Vastness

...[W]hen we look within, there is no entity, no mind-substance, no self, no thing we can identify. There is just awareness—open empty awareness. We can’t locate any center, nor can we find an edge to our experience. Unless we anchor ourselves again in thoughts, or grasp after desired sensations or feelings, we have nowhere to stand, no firm ground. This can be disconcerting, scary, incredibly mysterious. While there may be a profusion of activity—sounds, sensations, images—there is no thing to hold on to, no self behind the curtain managing things. This seeing of no thing is what the Tibetan teachers call “the supreme seeing.” 

But this emptiness, this “no-thingness,” is not empty of life. Rather, empty awareness is full with presence, alive with knowing. The very nature of awareness is cognizance, a continuous knowing of the stream of experience...

We look back into the emptiness that is the creative source of all stories and emotions, into the formless fertile space that gives rise to all of existence. There, we “see the universe as it is.”...

With practice, recognizing our natural awareness takes less and less of an effort or sense of doing. Rather than climbing up a hill to get a view, we are learning the art of relaxing back and wakefully inhabiting the whole vista. We look back into awareness and then simply let go into what is seen. We become more at home in awareness than in any story of a self who is falling short or on our way somewhere else. We are at home because we have seen and experienced firsthand the vast and shining presence that is the very source of our being.

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance, pp.315-317

Vastness is an experience, if that is  the right word, that  most of us only encounter looking up at the night sky on a clear night, or perhaps gazing out across the ocean when the sea is glassy calm, and seems to extend beyond the rim of the world. But there is an interior vastness that opens directly on the ground of being itself, no-thing, the endless expanse before differentiation, before "thingness" ever was.

Silence itself leads us in the end to what merely is. Only in inward silence can we see out across the shore of our own unquiet sea. If we will only sit still and be quiet, the peaks and troughs of our fears and our longings will settle out; and then, perhaps, the way will open across the water. But we must wait, we must be still and want nothing. Only when we are at an end of ourselves can we receive the grace that comes in silence, in the stillness that lies behind our breath, behind the little sounds from beyond the window, behind our having been born. For it is grace. All we can achieve is the letting go, nothing more. The best we can  do is to get out of our own way, for the fundamental ground is always there, patient, immeasurable, without beginning. We have only to trust, to let go without assurance, drop ourselves, into the empty stillness that is always waiting for us, always there.