareness is that space that invites creations and participates in life’s happenings as they naturally unfold. What many instead experience as self identification—the evaluator and decision maker—is perceived as a continuous and mostly rational entity. In Awareness this self identification is recognized as illusionary and is understood as a mere set of programs and reaction functions that we have picked up in the past and strengthened by repeating them over and over again.

 

The psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl discovered the space—the gateway to Awareness—when he wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” This space is always at our disposal, and if we observe carefully what is in front of us, removes all drama from our life.

 

Say we fall in love, but she is not returning our feelings. The old reaction function would simply go from “she rejects me” to “I feel like drinking my blues away.” With this space, all we experience is a pain in the heart and solar plexus region when the rejection hits, while the call to get drunk would be recognized as a pure coping mechanism and would be rejected easily. It’s just one example. See this mechanism at work everywhere in your daily life. There is always that short window when we can see through the outgrown reaction function at work.