In class this week we were asked to become familiar with the elements of space dimensionality by exploring thoughts and ways to open and loosen the categories we focus on.  Exercise DTS 9, tells us, among other things, to explore thinking:

...practice seeing the content of each thought as though it were a character in a stage play, dressed in its distinc­tive costume. Apply your inquiry to the experience of thinking (including associated feelings, images, and so forth) rather than simply to the content of what is expe­rienced. Later, bring into the exercise the content and significance of each thought.

In doing this practice, you may find that thoughts have a ‘body' that extends beyond their content; that the awareness of the mind and the openness of the heart are present as a kind of aura surrounding each thought. Practice expanding awareness into these domains. As you open them up, you may touch residual pockets of tension or emotionality that can be released in the course of doing the exercise.  

Observing thoughts and sensations in this way generates a spacious quality... This more subtle focus will help you see how space openness is partitioned through assigning attributes and characteristics and taking them seriously.

As you become aware of these trends, the partition­ing activity slows down, and fewer partitions form. Since thoughts and perceptions are less crowded and jumbled together, they can expand, allowing more space.  Eventually, whatever appears opens into space, while thoughts dissolve into the mind.  Though events con­tinue to arise and to present themselves, nothing is pro­duced through this arising. As you become familiar with this way of appearing, you may notice that you partici­pate in experience differently. Free from the momentum that proclaims identity, you can open to silence.

                                                        View from the Porch

My practice notes:

Sometimes I get the clearest sense that thoughts continue, as if from a spigot, yet I have no involvement with them at all, like when I awake in the morning.  It's that period just before full orientation in 'my world' has taken place, a kind of sensual 'zero-point'.  It's almost like rising up from beneath them or from a space prior to them, as if prior to putting on the fabric of my robe, or prior to cloaking or surrounding myself with clothes.  This awakening feels like openness which gradually, if I observe closely, begins a sense of 'I am', which takes on the concerns from which I left off the preceding night before falling asleep.  Then, as I continue waking, noticing 'where' I am orients me in a location, the familiar surroundings of my bedroom, and then, 'where I am in time', becomes important so I can assess where I need to be in the future, and how long I have to get ready; travel time, what to wear, what to be sure and remember to bring with me, and so on, because 'by this time', I am thoroughly engaged in, and engrossed by, my world.  I'm cycling and reinforcing; don't forget this or that, and while I'm over there I can stop at... etc., my world of thoughts, my stage and scenery, my cast of players; my contextual world assembled around 'I am' and 'I am here'. 

Another example of observing thoughts and how solidly they establish my contextual world, unless I take the time to step back and observe how they are doing this, is a current situation of mine.  Due to the economic times I'm trying, like many others, to come out of retirement and find work.  The process of searching for employment, preparing resumes, and interviewing, can be stressful.  The thoughts about what to do, and how to do it, continue to cycle, pick up anxiety and worry, and create a kind of tightly focused internal maelstrom.  When I step back, knowing these are worrisome thoughts and not hard facts (things), they lose some of their wind and force (momentum).  I have more space to be present, and notice thick globs of snow falling in the cornfield outside my window. Everything has a white dusting, there's a crisscross pattern of falling flakes; a slight slant to the left close up, and driven to the right out by the pines, as air flows freer further from the 'structuring' I sit within.  The moment is peaceful yet pregnant.  Suddenly, crows set down on maple branches, a stark contrast against the white flow.  I'm watching and listening to the silence of the snow, and mildly curious about the winged raiders as they lift-off headed for the next look-out.  Silence and space; "free from the momentum that proclaims identity"; a silence I was led to by observing thoughts.

It's nice here, noticing and falling into the silence; becoming the blanketing snow.  I'm just not thinking about job hunting right now, there will be time enough for that construction.  I'm aware I must plan, but now I'm just in-tune with unique flakes falling by the trillions, the sensual fullness of perception, and the system of planes and contours, gradation, and tonal density; moving dots screening white sky, washed-out distant trees, and tan cornstalks outlined in white.

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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...

This week we moved from a focus on thoughts to a focus on stories.  Our teacher says, "what appears to us in the present brings with it 'the lineage of its arising'... the usual temporal sequence, in which the present arises on the basis of the past, is just another part of the thought bubble." 

For example, ordering a piece of pie at the diner; from seeing it or thinking about it, I'm ordering an idea (my thoughts about pie).  I enjoyed pie like this before and want to enjoy it again.  I eat the pie, I engage my sense of taste, but also my memories, I might compare the current taste and judge if it is as good as the remembered experience of pie.  I'm comparing an experience with a memory.  What makes it real for me seems to be all about the degree "I" am involved, my thoughts and stories about what I accept as real, for "me".  But what I accept as real for me often seems to change as do my stories.

I seem to be surrounded by stories.  I tell them, and in a sense, they tell me.  I can think of how I am my story, the whole lineage of struggles and triumphs, the forays into the unknown; the fearful confrontations, and the chasing after desires.  They parade before me, like trains out of tunnels from the past.  I am so and so, and that story requires that I behave like him.  It is my shifting story, my measure, and my guide, as I recount from the past and project a future -- stories are linked to stories.     

This week I received news my Grand Aunt passed away after 95 years, so I'm immersed in her story and how it intertwined with mine throughout my past, and how I must attend her memorial service next week.  Stories of my mortality swirl with memories, cycling with the memory of her.  Also this week, the ongoing story of searching for work continues, and while I engage stories about my Grand Aunt and me, underlying them is the anxiety of finding a job, linked to so many imaginative stories of poverty, searching, measuring up, and so on.  

Every morning, it seems, I'm aware of constructing my world as I wake up, orienting myself in place and time, so I can project myself in imaginative space to where I will be.  I pick up stories as If putting on my clothes.  I remember them from yesterday and recycle them and reorder them, reinforcing my place here.  Underneath every story retold is a substantiation of the essential story of 'I am', and that backs up my location as a sensory body 'here'.  Grounded in my senses, wrapped and bundled in my stories, I feel real and tangible in time and space.  

Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) pointed to the heavens and humanity's relentless quest for knowledge:  "With increasing distance, our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly.  Eventually we reach the dim boundary the utmost limits of our telescopes.  There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurements for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial." 

Tarthang Tulku Rinpoché points inwardly calling our attention to explore how, "Substance takes form through stories that translate zeroless space into dimensionality... Stories... enact dimensionality."  (DTS p.61)

From these two visions, I'm drawn from the farthest reaches of the known, using time and distance, to the depths of my being where distance is deconstructed, and dissolved.  Where I can step back and observe my stories, luxuriate in the space this affords me, and open to what is unconstructed, to a sensual connection at the root of language and telling of stories.