REFLECTIONS ON THE GAP AND CONTINUITY
Reflections on the gap and continuity.
One of the topics we explore in the advanced Zero Balancing course, “Geometry of Healing” is the “gap.” The gap is discussed in Deepak Chopra’s work and is worth thinking about on your own.
The gap as discussed in Chopra, is a gap between thoughts. Here, as opposed to intentional thinking, we notice silence – or we don’t notice it because the “we” or “me” at that moment doesn’t consciously exist, when inhabiting this silence. We only re-notice ourselves as we come out of the gap.
It is, Chopra says, a place of pure potentiality because nothing is then happening.
To put it another way, only out of emptiness can anything be born. The unconscious or the gap is the womb of all “things.”
Emptiness gives rise to form and form eventually to emptiness.
There are gaps between one thing and another – otherwise there would no distinction:
Gaps between notes – otherwise there would be no music.
Gaps, space between the stars – they say the ratio of the matter to empty space in the atom is the same as the ratio of empty space to stars in the universe.
“Between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist…” - Rilke
My friend tells me that Tibetans believe the greatest hunger we have is for space.
Fritz Smith, Zero Balancing’s founder’s first book is titled “Inner Bridges” which, in a variety of ways explores the space, the emptiness between bones, joints being experienced as, relatively, empty space.
“Yoga” means joining. And of course there must be a space for a joining to happen.
All this helps us, certainly as bodyworkers and therapists, to allow for and cultivate those extended experiences of being in the gap, in various ways. Because there is space between one thing and another and one moment and another, one thought and another – everything we do partakes of the gap.
That is a wonderful notion that can consciously or not give us a pause, in a place or in time. And it becomes all the more powerful and yet restful when we ourselves do open up to this place and time of pure potentiality.
* * * * *
At the same time, we can see everything as connected. Especially when we think about or even somehow experience the waves of energy which connect everything; viewing things anew we can see there are no gaps, only a vast universal unity.
So here we have two opposite yet complementary truths. When two opposite things are true at the same time, here we find another gap, similar to the one cultivated by the logically unanswerable “koans” of Zen Buddhism.
The physicist Niels Bohr is credited with saying, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
Welcome to the gap! And welcome to the great continuity!
