Space as an Abiding and Non-Abiding Matrix

Abstract

This paper develops a contemplative phenomenology of space as an abiding and non-abiding matrix. Space appears to abide because it remains available throughout the emergence, stabilisation, transformation, and disappearance of phenomena. Yet it is simultaneously non-abiding: it has no permanently fixed centre, is exhausted by none of its contents, and does not possess the entities temporarily occupying it. A comparable structure can be discerned in awareness, which remains available across changing experiences without becoming fixed in any sensation, object, narrative, identity, or phenomenal world. Building on prior analyses of the re-collection of attention and the attentional elsewhere, the paper asks what makes inhabitation possible without permanent possession. It distinguishes physical, geometrical, ecological, lived, and phenomenal space from the openness of awareness. The concept of matrix names four functions of an open field — holding, differentiating, relating, and releasing — each of which can fail through deficiency and through excess, and it is this double failure structure that establishes their irreducibility to a single dimension. Abiding and non-abiding name the poles between which each function is calibrated rather than functions in their own right. The matrix is deflationary: it is not an item beneath appearance but the name for the togetherness of the four, and is itself dependently arisen, so that abiding is a conventional designation rather than an ultimate ground. The normative force of the analysis is epistemic before it is ethical, and the deformations it describes are institutionally produced as often as personal.