Insight Dawning

Continuing with the practice of looking at 'knowing as light' in experience, I like the way A. H. Almaas leads us into that view in his new book, "The Unfolding Now".  He points to a spiritual path as, "based on being with your immediate experience in an intimate and curious way."  He goes on to say, "...being with your own experience is what we call inquiry.  Inquiry is based on an open and curious desire for knowing the truth of your experience exactly as it is."  p. xvii

Almaas says, the practice of self-inquiry, besides observing momentary experience until "you become clear about where you are" also includes questioning, "What is making this happen?"  And as you do this you become interested in understanding more about where you are, and as you begin to understand more you begin to see some truth about your experience.

"Seeing something we call truth--something that gives meaning or coherence to what is happening--gives us an overall picture we can comprehend.  It's not only a mental explanation but a felt sense of it being experientially meaningful to us... And if we continue being where we are and exploring from where we are, the discovery of the truth becomes a process, a deepening thread.

The recognition of the truth--if you truly glimpse it, if you see it in its actuality--brings more awareness, which opens up your experience.  It means that you see more--as if there were more light available.  This is referred to as the light of awareness.  It is the penetration of the light of your True Nature into your experience, it is as though light had broken through.  That is what it means to have insight:  insight brings enlightenment.  And is actually more literal than that.  You see ignorance and shadow clearing away and brightness coming through into your experience.  What is the light that does this?  It is the light of your nature.  It is the light of who and what you are."  p. 15

The example Almaas sites is:

"I'm bored because I am experiencing some kind of meaningless emptiness.  If I explore why I'm feeling meaningless and empty, I recognize that it is because I am identifying with a representation, a particular image.  When I explore why that makes me feel empty and meaningless, I recognize that this identification disconnects me from being, and when I am not just simply being here, I am not being myself."  p. 16

When you have the experience of 'insight', the depth of the meaningfulness, in that instant of the unfolding moment, opens wide and the insight literally 'dawns'.  It can be a dawning of profound clarity and depth.

New Horizon Dawning

 

Continuing with the practice of looking at knowing as light in experience, there is an exercise from the TSK book, Dynamics of Time and Space, called Return to Light, which says in part:

Instead of trying to jump prematurely to a ‘lightness' realm, look within your thoughts and sensations for the quality of darkness. Become familiar with darkness; be ready to let yourself sink into it without losing aware­ness completely. Gradually you will be able to sense fluctuations within the dark: moments that are more luminous, when experience seems lucent and free. The quality is one of shining through, of a delightful alive­ness. To dwell within these moments is to engage a familiarity with light that makes its own path.

Comment 22 from the book

Despite what the voices of ordinary experience may say, light is never far away. If our experience exhibits darkness, it is self-constructed. It is as though we had built a box of light, then climbed inside and closed the cover.  Now we insist that we are surrounded by dark­ness, choosing to ignore that the box that shuts out the light is also made of light.

Once we see this deception in operation, it cannot control us in the same way. Gradually we can move toward openness, balance, and ease. As these qualities expand, points of tension and conflict can themselves become points of light.

Exercise 22 invites light to return to the center of experience. In its initial stages, it continues to support a distinction between light and darkness, but as you become more familiar with it, you may sense that light is available everywhere. Through this awareness, ‘light­ness' makes itself available. It can grant us relief from our restricted ways of being.

...this exercise can help you become aware in a new way of the darkness that accompanies ordinary patterns of mind: the compulsive, repetitive thoughts, the forget­ting that catches us up in the content of thoughts, and the emotional responses. You may notice how personal identity and ownership are linked to this darker side: how the telling of stories blocks light through the claims of substance and identity... [Dynamics of Time and Space, pp. 328-9]

My practice notes:

For me, an example of experiencing the quality of darkness within thoughts and feelings is sometimes when I'm faced with entering a social situation with numerous people, and I feel shy, an impulse to hold back or pull back. Looking into that anxiety I see myself scanning the room looking for signs of danger that might justify this inner sense of threat.  

While this kind of looking is outward, it's a very narrow focus, a compressed and dark outlook that is closing off the fullness of the current available experience.  Realizing this, I can look into why I'm reacting this way and trace, in an instant, all these types of holding back behaviors to a childhood fear of my father, which then branched out to interactions with schoolmates and fellow campers in my early years.  Suddenly, that tracing reveals my pattern of thinking, of ‘being wary' and watching for negative intentions, and seeing the whole complex of self-constructed thinking, I relax, lightness and light enter my being.  I'm now open to the others in the room, no longer preoccupied with myself, but interested in the current unfolding situation.

  I'll try and describe the recent result of my TSK class involving the practice of looking at knowing as light in experience.  The description leans less toward the scientific precision of parsing, and more toward the openness of the poetic.  This post is a continuation of my previous post, Knowing as Light - with TSK - (Part 1).

This week I was working with Exercise 21 from "Dynamics of Time and Space", called Healing through Light.  The exercise asks us:

"Once you have touched the full experience of the pres­ence of space and time, invite into this presence a quality of light.  This light has no source; instead, it is a centerless luminosity.  In a sense it is nothing spe­cial--simply the openness that allows space and time to appear.

Comment from the book

Access to the light within appearance depends on acti­vating mind without fixation. On the relative level, this mind belongs neither here nor there. It does not occupy space or time or pronounce knowledge; it takes no shape and establishes no relationship with either exis­tence or non-existence.

In conventional terms, we would say that such a 'not-belonging' mind is simply 'not there'.  But 'not there' is itself a kind of fixation. Only if 'not there' is not so can 'there' not be.

Although we can speak of 'not there', it has no basis: no something that makes it 'be there'. Nor can the 'not thereness' of this basis be founded.  If 'no basis' has a meaning, it will become a basis for excluding light.  If it has no meaning, it will lead to the lostness of the dark.  Perhaps it is better not to focus on 'not there' at all.  As an alternative, we could say of mind and its experience: "Never born."

My practice notes:

I sat this morning before the sun rose with no purpose other than to sit without nodding off.  In the middle of the silence, a calm slowly dawned, like diminishing shadows in a valley. I came to a perspective where observing was spacious.  Space was more than just area between objects, but felt like a knowing of a valley of contours only because the light allowed shadows.  The light was awareness before individual differentiation.  Freedom from the pressures of daily identity and no need for moment-to-moment reassurance was noticed.  Noticeable by whom?  Noticeable to a shadow-self allowed to co-exist within the light, but which can become enlightened.  There is an alternating as mind process carries away thoughts and feelings between me and not me.  Observance alternates with object-less, concept-less knowing, the moments mix and entwine in recognition of light with shadows of not-knowing in a rhythm.  There is this sympathetic interweaving of rhythmic flows, like breath, one full of self, timed with intent and looking for things; then alternating with its focused release, emptiness, weightlessness, freedom from measurement and meaning - lightness.

I felt one moment my diaphragm was reflexively tightening as attention was gripping thought: Clenching it with body language as mental language carried me away with a story line - then sudden realization, 'clarity' - seeing the process.  In that seeing was letting go of the linearity of story; space opening into knowing space, the knowing capacity, the light... something like immense relief as in letting go an isometric clenching, but feeling that opening expand exponentially. 

In terms of color, I often see internal light (with eyes closed) as a glowing perspective, like a golden-reddish glow in the dark, as the picture above shows without any objects in it.  But often there can be blues, rust, white light, and others too.  Knowing has a warm and energetic feel when I allow a more open access to it.  While it's true, I'm looking with my eyes at the inside of my eyelids, however, not focusing on what the eye sees, allows a deeper, more occipital kind of seeing.  Beyond a certain point there is just light, until darkness is approached.  If total darkness comes it happens as 'a blackout', as if going to sleep, except I'm not asleep, just gone - no light; and when the blackout goes, the light of awareness returns. 

The blackout is curious to me, and Rinpoché says in the exercise, "If 'no basis' has a meaning, it will become a basis for excluding light.  If it has no meaning, it will lead to the lostness of the dark.  Perhaps it is better not to focus on 'not there' at all."  In this statement he seems to point toward the light, that the point of the time, space, and knowledge vision is in the light of knowing and not-knowing, and not the blackout, which is the absence of light and TSK.

---------------------------------------

Footnote:   

I've tried to make an obvious distinction between, on the one hand, a non-conscious 'blackout' where there is no light and no experience, and on the other hand, a conscious knowing in the light of awareness where not-knowing is also active, like looking at the moon, one seems to be the darkside of the other.  Going into the light of full awareness without preserving concepts or images, 'not-knowing' as 'a knowledge gap' becomes openness itself, which is the source of knowing, a pure, awakened awareness, and it is not the 'blackout' I spoke about where consciousness seems to lapse.  If there is any interest, I've written a little more about 'the blackout' experience (or lack thereof) on the TSK Pod, under Practicing the Vision, here.

Rinpoché says regarding conscious knowing in the light of awareness:

A 'zero space' before distinctions will appear to ordi­nary consciousness as a blank, unknown and unknow­able. But this not-knowing is simply an expression of ordinary patterns.  Not to know in this sense means sim­ply that we cannot give what appears a position within an 'order'; we cannot make it accessible to the senses or to logic.  Because we cannot rationalize it, we also cannot assign it a value or determine how to evaluate it.

Instead of accepting this not-knowing as the final word, we are free to go into it, looking for knowledge of a different kind. There is an opportunity to step back to a point 'before' the known world arises, and ask in a new way where we come from.

In making this move to a 'zero space', we have the opportunity to look at something that we ordinar­ily miss: We are so busy 'pointing out' and 'pointing to' that we never look at the pointing or ask after the source. Perhaps what appears is a creation of the point­ing process, or perhaps the pointing participates in implementing what is created in some other way.

Entering the neutrality before distinctions helps break the hold that distinctions have over us. Distinctions are seen to depend on positions and points of reference; when we choose, we are choosing within a presupposed framework that gives the choice meaning. At times this framework is spatial, so that the mind in effect 'bor­rows' the physical locatedness of the body.  At other times the framework is better understood in temporal terms, as when we engage in perception of a world that has been 'measured out' in advance.

Through cultivating the 'zero mind' of 'zero space', we can investigate directly the arising of conventional structures through which the self seeks to possess appearance--the 'feedback system' of recording, recog­nition, identification, and representation.  Continued practice lets us return to presentation before possession or position, undoing the momentum of identification.  [DTS p. 175-6] 

The 'blackout' experience was significant to me because it showed me in a lucid way a kind of beginning or 'edge', as if the switching on of the 'light of knowing', the 'zero space', before distinctions began to become evident and proliferate, it showed the process with clarity.  A little like waking up from sleep but more clear and brighter without any grogginess. 

Learning the difference between entering Consciousness without content from simply falling asleep, the former being drawn almost irresistibly into it, and the latter, from a position of alert readiness as feeling, identity and perspective all fall away resulting in void.  It is my belief that had there been a noise, a touch, or some other interruption I would have instantly registered that as conscious input along with perspective, identity, feeling, etc.  Regardless, some time later I did emerge from that void alert, as perspective, identity, as feeling returned.  You learn about what you are made of, what constitutes your contextual world, you learn that to open into openness is not a loss of anything.

For several weeks we've been working in class with envisioning Knowing as light, to consider light not only a physical phenomena, but that light also involves both what is seen and the one who sees, and that light and knowing are well, illuminating.  We are told by our teacher that when we see, the knowing capacity and what is known are inseparable in an especially powerful and self-evident way. 

Our teacher points to Knowledge of Freedom, in which Rinpoché asks us to call to mind as an example, an image of ‘a first car'. Then he asks, "What is the source of the light in which this mental image appears?"  That question gives a very direct way of pointing out the relation between knowing and light.

We are asked to do the practices each week allowing the light to be present, and to find this same ‘lucent' quality in all experience.  We're instructed to visualize light, or look for the quality of light, and see if we can make the light as bright and intense as possible.  An example from the Tibetan tradition is the light that is reflected off newly fallen snow.  The light should have the power to transform.

Here are my brief practice notes:

I started with a visualization.  I tried to imagine light without any source from a point in front of me, and then added recognition of the 'knowing quality'.  This seemed to dissolve a focus on positioning and the feel of 'now' expanded to include this light.  It was a very full feeling or perhaps I should call it an expanse of 'intimacy.'  I was feeling this intimate expanse and it felt at that moment, as a 'pooling', as though the surface tension of the self-structure that momentarily holds together relaxes, like a drop that dissolved into a pool of light, and this 'pooling' of all my senses was like a vast, warm liquidity, that is knowingness. 

One way I notice light as a brightening clarity of knowing space is to look not only with my eyes, which can place specific limitations on how and what I see, but to also allow for other sense perceptions to be included.  It is as though space expands in an illuminated way, revealing more; feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and opening to whatever arises.  Just looking out under the breezy leaves to the field beyond, the whisper of the leaves and distant traffic, the sun x-raying transparent leaves, feeling and tasting, knowing space is illuminated with the lights of appearance; space into space, and light into light, both unsubstantial and floaty, but distinguishable and subject to precision...all appearing in and as the light of allowing awareness.

------------------------------------

As Rinpoché says:  "...through practice, our usual anxious and con­stricting way of knowing will gradually be relaxed, and we can begin to see a new type of ‘knowingness'.  Our sensations and thoughts will then have a more brilliant quality--and in this process we will discover that the expansion of the senses and other knowings comes of itself, naturally.  As a further development...we may learn to awaken the vital and all-encompassing ‘clarity' within the body itself."  TSK p. 275

Words and a Cigarette

I mentioned in Part 1 of this series on linear time that the self positions itself at the center of experience and structures time around it, and that paying attention to these structures brings a 'knowing' that is not limited by them.  Attention to the self in action reveals this positioning, which simultaneously establishes distance in opposition to other objects and other moments in a linear time series.  In the comments to Part 1, jikishin mentions a Haiku that he wrote that I want to quote again:

taking place right now
is so long a string of words
worlds slip in between

I love this on its own, but it's also useful as a segue into the next point - linear time as language.  The human language is a means of communicating meaning through symbols. We use an alphabet and word symbols structuring them into coherence to communicate meaning.  In the human language a 'phoneme' is supposed to designate the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning, they are cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them.  An example of one phoneme is the /t/ sound in the word "tip", however, some linguists consider phonemes to be further decomposable into 'features', as being the true minimal constituents of language.  Features overlap each other in time, (like the fricative consonant sound when placing the lower lip against the upper teeth to say the letter "f", and 'suprasegmental' phonemes in oral language such as changes in emotionality that manifest in pitch and speed while speaking.

Looking for features and suprasegmental phonemes through the continuous and mostly unconscious use of everyday language reminds me of looking for unnoticed 'moments between moments'.  It's a diving deeper, ever smaller, into the continuous string of linear time that language presupposes. Speaking seems to involve an embodiment of narrative, and because there is embodiment, I think, there's a periodic touching of presence, an opening to knowing space.  Often while speaking or writing I pause and wait in the open moment for knowing space to present the words I want, in order to convey the thought I intend.  There is a connection there between past and future, perhaps an encompassing. 

I can imagine and experience while speaking and thinking verbally that at some point, in terms of sound, silence is exposed.  In terms of time, at some point there can be exposing of an open dynamic that is prior to activities of a narrator-self giving meaning to events by 'pointing' them toward a 'persistent' future, and  also the interpreter-self defining and labeling based on past 'pointings', as well as other basic self activities.  In terms of space, simply observing the process of mental narratives as self concerns relax, more room is exposed for observing, eventually revealing, what Rinpoché describes as the, "unestablished prior availability of unoccupied space".

The interpreter-self defining and labeling based on the past exposes the near continuous circular act of referring to prior knowledge, this repetitive referring activity seems the essence of rhythm.  On the other hand, the narrator-self gives meaning by incorporating what the interpreter-self has defined and labeled into intentions, navigating toward future desires (or away from fears). 

The interpreter circling the past and the narrator circling the future, each activity touching the present, like a vehicle O~O confined to a linear time track -- a self-propelled (rear axel, front engine) acceleration that draws the self forward.  Even though there may be other self-activities in play, just these two are enough to turn rhythm into momentum, and to flatten time and space into linear sequencing.




The narrator tells the stories that are essential to the controlling self, all based on the founding story of 'I am'.  From that point at the center of experience the self proliferates meaning and stories.  Here is a good description of the hypnotizing affect of narratives, which 'fleshes out' what is involved in "single-minded knowing".  In essence the momentum of the narrative uses linear time to flatten space and narrow experience by compressing focus in the service of the self's overall consolidating tendency. 

Based on the founding story of the self and the narra­tive structures it supports, a form of understanding arises that could be called ‘single-minded'. Whereas the ‘perceiver' observes from moment to moment, the self sweeps each new ‘momentary' image or event into the flow of the founding story's narrative, continuously sustaining and reaffirming the narrative. Each new ‘experience' is assigned a place within a web of needs, interests, situational patterns, and emotional reactions.  Knowledge fits into this web as a tool for assigning iden­tity or identifying goals, or as a vehicle for accomplish­ing what has been specified.  It becomes an item to be acquired or manufactured for use within the framework of the self's concerns.

When knowledge is thus subordinated to the ‘single-minded' momentum of the founding story, experience eludes illumination. The momentum of the narrative compels a linear logic unfolding in time in a linear way.  In accord with this logic and with the self's ‘self-understanding', knowing is bound to the predetermined truths of descriptive knowledge, improbably under­stood as based on the fragmented and momentary struc­ture of polar observation. As the narrative flows along, one observation identifies one specified quality; one subject takes in one point; one knower makes one judg­ment, resulting in one conclusion that is immediately linked to the next. A steady narrowing of choices in the end leaves only one option. The identical pattern plays itself out again and again, allowing only one truth, one perspective, one position.

In committing to the narrative, the self finds the basis for asserting its identity. Just as the perceiver depends on the perceived, the narrator depends on the flow of stories that its narrative sets forth. The ‘perceived', the ‘described', and the ‘intended' are all brought together to specify a historically determined world, and this historical construct is then acknowl­edged as the source of the temporal momentum. The self is discovered emerging from this historical matrix, like a baby emerging from the womb.

In this way, the self gives to its narratives an unques­tionable authority. Self and objects are placed on the same ‘objective footing', with the self at the center and objects as ‘useful' adjuncts. Both arise through a histori­cal conditioning that makes the past the source of what is real. The narrative commitment is reinterpreted as the truth of all that has happened in history, and it becomes a ‘fact' that truth unfolds only within the nar­rative structure of linear temporality.  Love of Knowledge, pp. 174-6

In class we were asked to read the following quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth, and in TSK terms inquire into our own experience of Time, and to relate that to the significance of the quote, and the terms "petty pace, the use of "syllables", the nature of "light", and the word "dusty"?

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Living in this way, the past in a sense, is always present with 'recorded time' as a legacy or lineage we carry.  From a position and identity we stake out as a self here and now, so we can refer back in time to the first object or syllable or moment up to the most recent 'last syllable', moment or object we have labeled and recorded in our narratives about our world and ourselves.  We can take and gather from all that we have accumulated and consolidated (our history and beliefs), and summarize what we need in order to imagine our intentions for every tomorrow. 

The problem with this is that our choices tend to be limited by our recordings, rather than opening to facing the present in a way that is not habitual or 'petty'.  In this linear way of living, our narrowly experienced yesterdays slimly 'light' all our limited intentions so that the future is guaranteed to remain similar and narrowly experienced.  We do this over and over, moment to moment, 'day to day', as if hypnotized by the rhythm and momentum of the linear direction of our lives from past to future, until the last syllable, or moment of our objective existence, 'to dust'.  And up until that last syllable:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more

However in TSK practice, when moving to the leading edge of the present, going directly to the point of arising, where the future touches the present, and adopting a welcoming attitude toward whatever comes, (when I remember to do that!) the creeping petty pace of linear time cuts its 'consolidating' ties with the  'dusty' past, and opens wide.
 

The following is an account of some ongoing experiences with opening time as a result of a recently completed TSK class on Linear Time.

 It was pointed out that at first-level structures of linear time, the self is positioned at the center of experience.  Paying attention to this structuring brings a 'knowing' that is not limited by these structures or the self.  Attention to the self in action reveals a positioning, which simultaneously establishes distance in opposition to other objects and other moments in a linear time series. 

As was pointed out in TSK class, objects appearing in each 'moment' are like beads on a string that holds them together.  The string can represent linear time, and the hole in each bead is the place we leave open (the moment) for the dynamic of time.  This structure can be very constricting.  On the other hand, with a non-positional way of looking, distance dissolves, it's not really there; like when a painting represents a whole, distance within in it is only imputed through a structured perspective, but it is not really there.  The self typically structures how we look in a limited way, presuming certain assumptions.

There's a TSK exercise called, "Moments between Moments", and the student is asked to, "Observe in your own experience the flow of time from one moment to the next.  If the mind is calm and alert, you may notice that between two initially observed moments A and B lie other, intermediate moments: Practice observing from moment to moment in a way that makes available, on an ever 'smaller' scale, moments 'between' moments."

Normally, I'm engaged in a stream of activity as time seems to fly by.  Just taking the time to observe this 'flying by' has a slowing affect on the rapidity of these seemingly discrete and momentary attention-getters -- it seems to introduce some space into the observation.  There are other times when I'm thinking about a problem and how to resolve it, after turning it over and looking at it from different angles and perspectives, and suddenly something I hadn't considered pops into my awareness.  What I hadn't considered could be considered a moment between moments along a stream or line of thinking.

However, becoming more calm seems to allow even more space, which seems to provide room for information from the senses that normally arises below the surface -- sounds of traffic in the distance, birds, subtle ringing in the ears, how I feel, and what and where I'm feeling in my body.  These could be moments in between the moments (A1 to A2 etc.) that I'm normally not tuned in to or focused upon.  More 'fine' or fundamental moments seem to be observed as I become more aware of, or open focus, to allow for the overlapping of the sense fields in knowing space.

  My wife gave me gourmet jellybeans for Valentines Day, the kind that have dozens of assorted flavors.  So I noticed chewing one, focusing and identifying the flavor as I turned it over on my tongue enjoying the sweet, specific taste, but before I finished it I caught myself picking up another to pop into my mouth.  I hadn't even allowed the fullness of the first jellybean experience to arise and reveal before something in me was ready to discard the experience and take up a new one.  The jellybeans of my life, my sweet moments, were being eaten up too fast by a tendency in me to gather, close out, and move on.

Looking for 'Moments between Moments' in the jellybean experience. 

Just naming it like that tends to isolate it from a more encompassing current of what was happening.  It isn't just about the sense of taste in sequence, there's more going on at different levels of subtlety.  There were the thoughts about the taste, of course, remembering flavors, judging them, the decision point to have another, etc.  But other senses were also operating if not directly focused upon.  The sense of hearing was registering the sounds around me.  The tactile sense was feeling body temperature differences, skin touching areas, etc.  Visually, I was sitting at my computer, peripherally there was the room and its contents, and the landscape beyond the windows outside.  The olfactory sense seemed neutral, but I think it was just the underlying scent of the familiar.  There was also an overall sense of overlapping awareness of all activity.  That overlapping awareness seemed like an opening out beyond body bounderies, and as that all was happened the linear series of eating consecutive jellybeans lost its linearity.  The sequential nature of experience was gone, position and distance was eliminated, experience was open and direct.

Investigating how the self engages in narrowing focus on time actually allows for the very emergence of an active, non-fragmented knowing (intimacy).  It's when I then take the read-outs that emerge from that non-fragmented knowing, and use them to support statements and conclusions about the world, that I continue the self's isolating and consolidating activities.  And one way to counteract that and open the linear progression is to inquire into who is observing and how, and what structures and limits are being assumed.

Here's a related quote:

"Concepts such as ‘progress on a path' reflect a particular kind of time and space in which that intimacy has been submerged into the structures of distance and separation, ownership and wanting. But the intimacy itself continues to operate; in fact the apparent ‘loss' of intimacy reflects a particular interplay of space, time and knowledge. Increased knowledge restores access to this intimacy. It reveals that the moment can be opened up, allowing space to exhibit a greater knowingness."  Love of Knowledge, pp. 387-8

(continued here)

 

As a result of further practice and some TSK class work I've done some fine tuning to the way I've been observing time at different levels.  I've returned to the activity of painting a watercolor to dive deeper into time to observe how the referential activity of back and forth 'pointings' between past objects (memories), and future imaginings of how my painting will develop, if 'I the self' (a consolidating tendency) in this moving present, take certain actions with color, water and brushstrokes on paper. 

I've previously described the 'Painting as Practice -- Transcendence of Pointings' as when the self gets out of the way and 'dissolves' as process takes over.  The dictionary indicates the use of the word 'dissolves' means the self would fade away gradually and disappear, but on closer investigation, and after my teacher, Jack Petranker's questioning: "...does the self perhaps go into hiding when it gets out of the way? Are there different levels of being aware of the flow of time?"  I see that the self doesn't just disappear, but does in a sense, 'get out of the way' as a dominating influence. 

The self as a 'tendency to consolidate' just seems to revert to a more subtle level, which does not subordinate objects and emphasize dominance of position or distance, even while knowing seems to continue to differentiate and refer, and that from a first level time perspective appears to simply 'hide'.  It seems that from a second level time perspective the self operates, but in a non-dominating and more inclusive way, where linearity is not a groove that must be adhered to, and where the first level linear groove of past-present-future seems to open up.  The point is that there does not have to be a complete transformation, or transcendence of pointings for the self to grow more inclusive (open)  and thus, result in a more satisfying experience.

I'm reminded of the following quote:

'Lower time' amounts to an attempted taming and appropriation of Great Time for egoistic purposes.  We have borrowed from Time all our energy and capacity for measuring, predicting, discovering, controlling, and communicating.  These are all distorted versions of Great Time's intimacy with Great Space and its evocation of Space's vastness.  But we have allowed ourselves such limited access to Time's dynamism that our little struc­tures are continually blown away.  Great Time exhibits something --thus showing the openness of Great Space which permits 'being' and 'happening' -- and then breaks it down to exhibit something further.  This series (of what from one point of view are misfirings) is the only pattern we know.  In fact, this pattern is what we are, so we 'go along with it' even if it can sometimes seem quite threatening.

It is not, however, a necessary condition, or even one that is ultimately true.  But given our 'knowing', it is the only way 'lower time' can express more of the infinity that is 'here', since what we can perceive of it -- moments -- are small and 'cannot hold much at a time'.

If we did not take time quite so much for granted, and were less object-oriented, it might occur to us to try to control time itself according to our desired ends.  TSK p. 137

There are many available ways of viewing the world.  These views or models are most often defined according to particular perspectives.  But few models are offered that are designed for us to open perspectives while at the same time fully confronting reality.  TSK is one that does. 

Recently, I was working with the subject-object way I normally structure experience.  I 'here' as subject, relate to everything else as objects 'there', and even relate to myself in succeeding moments as a remembered object.  Working with the TSK exercises I uncovered other levels of confronting reality, which relied less on the subject-object dichotomies and was more open, allowing, and less restrictive.  

Now I'm working with linear time and the way the controlling self structures experience in space.  I'm asked questions such as:  What is our relation to time?  Does time happen 'to' us?  Are we happening 'in' time?  Is the happening of our lives time?  Is it us?  How would you tune in to time?

 Observing my activities reveals I - 'now', relate to everything else 'then', which reveals a past-present-future structure of linear time.  I am constantly freezing time to take up a memory of someone, or a situation, to reference from a position I've staked out as representing 'here' and 'now'.  I also do this with thoughts and projections of possible future benefits, or alternatively, of what damage there might be if 'I' act in a certain imagined way back in the 'here' and 'now'.  It's a back-and-forth referral that continuously centers, and supports, this 'moving spot' I feel is 'me' that is controlling linear time, and the significance or meaning of the objects that arise -- like just remembering words to write this paragraph.  And most of the time I don't even notice I'm doing it. 

But when I do notice this process, I begin to see the narrow focus on time that is being allowed.  Noticing suddenly reveals there is a wider perspective, as if more space has been introduced.  Consider the analogy that the back-and-forth referral is like a presupposition or a limited robotic movement only from East to West that continues in a groove, excluding any possibility of consideration of movement from North to South, or toward any other point in between.  This linear time trajectory along past to future is 'self-limiting', and seems to be under direct control of the consolidating and organizing self.

 At the end of my last TSK course I described the process a little when I referred to Painting as Practice -- Transcendence of Pointings: I said, "The process of pointing continues from the memory of the singled out impression. I make sense of the developing landscape painting through a continuous series of back and forth pointings, assimilating the current version of the painting to the memory of the original impression, attempting to extract coherence as the painting develops."  This is happening while the self is centered in a kind of moving 'here' and 'now'. When the self seems to get out of the way pointings are unnecessary as time seems more fluid.  Time opens up, the restrictions of the past-present-future structure dissolves.  

So how can I tell there are other possibilities than just linear time sequencing?  I get a sense of it when the self seems to get out of the way while I'm engaged in doing something.  When there is intimacy or a transcendence of pointings, the subject-self seems to dissolve into the object (be it a memory, or a projected image), yet knowing still unfolds as objects relate and seem to know themselves.  If the self is present, it is at a more subtle level that does not subordinate objects and emphasize dominance of position or distance.

I've had 'the flow experience', normally hidden at a preverbal level; as objects and events flow while 'I' am momentarily positioned at the center as changing objects and events pass.  But then there's another level of time felt at the leading edge of the present, where the future seems to touch it, when the subject-self dominance dissolves, and even objects seem to dissolve into events as an active 'blooming', where the message is not observed from a position, but is embodied as a 'budding' presence, like the feel of inner fireworks blooming out of nothing in knowing space. 

During meditation I've noticed the deepest and clearest level of time as a 'pre-sequencing', where time's unfolding is 'spaced out', and there is no body sense, there is just a glow of knowingness.  These periods seldom last long for me, but they do seem to provide a kind of depth perspective when looked back upon from a conventional view.  The conventional view tries to make an object of that past memory, but the memory can't really be grasped in its original way, it's too wide open and 'quantum' in its 'fuzziness', and the limiting self can only seem to grasp objects.  This realization 'after the fact' seems significant, because it constitutes awareness that the self surrendered, where it gave up some of its territory and tyranny as the one who knows, and where knowingness made itself known, and time became multidimensional. 

In a sense, it begins to dawn on the conventional perspective that there is a way of being aware, or knowing, that doesn't exclusively rely on the controlling and normally dominant self.  This realization seems to allow for relaxing into the immediacy of experience.  I find it an enthralling invitation to be intimate.  And this relaxing of the self, and its incessant past-present-future structuring, can be more easily released and opened in normal day-to-day activities.  It shows that TSK time traveling is less about traveling to the past or future because we do that in our ordinary lives in an ordinary way, rather, traveling in time is realizing that we are time in a full way.  As Tarthang Tulku says:

"When fully appreciated, Great Time is seen to be a kind of perfectly liquid, lubricious dimension -- it is quintessentially 'slippery'.  For this reason -- although there seems to be movement and separate places to move to on the first level, and still more open, fluid possibilities of movement on the second level -- on the third level there is no 'going' and no separate places.  It is as though all the friction in the world were removed -- nothing can then walk away from anything else.  So, from a third level view, an eternity of 'straying' still leaves us very much 'at home', intimately united."  (TSK p. 162)

My friend Sandra was talking on her site (here) about how her approach to writing is similar to my approach to painting.  I described my approach in my last Blog.  I can see how that could be the case, for it's true of my writing also, (not that I'm particularly great at either) because it's more than just using the tools at hand, rather, it's embodying them, it's about allowing the full range of ourselves beyond conventional depths.  In my description of painting a watercolor it helped to use 'three levels' to clarify what goes on at different internal depths during that process. 

Normally, this is all happening at once and it can be difficult to distinguish what unfolding currents are related to what during the stream of consciousness.  That's why I like TSK as a vehicle to help sort out what's going on.  TSK also uses 'three levels' of time, space, and knowledge to relate to our experience.  It isn't that any one level is more desirable than the other, but that to operate exclusively at one level, without awareness and knowing participation in the others, we cut ourselves off from the richness of our own vastness.  

The first level, or conventional level, of experience is where we take our visual dominance that normally marks our external interactions between objects and things that we focus upon, and we internalize that way of looking in mental space.  Here we work with objects that are separate from ourselves as subject.  This is where distance is established between subject-I and all other objects- and all ensuing judgments and consideration is geometry.  We triangulate the imputed distance between objects of desire and the self, between memories back then and now, between what I currently lack and the projected image of what I want in the future, and so on.  All interactions are between 'things', strung out along points of linear time, it's a world of duality that establishes patterns and tends to crowd time and complexify experience.

Yet if you watch closely, you can observe another level that we normally ignore described as follows:

"As the act of knowing unfolds, the image also projects itself into those patterns, contributing the direct 'feedback' of immediate experience.  In this sense, the image of the object can be said to understand itself, in a process that develops sequentially in accord with 'feedback' and repetition.  The object in being known reflects the interpretive structure that knows it; the subject in knowing the object is modified by the object it knows."  Knowledge of Time and Space, by Tarthang Tulku, pp. 423-4

This is a key insight.  You don't have to use a TSK exercise to observe this, but I found it immensely helpful.  You can read more about that (here), under the section 'My practice notes'.  What happens at this level is that the 'self' gets out of the way of the process, the tendency to 'over think' something is suspended, along with the distance that we assumed existed between subject and object.  Experience is more direct, less mediated, richer, multifaceted, and multidimensional.  And why not, the boundaries of our assumptions, presumptions, and presuppositions have been preempted.  There is more openness available, and that leads into awareness of the next level; the spring from which our specific knowings bubble up, where we are confronted with the very knowing of our capacity to know. 

Magic

As a child I believed in Magic and collected tricks.  Eventually I put on little shows for my family.  I didn't realize at the time that the process of learning about tricks of illusion was actually eroding my feeling of wonder for the great unknown, and slowly replacing it with a mastery over my limited but growing accumulation of the 'known'.  The focus led away from magic toward a lifetime of artful manipulation. 

Many years later, after establishing a life for myself in business, I felt something was missing.  I painted and wrote as a hobby, venting a creative urge, but those activities at the time still didn't give access to the depth that I knew was available but only occasionally flashed.  I seemed blocked from engaging with it.  I read many books and meditated, and eventually discovered TSK.  A little about TSK (here).  As my friend Balder says, "while TSK truly does provide a new and compelling way to view the Kosmos, its rich, multi-faceted discussion of time, space, and knowledge is intended, not as a comprehensive "map" of reality, but as a point of departure for inquiring into and growing more intimate with the living, open, dynamic fabric of our experience." 

So, while I discovered meditation, it was TSK that gave me a way to inquire, to look within, to open the door to interior space, and in so doing, opened up every-'thing'.

Essentially, looking into internal space, can be compared to looking at external space, even past everyday images all the way to the stars.  We might use our eyes, Hubble or other instruments for the stars, but internally we use our own 'focus', which opens many ways.  Looking inward could be said to involve space, and an unfolding landscape and observer.  There is magic in our ability as human beings to do this.
 

The Magician
(see footnote below)

[Inquiring deeply into not-knowing], "we find ourselves embarked on a great adventure. Before we acted out our own dramas, raptly watching the play unfold beneath the glaring spotlights of our own restricted knowledge. Now uni­versal knowledge engages in a more fulfilling drama. A universal audience watches and the universe itself per­forms, engaging all appearance in the images presented by knowledge, the Great Magician. There is no longer any question of stopping short.

It is no ordinary magic show that knowledge pres­ents. The magic of knowledge is the magic of our own being. It is the cosmic show of space: the changes of the seasons, the dance of the cosmos, the times of our lives. As a part of the presentation, we can engage with knowledge intimately -- engage as lovers are engaged.

We have learned to think of knowledge as linked to distance: to standing back and judging coolly. Now we know that knowledge is something quite different. It is the love we feel for all appearance, the love that unites all appearance. It is knowledgeability without separation and without ownership. It is the performing of the play for the sheer joy of it. 

To perform magic, we start by taking into our hands the ‘can' and ‘cannot' of what is.  Holding both at once, we see that within the structures that reason and ratio­nality provide, reality is not what it claims.

This realization is deeply interesting, deeply involv­ing. We cannot, but we do. We did not, but we could.  We are not, but we continue to be. It is like the birds that suddenly fly out of the magician's scarf, or the elephant that disappears in plain view from the stage. A phantom body enacts the echo of reality, and we discover that we are fully present."  Dimensions of Time and Space, pp. 196-7

Inquiry and analysis let us look honestly at the pat­terns that shape our lives, investigating them and trac­ing them back to their roots.  Investigating, we find that these patterns are interrelated, supporting each other in a way that gives them a remarkable strength.  We see that our reality is founded in experience, our experience in interpretive concepts, and our concepts in beliefs that are themselves unfounded.

In the end there is nothing but beliefs, so thickly bunched that no one could ever hope to root them out.  We live in a no-choice realm; we are trained to perpetu­ate that realm, and we have a massive investment in verifying the truth of our training.  And so we do just that, affirming and transmitting it onward with each thought, each word, and each act.

Yet when we have undertaken this investigation and arrived at this insight for ourselves -- not accepting it because we are told that it is true, or because a certain chain of logic and reasoning seems to support it, some­thing quite wonderful happens.  Seeing only beliefs, we see no limitations.  Wherever we turn, we find beliefs hardened into convictions, and so into a mutually agreed upon reality.  Our suffering is a belief, and so is our pain.  Our conditioning and our isolation, our not knowing and our anxiety -- they are all beliefs.  With nothing of substance to block the way, we stand at the threshold of a remarkable freedom.   Love of Knowledge, pp. 373-4

                                      -----------------------------
 

Footnote:  The creator of 'The Magician' was generous to allow me to use her picture, however, she prefers to remain anonymous.  Should you encounter her work by chance on Gaia, she feels that itself will be magical.

 
There is an interesting TSK practice I like to engage in that is closely related to 'Intimacy'.  It's called Transcendence of Pointings, (more about that here.)  For me, it involves simultaneously participating in the linear unfolding of serial events while observing their non-linear presentation, all the while being fully engaged and present. 




I like to work with watercolors to paint landscapes.  This too can be a TSK practice.  The process from beginning to end is the implementation of countless pointings.  There is an initial impression, which includes (a kind of whole), much more than will end up on paper.  The initial impression was singled out of a continuous flow of impressions, but was 'caught' because of a special connection -- the way the sun touched the tips of objects highlighting them -- which triggered excitation and appreciation within me, and thus the desire to represent a likeness in an interpretive way with color and form on paper.

The process of pointing continues from the memory of the singled out impression to the choice of colors, to how to obtain the right shades and hues by mixing certain ones.  It includes what order to place them on the paper; to start with the lightest colors for background, and to slowly move forward in the painting with darker colors. This moving from background to foreground, and from light broad suggestive, but less defined strokes, to darker more detailed colors, is what clarifies what is suggested far off, and what appears in the shorter distances.  It gives nuance and definition to what perspective is meant to focus upon. These choices and pointings become ever narrower as the painting becomes clarified. In TSK terms, the read-outs from the initial impression in space and time, each shaped by the previous pointing, forces the reality of the painting to move within the circle of established possibilities.

I make sense of the developing landscape painting through a continuous series of back and forth pointings, assimilating the current version of the painting to the memory of the original impression, attempting to extract coherence as the painting develops.  "Shaped at every stage through a passing on and [adding of color], an interweaving and feeding back, the [painting] as it has been received becomes the accepted truth of what actually [appeared]."  The direct experience of the original impression gradually becomes subordinated to the emerging, specific landscape painting -- a new 'frozen' reality is shaped.

But there can be another level, where at some point the process becomes less about 'me' doing and controlling the painting, and more about the process of painting.  When this happens, in a sense, 'the painting paints itself'.  Process seems to take over at a more fundamental level and doer dominance is relinquished, to return and fade as needed, back and forth.  Pointings by a separated bystander-self are reduced to necessity or to a level that does not emphasize separation and distance, and objects touch and interact with themselves as they appear and develop in time and space.

But there is another even more basic level I sometimes get a sense of while I'm lost in impressions along the way -- prior to establishing 'I am here', and prior to pointing and doing -- where whatever arises does so with the allowing space that knows; a witnessing at the edge of time, where fundamental events burst into appearance without establishing anything, unconnected, and without meaning.  When I emerge from that freedom there is a new energy and clarity. It's like starting over fresh and clear and ready.