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Now the spacious mind has room for everything. It is like the space in this room, which is never harmed by what goes in and out of this room. In fact, we say ‘the space in this room’, but actually the room is in the space; the building is in the space. When the building has gone the space will still be here. So we can have a perspective, we have the actual walls and the shape of the room, and the space. Right now we can see the limit of this room, and the space of this room is contained by the limits of this building.

Space is something that we tend not to notice, because it doesn’t grasp our attention, does it? It is not like a beautiful flower something really beautiful, or something really horrible — which pulls your attention right to it. You can be completely mesmerised in an instant by something exciting, fascinating, horrible or terrible; but you can’t do that with space, can you? To notice space you have to calm down — you have to contemplate it.

This is because spaciousness is not extreme, it has no extreme qualities. It is just spacious, whereas flowers can be extremely beautiful, with beautiful bright reds and oranges and purples, beautiful shapes — extremely beautiful shapes — that are just so dazzling to our minds. Our something else can be really ugly and disgusting.

But space is not dazzling, it is not disgusting, and yet without space there would not be anything else; we couldn’t see. If you had just this room, and filled it up with things so it became solid, or filled it up with cement — a big cement block — there’d be no space left in this room. Then, of course, you couldn’t have beautiful flowers or anything else; it would just be a big block. It would be useless, wouldn’t it? So we need both; we need to appreciate the form and the space, because they are the perfect couple, the true marriage, perfect harmony — space and form. We contemplate this, we reflect, and from this comes wisdom. We know how things are, rather than always trying to create things the way we might want them to be.