spaciousness

There’s a spaciousness inside all situations. We’re walking through them, and underneath our feet there’s space and light, and around us. And we’re walking through that space and light. That, then, is the source of empathy and love. And we accompany each other—and we don’t have to take ourselves or each other so seriously.

The Heart Sutra, like any koan, contains the universe, and so you have to go in somewhere.  I want to go in through the “Mantra of Great Magic.”  Even the word “mantra” is, in a certain way, a reference to magic, a sort of portable access to reality that you can carry around with you. And the word “magic” is also used for the word “mantra,” so where we use “mantra” to produce magic, there’s a transformative quality about the mantra so that, when you repeat it, when you keep company with it, you end up in its world.