Mind itself is a vast expanse, the realm of unchanging space. 

Its indeterminate display is the expanse of the magical expression of its responsiveness.

Everything is the adornment of basic space and nothing else.

Outwardly and inwardly, things proliferating and resolving are the dynamic energy of awakened mind.

Because this is nothing whatsoever yet arises as anything at all,

from The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomenon – Longchen Rabjam (Longchenpa)
Padma Publishing, 2001
Longchenpa who wrote Mind Itself Is A Vast Expanse, The Realm Of Unchanging Space
Longchenpa

This amazing ‘is-ness’, so very hard to express in words, just so, just this way, just …. 

How vast is mind, this spacious ‘nothingness’, which nurtures and embraces its myriad expressive displays.

So utterly pure, still and silent, endlessly vast, unborn and unchanging. Far beyond words, far beyond concepts, no wonder people say things like ‘god’, ‘shiva’, ‘self’, ‘brahman’, trying to say the unsayable.

Longchenpa points to the basic space – Dharmadhatu – the ‘realm’ which is the deepest nature of how life presents, of our mind, of experience. Utterly still and pure, untarnished and natural, so utterly beyond and transcendent.

When we open to this basic space, it is stunning in its purity, and remains utterly unperturbed by the magical display. Words can’t begin to capture how beyond it is. This field about which you really can’t say anything – why am I then trying and fumbling? As I write, all words fail, yet I write them nevertheless.

Yet there seems to ‘also’ be an endless display, what we call experience – for most of us how we know we are alive and so-called awake. Thoughts come and go, sensations come and go, emotions and feelings – arising and ceasing. An endless flow. 

When the basic space is in view, this flow of life, of experience seems like a truly magical display, a magic show with irrepressible expression, coming from nowhere, nowhere when there, and nowhere when subsiding again. As Longchenpa says, proliferating and resolving, inwardly and out, just the dynamic energy or expression of awakened mind. 

How marvelous this utterly still, pure, unchanging space expressing itself as an endless display, a conjuring trick of ungraspable expression!

How more wondrous still that the display is not different from the unchanging space, the space not different from the magical display! Nondual.

This Dharmadhatu is empty, so it can manifest as anything at all – empty yet full.

Yet what seems to appear is utterly groundless, utterly ungraspable, utterly beyond holding. Basic space adorned with its own nature. Shiva and Shakti.

Such a reasonable question – why does it endlessly express? Yet such a idiocy to ask!

Responsive, expressive, creative.

This entrancing dream which so often we are lost in, in illusions of self and other, of this and that, of now and then.

Dance on this magical display, where nothing really happens, where space plays as things appearing in time. My words utterly missing the mark.

Basic space.

Expression.

How marvelous!