Knowing as Light - with TSK - (part 2)

  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.

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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.