Madhya # 70

The Space Between Us
How do we stretch ourselves? Not just of body but mind and spirit?
Do we increase repetitive patterns or push ourselves - this pushing against something is a confrontation that is necessary to refine to expand to deepen.  And it is the friction necessary to spur growth.

One should always keep something of beauty in the mind - Pascal

When you think the word beauty what pictures come to mind? 

Beauty, the word that best relates is the classical Greek noun "kallos" meaning good or of fine quality.  The combination of beauty and good is associated with truth.

Beauty - we yearn for it and it is everywhere if we have the capacity, the sense(s) to discern. We seek to bring beauty to impoverished spaces because experience, what we inhabit feeds our inner world just as knowledge of interiorized states is the fuel of outer manifestation.

We are each day creating our acts of beauty even in the making of daily life.  Life exists in the space of how we go about it, with what intention and attention.

The Śaiva Tantra speaks of the madhya space. The Heart is madhya; it stands in the middle, it is intermediate standing between any two extremes.   Between the inhalation and exhalation; between the beat of the heart; in the interval of pleasure and pain; between the thought and subsequent action.  “It is central; it is the interior, which is the space or vacuum at the center of all things.” Paul Muller-Ortega 

Kṣemaraja in the Pratyabhijna-hṛdayam, sūtra 17, speaks of the madhya-vikas̄a:
By the expansion of the center, one attains the bliss of consciousness.

This space is the dimensionless point of Śiva and Śakti, it is the union of power that creates all manifest reality and is alive in each one.  Meditation then is the journey to the great Heart.  Resting here, awareness steeps in creative power; expansion is known, and is palpably available to the practitioner in life. 

Expand the middle.   Stand on what Paul Muller-Ortega terms the “ledge of freedom.”  From this ever expanded space, see clearly and deeply, choose wisely, create with love and efficacious power.  

When we meditate, we meet in the space of the heart.  It is that knowing that heals the individual and by extension, the world.  Expand the middle, push the light of your own consciousness into every dark corner.  Yes, this will shine a light on sorrow and ugliness as well, but in doing so, bring the fire necessary to transmute and create beauty.  In that, the space between us expands with possibility and diminishes in differentiation and limitation.