Bonus: The Mysticism of Space

Thomas Hübl:

We can explore now how we speak in the mystical principles about the manifestation of life, how life comes into being. On the one hand, we could say that we, for the exploration, we divide life into three aspects. One is space, one is energy, information in movement, and one is structure. How energy or potentiality becomes a physical structure, a physical body, a physical universe, a planet, an organization, how an idea becomes an organization. And so let’s start with the first one. What is space? In order for anything to exist, we need a space because without space, nothing can exist. So we exist.

The universe exhaled a lot of space, and within that space, there are stars, there are galaxies, there is planet earth, and here we are, we’re occupying space. The space that you occupy in this lifetime, nobody else occupies because that’s the space that you occupy. Even your body is a three-dimensional space. There’s an interior to your body, there’s an exterior to your body. There’s space within you and there’s space around you. In all the connections in your body, there’s space. So we are all living in and also as space often without really noticing the space itself. Why? Because from early on we have been trained to look at objects, which on the one hand is very good, that I can say, oh, this is a glass and this is a table, and this is a computer screen, and this is a light and this is a room.
But what happened is most probably when you read a book and you open a book and you’re really eager to read it, how often do you think that you’re looking at paper when you’re on page 20? Maybe if the book’s really boring, then you think about other things than the content. But when you’re engaged in reading your mind and your attention is taken by the letters, by the words and the meaning that creates in you.

So most probably when we look at the newspaper or when we read a book, we are not anymore really aware of that. We are actually looking at paper, and the paper is space. Because without the space in between the letters, you won’t be able to read anything. So space is a tremendously important aspect of life, but often because it’s so normal, because it’s all over that evades a bit, our regular awareness in our internal experience space, internal space and internal space awareness comes with a certain regulation of the nervous system. So Steve Porges social engagement zone in the Polyvagal Theory and our nervous system is regulated. We also have more space to reflect. We have space to engage socially and for the introspection. A certain level of relaxation allows me to enter reflective states.

So I can think about my life, I can explore, I can think about and reflect on certain aspects of my life. I can think, how did my day go? What did I experience? So I become partly a witness of my experience. I’m not just in the experience, I start to witness my experience. And in our work, we are saying space gives us the power to reflect. I can reflect on things, reflection leads to digestion. Because many of us know that when we are very busy, our nervous system stores more and more and more information, or maybe sometimes also unprocessed experience.

And there must be a moment when we digest it. Because if you eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and you don’t digest after some time, you’ll stop eating because it’s full and it’s not healthy. But in the psychological dimension, we often forgot, or we haven’t been taught, or it’s also not so part of our regular conventional societal education that contemplation, mindfulness, which became very popular, is a way to start the digestion process and to take care of the digestion process is something that’s important in our life. So reflect, I can look at my life, I can look at creation, my creation, my creative process that we call life. I can digest the undigested experiences and like this, I can integrate those experiences as learning.

And when we look at it, when we zoom out a bit for a moment, I can say the fact that I’m sitting here is based on the fact that my ancestors live their life and made it through life enough that all of us are sitting here now. Everybody who is alive now is here because of our ancestors and a long time of life. So the impulse of life that is alive in me has a long tradition. And often in a hyper individualized world, we forget a tradition that we are part of. Life is a tradition. It has been handed over again and again and again and again for a very long time.

And all of that sits here in our bodies inland as our bodies. This is accumulated, concentrated life, all the resilience, all the intelligence, all the trial and error, all the trauma and healing, all the disruptions and integration of disruptions into higher learning sits here as a complex physical structure, complex emotional structure, complex mental structure, complex societal structure and so on. That’s beauty. So the integrated history of humanity is sitting here through all of us as structures of consciousness that have been developed over a very long period of time. And the integrated part is presence.

So integrated life is presence, but unintegrated life is the past. Integrated history is sitting here and looking right now or listening right now. Unintegrated split off traumatized, unconscious hurt, past or life is the past. And that’s very important because integration integrates past into presence, into the one who looks or with other words we call that learning. Our learning constantly increases our perspective of life. So reflect, just integrate our fundamental principles of space and the fundamental principles of space help us to digest our life experiences and integrate those into the learning that expands our capacity of today, which means more of life is being included in the way I live, in the way I take decisions, in the way I relate, in the way I move.

That’s wisdom. Wisdom is more of life is included in the way I live. And that’s very important because with that kind of inclusion, and it’s not an inclusion like a mental politically correct, trying to live a good life integration means that it is included. Not that I have to try to include something. If I have to try it, then I know it’s already, I know it’s partly not integrated. If it’s naturally integrated, it leads to natural compassion, natural empathy, love presence, natural inclusion, intimacy, capacity to be able to listen, to receive, to be informed, to be a contemporary citizen, and to be a witness of our time. All of that is included in integrated life.

And that’s very important because integrated life is where we’ve experienced flow. Unintegrated life is where we experience stress, tension, activation, numbness, all the trauma symptoms, separation, fragmentation, that’s unintegrated life. So we need a practice of space. We need a practice of reflect, digest, and integrate in order to have a hygiene process within our regular life. But definitely that’s an essential part of trauma healing. So space reflect, I just integrate. That becomes the learning. That becomes the presence of the one who looks and listens right now.