To start the TSK on-line 2009 – 2010 class, our teacher, Jack Petranker, had us "loosen up our inquiry muscles" so to speak.  We were asked to consider knowledge as not something we own.  In Love Of Knowledge, Rinpoché says:  “Knowledge is not what the knower knows.”  The problem is we are used to assuming, "knowledge is what the knower knows, that no one else can do the knowing."

The example of 'typing' was used to point to how often 'typing seems to happen automatically'.  Our teacher said, the body seems to know what to do, and the mind makes thoughts and words available.  The idea is to look at the assumptions operating here of my thoughts, my skills, my body and my mind.  What does this mean, and what is the basis for the claim of 'my'? 

For practice we were asked to try the following:  When the ‘I’ wants something (a snack, a break from work, words of praise, etc.) try saying no.  Don’t go along with what the 'I' wants.  What happens?

For the last few weeks we've continued to investigate the self in our experience by looking for the 'I' in operation, and challenging the 'I' by saying 'no' to what it wants.  Our teacher, Jack Petranker, says, we do this because once we see how the 'I' operates, we get some sense of detachment, better able to see with a more open and spacious perspective.  Consequently, there's more room to experience more fully, there are more options available, more possibilities present themselves. 

In our weekly conference call we discussed how every experience has a surface – the stories of the 'I' – but this is a layer of illusions.  Under this layer is more, for instance, in the morning we often experience a kind of waking up into the 'I'.  If you go deep enough you don't know who you are.  Who tells the story?  No one, there's just stories.  The 'I' is like a dictionary of itself, a self-referencing circularity.  When we let go of 'I' we gain a creative unfolding of experience.

A question was posed, "What purpose does the 'I' serve?  If the 'I' or 'self' is a construction, why is it constructed?  Why do we operate from this sense of 'I'?" 

At first I thought the self is a learned behavior that surfaces when as infants we begin to get a sense that we are physically different from our mothers. It's a process or skill we gradually become used to and more proficient as we develop over time and remember past experience.  If we didn't learn to differentiate ourselves from others and things, we would have tremendous difficulty adjusting to life, unable to distinguish what was safe or dangerous, unable to discriminate between alternatives or opposites. We would be continuously confused.

But while this may have some merit, a TSK perspective looks a little differently at the functions or activities of 'I'.  As I practice watching for the 'I' in my experience, I see it showing up in language.  It's an anchor word, used to label and pin me to a time, place, or identity, to 'fix' it in place or freeze it, so that I can attach other times, places and identities in relation to 'I', like a gathering of self-referencing ideas, or 'things'.  The 'I' seems to gather from there, accumulating in memory, available for reference in each new experience.   

The way I think, the stories I tell about myself -- who I am, where I came from, how the world is -- are all told from the perspective of this 'I' that organizes and gathers its experience around itself in time.  As Rinpoché says, the self is a 'consolidating tendency', a 'gathering tendancy'.  As such, it tends to reveal itself in these activities: objective self, perceiver, interpreter, narrator, and witness or owner.

• First is the 'objective self', subject to history and con­ditioning, to birth, life, and death. This is the aspect of self that gives self-identity its content: a personal history and a personality, a set of goals and purposes, a physical locatedness and an embodied nature. But this self—the self as object, with an identity and charac­teristics knowable by others—is part of the world 'out there'. It lacks the unique capacity of the self to occupy the 'here', which sets it apart from the rest of existence.

• Second is the self as 'perceiver', active 'here and now' in the present. Confined to the moment, this self lacks the power to shape, define, and organize experience.

• Third is the self as 'interpreter'. This is the self as subject in a world of objects, defining, naming, and labeling: the self of descriptive knowledge, knowing on the basis of the past. But... interpreta­tions lack the power to found themselves. A self reliant on them is in the end only another interpretation.

• Fourth is the self as 'narrator', the self of intentional knowledge… The narrator gives meaning to events by directing them toward the future...

• Fifth is the self as 'owner' and 'witness', validating experience and reality in validating its own identity: the self that underlies and guarantees the perceiver, interpreter, and narrator. This is the 'core self' whose existence is the key to all temporal knowing.  LOK p.170-1

I have been focusing my practice on watching for these activities, and found this way of looking at experience helpful.  As Rinpoché says:

"A single story may be fully formed, subtle, and intri­cate, or fragmentary and suggestive. In either case, it allows for the possibility of subsidiary stories, bars the telling of conflicting stories, and establishes a frame­work for later experience, defining the understanding within which descriptive and intentional knowledge operate. As stories interweave and grow more elaborate, parts slip out of view, too complex in form and content to be grasped as a whole.

The growing complication (and internal conflicts) of the web of stories can lead to a fascinated self-absorption. The self learns to turn to its own stories for gratification and to make sense of events. Tracing out the patterns of interlocking stories permits the creation of new, more comprehensive, or more satisfying stories, including sto­ries about stories, or even stories (such as this one) about how the story-telling mechanism operates.

Common to all these stories is the narrator itself. Who is this narrator that tells the tales that shape exis­tence? A clear answer is given: It is none other than the actor at the center of every story — the owner of each experience.  But the narrator is also none other than the audience that reacts to each story with emotions, expla­nations, justifications, and more stories.

…the narrator is none other than the objective self whose identity and attributes the intersecting narratives establish.  The narrator’s stories unite owner, actor, and objective self, bearing witness to their exis­tence and persistence 'over' time. The central narrative structures — "I am; I feel; I experience; I want; I act" — are the self-authenticating truth of every story.

The narrator thus asserts the self by telling another story — a founding story that makes possible all other stories.  For without an actor at its center, an audience in attendance, and a teller of the tale, no story could unfold and meaning could not emerge.  But this found­ing story is intended as its own witness: presented as the basis for self and world alike. LOK p.172

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PRACTICE NOTES TABLE OF CONTENTS

Fall Session - "Self in Question"
September 27th - December 13, 2009

Davidu

1.  The Self In Question – TSK Week 1
2.  The Self In Question – TSK weeks 2-3

starlight

1.  The Queen and 'I' – TSK 1

2.  Tyranny of I's...TSK wk 3

3.  Binding Through Identity...TSK wk 4...

Balder