Practicing Presence with TSK
Davidu
I used to enjoy playing with color on white paper, and I can appreciate it when others do. I loved the often stark difference between shape and undifferentiated space, and the play of colors that seem to flow and burst, one into the next. There's something primal and preverbal about it. It's exhilarating to see this done well, like listening to music when you are luxuriously immersed in it. There's the comfort of the space in which the melodic sounds unfold, as well as the tone and timbre of their rhythmic appearance. And it can be that way with color and form too.
There are levels of appreciation of these basic jewels of our sensual encounters. There is the pleasure of allowing the visual sense to absorb not only the objects that appear as they are, but also as what they suggest to us personally, subjectively, and also from a level that is unknown. Exploring the unfolding moment with color and form can be exciting as we inquire into it.
Like a meditation at the leading edge of the Now, looking directly into the oncoming future, as time unfolds and reveals as space allows, I have seen the future unfold as foundational facets, as bursts of form are born. I've seen metaphors used that it's like sitting at the edge of a kind of black hole, at the event horizon where experience is swirling, mixing and complexifying, but from this black hole, instead of just gobbling everything up, the unfathomable blackness is where the primary elements of our experience are also happening, as if experience is spiraling out of it. As if the hole morphed into a black sea of unfathomable depth, a sensing, viscous medium of knowing, out of which the future unfolds in the form of sensual nuclear events. From the fresh and new we add color by reaching back to the past, we mix our personal stories, preferences and fears, and smear them together in space, the knowing canvass and our focus.
Then, to release our focus, widen it, encompass space, depth and all that was, and face once again into the open, pristine, unknown and new unfolding future. There is the feeling of self, of me, a knowing of who I am, and so I have a position in the stream of the oncoming flow of feelings from all my senses, as though I am the bow of my own craft splashing through the surge. Then, there's an involuntary releasing of my position as self, and no longer is there a sense of me moving, there is just appearing. Like fireworks in the mind. 
"Thoughts take form out of awakened awareness and the ground of mind. This perception helps clarify why we are able to use thoughts and the other structures we identify to find our way back to awareness. It is something like letting the images in a mirror guide us to the mirror.
But even this image presupposes too much. It is more accurate to say that awareness is the alert and open clarity within each thought or each physical appearance that makes it possible to read out a specific content or identity. If we return to the image of thoughts as bubbles arising in a stream of water, we can say that water and bubble can be separated only conceptually. The actuality is that the shape and form of one are the shape and form of the other. As you investigate the arising of experience, you may glimpse a similar interplay in your own consciousness." Tarthang Tulku, Dimensions of Time and Space, p. 283
I wrote the following several years ago, it took quite awhile for me to understand that achieving a remembered or imagined state of consciousness has little to do with an open inquiry into present experience, and the dangers of entrapment that lie hidden within the attempt to achieve...
TSK exercises working with Time have revealed the emergence of form. Current ability to discern this emergence points me toward a focal setting on full-body feeling from all the senses, which locates me in the Now. The sensory input is Time continuously changing, and consciousness is differentiating the emerging forms. This differentiation is occurring at various levels, pre-thought and pre-verbal. If I choose to single out any of these forms, then thought is employed to further distinguish, and language is employed to further isolate them, which is in a sense what I am doing here.
This process of moving the focal setting on Space to allow Time to emerge as form seems to be a natural functioning that can be further developed. What would be the benefit of developing such a skill? How could life be improved by opening Space in order to learn more of what Time presents? Would that be beneficial personally, socially, economically, environmentally, politically, etc.? Would learning to see where Space and Time become form, where knowledge begins, as each situation emerges, allow us to act in non-habitual or non-reactive ways? Would we be more likely to act appropriate to an emerging situation; more fully engaged, in a more caring manner?
Time seems to be informing my 'knowing' that Space is not the 'thing,' that searching for peak experience is not a quest toward openness, but rather, a space 'thing,' a meditative high that can be a dangerous stopover, a so-called 'Hotel California' where we stay but find it difficult to leave, lost in a ghostly idea. I have wandered in those empty corridors for several years, looking for the door where there is none, and not realizing that I am surrounded by an openness for which no door is required.
This is why Tarthang Tulku points out that finding Space without understanding Time will not inform a higher level knowing. I now understand in an embodied way, peak experiences tended to fuel a searching, a kind of 'wondering' in the darkness, until Space allowed Time to introduce and inform, and I began to have an expanded understanding of their unfolding.
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Footnote: Thanks to Crouching Tiger who supplied the artist's web page, and on who's photo page I first became interested in Claude Vernet's work.
Access: Public
David, what a refreshing entry to enjoy toward the end of my day!
“I used to enjoy playing with color on white paper, and I can appreciate it when others do. I loved the often stark difference between shape and undifferentiated space, and the play of colors that seem to flow and burst, one into the next. There's something primal and preverbal about it. ”
Long before I knew of philosophy or spirituality, I knew deeply of nature, solitude, playing music and creating… Letting thoughts and feelings I could not articulate, flow through colors, notes and footsteps in the forest… Then to discover how they mingle together with science, philosophy and spirituality :) The imagery, deeper and beyond the aesthetic…!
There is something about the act of painting that feels timeless. The process of creating… When I've created in glass, sketched, painted…hours have gone by and I've not felt the passing of time. I discoverd this book (by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and was thrilled to read the experience articulated so well. Your entry reveals the spiritual and even deeper understanding of how this is possible, and further intrigues me about TSK.
I really like the excerpt you selected from p. 283:
“If we return to the image of thoughts as bubbles arising in a stream of water, we can say that water and bubble can be separated only conceptually. The actuality is that the shape and form of one are the shape and form of the other. As you investigate the arising of experience, you may glimpse a similar interplay in your own consciousness.”
When creating, time neither stops nor passes, and what is being created is both water and bubble and us and itself and something new all at once and separately! The Hotel California reference is a good one… How easy it is to go hours without eating sometimes, shutting out the noise and the news and the wars and everything relative…not noticing the sun has set until it is too dark to continue painting without turning on a light, as an example. Further than flow…in a state of such meditative high as you describe.
”I have wandered in those empty corridors for several years, looking for the door where there is none, and not realizing that I am surrounded by an openness for which no door is required.”
This sentence is so beautiful to read, and, to understand. I had a vivid dream about a cosmic door with no walls that literally and figuratively woke me up in this sense. What awareness our unconscious and subconscious experiences… Incredible…
Hope all of that isn't too green! The TSK book is on its way from the seller and I'm looking forward to this journey. I've long advocated that creating art (and music) is not an extra-curricular - it is a necessity and a part of Living, of experiencing and expanding awareness. But I never really knew how to express those ideas well to others… No surprise how passionate I've been about these subjects!
To discoveries! To unfolding…
Thank you,
Erin
Hi Erin,
What a lovely response! I truly appreciate it. I haven't read Csikszentmihalyi, but I am familiar with the flow, or the zone, and also the more fundamental source or awareness, which I described a little here, if you care to explore. It was really your link to, and Vernet's paintings that reminded me of the meditative experiences I described above, and that inspired me to put them together in this Blog. I thought the color and forms, visually and descriptively, played off each other in a beautiful and multidimensional way. And looking at experience multidimensionally is what TSK is all about.
I'm glad you've joined the TSK Pod, we need new faces. It has been a pretty quiet Pod over the summer. Hopefully everyone is busy practicing. :-)
Best wishes, and thank you!
David
Hi David,
It was my pleasure!
Something I love about interacting with others is the potential for remindings, inspirations, and sparks to flicker and twinkle softly, or brightly, as they may.
I have a small print of Vernet's Contraste hanging in my home. It was given to me by a friend and it was a pleasure to see how you've gathered some of her paintings together with your thoughts and TSK excerpts. Like putting words to music.
Would ”multidimensionally” allow for a poetic observation of exponentially enjoying her work :) More on the TSK Pod…
Very best,
Erin
David, Erin,
yes.the process of creating and playfully exploring world of forms, objects and zones of all kind..is such a rewarding one.
The flow experience-described by Csikscentmihalyi -is one stream of discovery.
Deep intitations with experiences at the limit another one.
Want to recommend this page:
www.myriades1.com
Another snapshot about really unlimited perceptions, perspectives and experiences.
Albert
Hi Albert,
Thanks for the link to that web site, I will explore it.
Zephyr posted the following on my Grapevine… but my response is too long for the Grapevine, so I'm posting it here…
Your time experiments, have you looked at holographic universe and time, and tests on rats show that memory is retained when different brain parts are removed they sort of spread over the whole brain holographically rather than one location.
Hi Zephyr, Yes, for example, Francisco Varela thought that a key point of embodiment was, ”the mind is not in the head”. It seems we behave as a coherent unity even though we may act from a specific focus that we may call 'myself'. A hologram allows the appearance of a three dimensional object to appear from the surface of a two-dimensional credit card, for example; a higher dimensional universe created from the information on a lower dimensional surface. String theorists might posit that our three dimensional universe could rest on the surface, like the froth of a pond, while a deeper dimension could lie beneath the surface. Or maybe our idea of mind rests on something more fundamental… From a TSK perspective, this appearing and unfolding could be considered as Time, and is observable at different levels. There's more about how TSK takes up the consideration of Time on the TSK Pod here.