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inquiry based practice
December 2009 
Week 7, Generating Space
Davidu
I took the dog out for a walk just before turning in for the night. It was late, and everything was quiet, the storm had passed and the winds had been blustering for four or five hours. While she was busy, I looked up at the sky and it seemed to open wide. There were pale rolling clouds parting, and the sky was still tinged with a night-blue, and stars were twinkling. The moment I looked up I was 'impacted', space seemed to open from my head shooting down to my toes, and just continued on as if through the earth. What I normally maintained as distance was distorted, like a discarded construct. There was all sensation; chill wind and skin, and trying not to fall over backwards while nose pointed toward a brilliant moon. It only lasted a few moments because the dog was tugging at me to come inside. I heard and felt and saw everything there was for me to see at that moment, and I'm not sure how else to express that...
In 1995 there was a movie called "Powder", about a sixteen year old who is electrically super-charged, and had miraculous powers of perception, ESP, and healing. There is a scene at the end of the movie when Powder is running in an open field with arms out-stretched in an electrical storm, and the lighting is attracted, as if he were a metallic kite floating in the gathering storm clouds overhead. At a point this super-charged being meets with a sustained lightening bolt from the heavens and is carried up into the clouds and 'ionized', and thus, Powder is released, set free into the energetic space of the living planet.
This is a visual dramatization, of course, but it has subtle parallels with the experience and fullness of presence. Powder was set free from the life of small mindedness in a judgmental and painfully conforming community that surrounded and confined him.
Similarly, presence often sets me free of the superego whispering what I should be ashamed of or proud of, free of the ego's tendency to consolidate 'things' around ideas of who I am or want to be, free from my concerns for safety, free from a myopic self-involvement.
Presence opens experience; it sometimes feels like being jolted or super-charged, plugged directly into the living planet. In presence, the colors of crumbling, sunlit leaves can feel like ripples of energy, a visual tingling that carries over to kinesthetic sensory stimulation, and likewise, looking up at the blustery sky at night into deep space and twinkling stars seemed to dissolve my separating boundaries of 'confinement' (assumptions and presumptions), and those of 'identity' (particularly 'subjective' assumptions and presumptions), to simply expand self-imposed limits into space fullness.
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PRACTICE NOTES TABLE OF CONTENTS
Fall 2008 - Unit One: Inquiry, Space
October 6 - December 5, 2008
Davidu
1. Layers of Mind with TSK
2. Exploring Layers of Mind with TSK
3. Space of Memories of Layers and Contexts
4. Expanding with TSK
5. Expanding - Revealing the Field
6. Condensing Experience with TSK
7. Week 7, Generating Space
8. Tracing the Tendency toward Solidity
Balder
1. Layers of Mind (TSK Practice Notes)
2. Deepening Layers of Mind
3. Week Three: Exploring Space and Form
4. Week Four: Expanding Layers of Mind
5. Subject-Object Reversal (TSK Class 9)
Debyemm
1. Layers of Mind (TSK Practice Notes)
Winter 2009 - Unit Two: Thoughts, Stories, Self
January 12 - March 13, 2009
Davidu
1. TSK Course Two - Time (Thoughts, Stories, Self)
2. Week Two - Thoughts that Establish
3. I'm Telling (TSK Unit 2, Week 3)
4. Unit 2, Week 4 - Defining Stories
5. Models, Stories and Self - Week 6
6. The Founding Story of the Self (week 7)
7. Imposing Reality & the Cycle of Seeing, Week 9
Balder
1. TSK Online Course (Unit 2)
2. Watching Thoughts (TSK Class 2, Unit 2)
3. Telling Stories (TSK Unit 2, Week 3)
4. Telling Stories 2 (TSK Unit 2, Week 3)
5. Personifying Thoughts, Embodying Space (TSK Unit 2, Week 5)
Starlight
1. Adventures with Time, Space, Knowledge
2. Noticing Thoughts - TSK Exercise
3. once upon a time...tsk exercise
4. restoring multidimensionality...tsk exercise week 4
5. Memories, Models, Stories, Immediate Experience...TSK Exercise...
6. self interpretation...models...tsk exercise...
7. core self...tsk exercise...wk 7
8. self and world given...tsk exercise...wk. 8
9. Creating My Reality...TSK Exercise...wk 9...
Spring 2009 - Unit Three: Conducting Time and Knowledge
March 30 - May 29, 2009
Davidu
1. Objects of Desire - TSK Class 3, Unit 1
2. The Edge of the Future - Class 3, Unit 2
3. How Time Recreates - Class 3, Week 4
4. Time is Our Life - Unit 3, Week 6
5. My Summary of the TSK Class
Starlight
1. Objects of Desire...TSK class 3...unit 1...
2. on the edge of time...tsk exercise class 3...wk 2...
3. Time...Past...Present...Future...wk 3...
4. Opening up to Time...TSK exercise...class 3...wk 4...
5. Unending Flow of Time...class 3; wk 6...
6. Footprints in the Sands of Time...TSK exercise, wk 7...
7. Time Conducting Time...TSK Exercise...wk 8...
Access: Public
way cool expression David…thnx for sharing your experiencing…
i saw that movie too…great depiction of the fact that there is more to our existence than the accumulated ideas we have of it…and that those ideas can be transcended by opening up our own awareness of being…it is quiet freeing and amazing…joy*
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Star. I was telling a friend that in ”Dimensions of Time and Space”, Ex. 10, 'Space Arising', which is the next exercise after the one I was working with above, Tarthang Tulku says:
“Eventually this presence can become a ‘place' that you can identify and enter with ease, even though it still has no specific identity or qualities. We might call it the womb of space. Some people may find it fruitful to spend long hours there, familiarizing themselves with the spacious silence it offers, deepening their contact.
As you come to know this foundational ‘place', you can see how ordinary experience arises out of it. A sense of being becomes ‘being here'; from this arises ‘being here in time'. Presence becomes presence 'of ' something, which is then established and felt to exist. Existence becomes ‘I am', which is felt to be identical with the original sense of being.”
I think up to this point the course is pointing us toward a deeper or more encompassing understanding of space in our own experience, a knowing space where what arises switches from a 'fixed thing' focus to a more open one of ephemeral 'appearances'. This more open focus diminishes the reliance on the fixed nature of beliefs and value judgments, rendering them light and open and subject to further question, as confinement by these beliefs and judgments is released and knowing is free to engage in other ways of knowing, beyond that of a myopic self who claims ownership of fixed notions.
Best wishes,
David
David, thank you for keeping up with this TSK class journaling! I have not been able to, but will be posting something before long to try to catch up.
I really resonated with your descriptions in this blog, and loved the connections you drew to Powder. That was a fun film and I'm glad to be reminded of it. I may go rent it! Like you, I often do TSK practices while I'm outside, and I recognize this sudden, spontaneous “opening” and connection that you describe.
And this sentence: “In presence, the colors of crumbling, sunlit leaves can feel like ripples of energy, a visual tingling that carries over to kinesthetic sensory stimulation, and likewise looking up at the blustery sky at night into deep space and twinkling stars seemed to dissolve my separating boundaries of 'confinement' (assumptions and presumptions), and those of 'identity' (particularly 'subjective' assumptions and presumptions), to simply expand into space fullness.”
Lovely.
Thanks Bruce and Star for responding to my Blogs. I really appreciate that you take the time to read them and respond as you feel moved to do so. It means a lot.
Wishing you both a warm and happy Thanksgiving holiday.
David
i have been having a lot of success with not only being able to remain there quiet easily, but also with remaining there while interacting with others…at first, it was difficult…but the more it is practiced…and i become aware of my body…and the various feelings within it…the tensing and then becoming aware and relaxing…then it is almost like awareness just takes over that too…
i especially like to experience the opening up to space within nature…that seems to bring the most dramatic effects…but to even be able to do it in every day situations, with a less deeper effect is quiet awesome…
it is not as deeply felt when experienced while interacting with others, compared to when not…like right now while i am typing, i periodically have to slip back into it…but it is just a matter of practicing and remaining aware…much joy*
You’re on to it Star! Plugged into the alternating current ofBeing. :-)
YES…and it is beyond belief…pun intended…lol…joy*