Did you notice? Unbounded space disappeared! It seems to be so inconspicuous that nobody seems to take note of it.
This morning, when I came along the construction site in our neighbourhood, I noticed it again. When the walls are put up, suddenly the sky starts disappearing and the unbounded space seems to condense into a tiny hall called a room.
I very well remember how, as a little boy, I several times run from the garden into my parents’ home and then came out again, and I wondered how it can be that space disappears in the house. And how it feels being inside, cut off from the freedom of vastness.
It is like getting into the mother’s womb. From out of the unlimited space of the subtle dimensions shrinking into the narrowness and confinement of body, with its heaviness. As a child, I had the feeling that I did not really want to come down. And it took me many years to get accustomed to live in such a narrow thing like the body.
Yes, the curtain slowly falls and you get used to it. As you get used to live in a room.
At the beginning, you can still see the larger space. Space…. another word for spirit. Slowly you forget that you are not an island, in a corner of space, but contain in you the great whole.
In the morning, when I walk over the field, looking up to the blue sky where just some clouds block the view, and where on the one side the ring of the horizon is limited by the residential area and on the other by the mountain range of the Alps in the distance, I feel like opening up my subtle bodies which envelop the encased spark of the Sun called I AM.
And when I come back into the street of the settlement, it narrows down again, a kind of crippling. Do the people living here notice it?
But when I go down the stairs into the house where I am living, and then the staircase up to our apartment – although it gets really narrow outside, it feels like having re-connected to the vault of heaven. And that the cosmic vastness is also here.
Morning sun shining on some dahlias from the nearby farmhouse, with the Sripada statue in the background, in my study.
