trying to vary the menu of earthly delights

One of my personal endeavors is opening the given, to see through the habitual assumptions and presumptions I have about everything.  Why?  I've found that my handed down knowledge, the knowings that I own and tend to hold to, gradually begin to harden.  They freeze out a more inclusive experience.  Living becomes cramped; I'm often up against the clock; I get trapped between what is and what I think should or shouldn't be.

When I think about how one sided and confined living like this can be, I think about the quantity of life, and that brings into focus limits such as death, intervals of time, positions to take up, get to, or avoid.  Quantity always implies a measure, and a separation from what is measured.  A quantity of life perspective has me focused on accumulating, and filling, (or on the flip side, avoiding), views that are all based on limited, fixed assumptions.  Satisfaction becomes a projection of how fulfilling I can measure myself and my life, such as how much I can have, and can hold.  Living by quantity of life can be a myopic focus without a counter-balancing quality of life awareness.  

What brings about an awareness of the quality of our lives?  I like the practice of TSK (Time, Space, Knowledge), a contemporary vehicle of spiritual inquiry and transformation. TSK challenges my conventional way of relating to, and experiencing Time, (and Space and Knowledge) and in doing so also challenges the self and the limited way it structures time.  Many of the TSK exercises show, as we engage them repetitiously and in depth (not only intellectually), how the self, a position we rely on to interpret our living, limits the quality of our lives through its tendency to focus exclusively on the quantity of existence.

If we can see how it's possible to engage time differently, and not to relegate it only to a measure against which we play out our moments, then those moments lose their hard boundaries, and time (past-present-future) opens, as well as space.  We learn (new knowledge) that we are not what we thought we were.  We engage time openly, and more aware.

 The TSK vision is not specifically Buddhist; it does not belong to any tradition. It urges us to explore our experience before interpretation and concepts, gaining access to a deeper, primordial level where real and lasting change can happen. It invites us to rediscover space as allowing, time as dynamic, and knowledge as a fundamental facet of reality, not “owned” by the one who knows.