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TSK
December 2009 
Imposing Reality & the Cycle of Seeing, Week 9
Davidu
For the remaining two weeks of this course, we've been asked among other things, to continue to observe how we employ stories to create our reality, and to work with TSK Exercise 28 -- A Cycle of Seeing, which says:
Select ten 'things', including objects, qualities, and other common contents of experience, such as a car, an orange, a piece of music, a tactile quality, etc. Once you have formulated a specific and ordered list of such items, contemplate the first one until you 'see' it quite concretely. Then go on to the second, the third, and so on until you have completed the list. Then repeat this cycle of 'seeings'. Continue this over and over with the same ten items, paying close attention to the factors at work in such 'seeing'. Notice everything, but at the same time keep an open mind about what is involved. In this way, you may discover new factors while re-evaluating the old ones.
Spiral Milky Way
I will summarize and give a couple of examples; the Cycle of Seeing exercise demonstrated for me, many of the elements we've been learning for the past seventeen or so weeks. Selecting the ten 'things' put a focus on how I model experience to 'short-hand' each 'thing' from a countless selection of choices in order to refine and easily understand and recall them. I also saw how I construct stories by constructing the linear list of 'things', and then spinning it, the way I spin my daily stories of identification, desire, and worry from waking till falling asleep at night. What a revelation is revealed from the 'revolution'! Working with the exercise actually creates the space and sub-spaces in which to construct the context of the ten 'things', a spinning world that I cycle over and over... and the phrase comes to mind, "To see the world in a grain of sand."
As I continued through the days to spin this micro-cosmos of ten 'things' more fascinating effects occurred. While I didn't see a 'self' manipulating the creation of the 'things', I did feel the presence of the narrator, controlling the process of gathering, organizing, deciding, valuing, discarding, and the interpreter by setting up a distance between itself and the 'things'. And the distance was actually felt as a tension, a gravity of 'will' holding the things together made out of a value system I seemed to have set up in advance without fully understanding the consequences of doing so. The consequence was that the 'values' narrowed my focus and attention. Such tight control was maintained until I became good at spinning and I got sort of cocky about how easy it was, and then something extraordinary happened, which I will explain in a moment.
But first, regarding choosing a 'thing', I found a good deal of the practice was about deciding what 'things' to choose, and what aspects about them I should remember in my images. Each thing had to be easy to remember, so I thought they should be significant and close at hand. As 'things', I named loved ones, my pet, and home, and so on. I chose what was easy to remember, and what I liked about what was easily recalled.
Visualizing was initially difficult, for instance, with eyes closed trying to visualize my puppy, I had to distinguish what I was seeing behind closed lids, from various amorphous forms, and swirls of black and specks of color, from a mental seeing of my puppy. I also kept vacillating between what final image of her I should accept as one of the 'ten things' because there were countless moments to choose from. Finally, I settled on an image in a photo that I've seen thousands of times. Once I settled on the 'thing' and all it's 'sub-things' were set, it was established as an object of my mind, but each time recalling it was never quite the same, and never clear and crisp. I was reminded of the exercise where we recalled space in memories. The 'thing' was like a TV image with poor reception, blank areas, and distortions and incomplete parts, but it did become a 'model' or shorthand image that stood for my puppy. And I realized that I had just directly observed the normally unconscious process of how I make models that fit into stories.
I saw directly how, this participating self, as a 'controlling process', is involved as subject, refining the 'object', based on countless unseen feelings, choices, and referrals coloring their relationship. And how the self in one moment holds a fixed word-symbol like a place-holder, then tries to fill it in, referring back and forth to me 'here' and out toward the developing object. I think I was exerting such a tight control over the process that I couldn't quite fixate on the object precisely because the linear unfolding of Time, the subject, and the object itself seemed to keep moving and changing.
The value scale I set was; good equaled 'easy to recall,' and bad equaled 'hard to recall.' Every choice based on that value system called the subject-self into play from a predetermined perspective. I saw that my value judgments were 'self-assumed'; they were presuppositions that not only defined but limited my 'seeing' of the 'things.' I had not realized my initial unquestioned attitude about what was good or bad kept me in a repetitive one-dimensional tunnel-vision, sifting through models, like mental photographs. And that little world was essentially a flat, spiraling context that seemed to keep my focus confined to boundaries of my own making.
As I said I got better at cycling and remembering the ten 'things' and visualizing their detail, and so my tight control seemed to ease up. As I kept spinning the 'things', and relaxing control, suddenly, I lost the subjective perspective, I forgot 'me' and seemed to become the 'thing'. The value system in place dissolved, the constructed nature of the 'thing' seemed to 'deconstruct' the values, while at the same time retain its objectness. All of a sudden there was tremendous freedom and a sense of expansion or opening as I became free to be all I knew of the thing, in a more full and richer way.
While spinning without the tight control over the things, when I looked at the 'thing' called my house, as I was trying to decide what view of it to take up, the question popped up - why be physically confined to a specific perspective? Why not keep spinning but loosen up this view? The moment I asked this everything opened, and the subject-I position, who was doing all the organizing, spinning and controlling, just seemed to become the house. This new unrestricted 'I' now moved through it no longer confined to any specific location. I 'was' the insulation, the carpet, moving up the fireplace. I 'was' the eves; I was the microscopic space inside the brick and concrete. I was shocked and exhilarated. I thought - why confine myself anywhere? When I asked that, I dissolved into the maple tree outside, and became more intimate with it than I ever imagined. I moved through every molecule, every pigmented leaf, crust of bark, and thirsty root. Its wood was the meat of my muscle as I moved into the earth, deeper through layers of striations... I continued this way unbounded.
There was an amazing freedom and expansion, a radical opening of my conventional perspective. I asked myself - what was the implication of such an opening? I obviously didn't physically travel through my house and a tree down through the earth. But in some sense I did, I did so in the sense that I traveled through my constructions. All the 'things' I put together from millions of parts were no longer separated into parts, but seemed to retain their wholeness in spite of their parts.
It seems I just changed perspective. The subject-I, the controlling narrator-self that began this exercise, did so with self-limiting assumptions about the objects that it was constructing in its world of the Cycle of Seeing. There was a process, and as it progressed, focusing on the process exposed structural limitations imposed by the 'constructor.' This allowed more space (openness, intelligence, knowing capacity) to adopt a more encompassing perspective, and this new perspective is now directly aware of how the structuring self tends to limit itself. I can now watch for this tendency, I am better able to confront it in operation going forward.
The Cycle of Seeing exercise was a demonstration of what had often been an idea and a once in awhile feeling, that I am the world, and that most of the world I know is my own creation, made of models and stories that are shared with, and shared by, others. And that being aware of this seems to infuse a new freedom, and space, in experience; more transparency to the fixed, and more relaxing in the immediacy of the moment.
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...
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