Objects of Desire - TSK Class 3, Unit 1

Posted on Apr 1st, 2009 by

Desire - photo by Nick Owens

Our teacher points out: "No matter what we are experiencing, even if it's something as simple as seeing the flowers on the table in front of us...we make sense of it in terms of some story... in every moment we take a position, we posit a situation, and we impose meaning."

I saw in the last unit, specifically in the Cycle of Seeing exercise, but in others too, that stories while making sense of experience, also confine it through the self-structures and models I impose. This confinement manifests in part as time-structuring leading from past to present to future. I saw that this continuous cycle of referring from the past to the future tends to flatten out experience, while the fullness that is available is consistently overlooked. We've been reading about, and investigating how, 'descriptive knowledge' which is based on the past, describes the world and provides a web in which the self arises, and gives birth to linear time as 'intentional knowledge', and projects the self into a future. We're told the point of TSK is to inquire into the reality we live, "to see how time, space, and knowledge might be different from what we usually imagine", because our normal approach is inherently partial, restricted, and frustrating.

So this week we're asked to work with a modified exercise 19, Object of Desire, from "Love of Knowledge". Our teacher, Jack Petranker, asks us to observe our objects of desire:

"Do the exercise when you find yourself desiring something in the course of your day. It may be something strongly desired, but it could also be the little flicker of desire that leads you to reach out and have a second potato chip, etc. The idea here is to get familiar with desire in all its forms. You could also do the same thing with aversion or dislike. For instance, what is the feeling that keeps you from doing some necessary chore?"

Glow - photo by alsay

I wanted to observe my internal processes during different desires, and also during incidents of avoidance. Among other things, I observed the desire for an iPod, the hunger for lunch, the avoidance of anger and not wanting to display it, and desire for employment that was really a desire for some kind of financial security or independence. I even observed the desire to move out of the present to hang out in a space of imagined possibilities, in avoidance of the present.

I noticed, during a recurring desire for a 'thing', the tendency is to imagine myself in possession of it, in certain attractive scenarios or stories. I saw myself enjoying it, and there were pleasing feeling tones around the story. The pleasing feelings seemed to feed into a space that felt sort of lacking, a hollow that is almost 'itchy' for filling in; like not wanting to be here with what is, and hankering for something new. Avoiding something is very similar, but the feeling tones were different. They seemed to come from a desire to not want to feel uncomfortable, as I was immersed in an imagined story of how 'things' might be. Hunger, on the other hand, felt very basic or direct, but then I also proceeded to projections of filling the hunger, fulfilling the expectations that sprang from it.

Both desiring and avoiding seemed to emerge from concerns centered around my self-interest; there's a story from the past about the good thing I want or the bad thing I want to avoid, and there's a projection of a story in an imagined future; a space in which these stories are accepted as a possible future. The underlying feeling of a restless dissatisfaction seemed to motivate my-self to use these images as a basis to identify with the object, and a way of proceeding to act toward achieving the imagined desired object or avoiding it. I realized I could drop the self urges and just observe this process standing partially in it, and outside it, as an observer. The latter seemed like a way to encompass both.

I also noticed at times that it sapped my energy to want something if there was a lot of 'process' involved in the wanting (same with avoiding). So that at the end of investigating aspects round the desired thing (even though that seemed somewhat interesting), I still didn't have it, the thing was still 'out there', and I felt disappointed, frustrated, that the whole process was circular and a waste of energy.

A final point, I remember achieving something I wanted after much prior effort looking into it, it was a particular car, and I did feel the presence of it, and my involvement with it when I drove it. But after awhile the restless identifying with it, and the investigating process had concluded. There was little left to the imagination. In a short time I was once again ultimately faced with 'what is', and the urge to move away from it.
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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...

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Tagged with: Jack Petranker, Tarthang Tulku, Time Space and Knowledge, TSK, meditation, When It Rains Does Space Get Wet, Spirituality, Inquiry based practice, Transformation

The Edge of the Future - Class 3, Unit 2

Posted on Apr 9th, 2009 by

Davidu

Edge of the Future - photo by algo

Proceeding from last week, by looking at our stories and desires, we've been inquiring into how descriptive knowledge is anchored in the past and intentional knowledge gives priority toward the future, and how the enacting of these two types of knowledge installs a self at the center, who then begins the 'time-structuring' of referring from past to future. This structuring of experience by the self toward the future has an effect on the 'now': it insures a kind of poverty of the present, it tends to be overlooked, skipped, foreshortened, and unsatisfactory.

We are told we don't have to accept this structure; we can 'conduct time' differently. The exercise this week was taken from 'Dynamics of Time and Space', and says:

"The future transmits time's dynamic into being, and experience in all its aspects ‘embodies' this ‘future arising' of time... Young children seem to live in time directly, and there are times when each of us feels its energy. But as our world solidifies with the passing of the years, we lose touch with time's immediate power. Temporality becomes an external force, and knowledge fades. As this new, restricted time unfolds and we conform to its structures, we even forget what we have lost.

To rediscover the immediate feel of this connection, we can go directly to the point of arising itself: the point in each experience where the future could be said to come into being. Just there we touch an aliveness that can expand within our consciousness. The possibility emerges for a dynamic knowing, attuned to every presentation but limited by none of them." p.99

Edge of the Future - photo by gonzalo ar

The Point of Arising - photo by gonzalo ar

Sometimes, most notably during meditation, but also at other times, I have sort of inched closer to the breaking edge of the now, where the unknown openness of the future touches the present moment, where the seeds of the sensual bloom in allowing space, just prior to the process of positioning myself, and before assuming identity and the process of organizing data from referrals to memories, and flung-out projections of desires wrapped in stories. It is a delicate point close to the beginning of awareness when I am not a gathering self, but a presence, where organized thought has not yet taken form, where atoms of time emerge not as objects so much as waves of nuclear events of basic sensual happenings -- a womb of space and time.

There are other times, while walking in nature, for instance, a new moment emerges untouched, where the haze of thoughts and self concerns are blown away like dark smoke, and the seed of a new moment is born, freshly germinating from an impression deeply felt. Gradually, after the experience of such openness begins to fill in with thoughts and other consolidating structures, the open potential of the original moment thins out into a string of my usual desires and perpetuating stories. But I can sometimes choose to again orient toward the edge of the future. Reorienting toward the edge of the future seems to be free of inhibiting attitudes and concerns for safety, it's a feeling of open expectancy, pleasant anticipation without an object, an acceptance and trust in whatever emerges with an almost playful curiosity. It feels fresh, free, and new -- a pristine moment, a blooming seed of time.

Atoms of Time

Once in a similar exercise, I used this graphic to represent one experience at the edge of the future. The graphic suggests unfolding 'Time Emerging as Nuclear Form' in aware space. It represents my actual experience of feeling the 'oncoming' shapes emerging from the shadow of mental space; like walking in a heavy, driven snowfall at night. Once I recognized the subtle positioning of "I am here", my position seemed to drop away, and there was no separation -- I was bursting sensual form, that really seemed to have no visual correlation. It was perhaps more of an occipital feeling of bursting energy, like blooming fireworks in mental space - the raw feel of now. I think there's no visual correlate to these forms because they are not 'things', they are very basic events in glowing awareness out of which further events connect, unfold, and gather significance - where bursts of form are born; what my friend Balder once called, "the fireworks of creation".

So, the 'edge of the future' is not so much a boundary as a welcoming attitude; and not so much a place as an arising of the present. Whether in the midst of normal activities or deep meditation, it's not altogether where I look but how. It does manifest as the new, the fresh, and the revitalizing, or so it seems to me.

Note:  For the forms in the graphic representation, I could have used dandelion seeds, (seeds of a future potential) for they do seem vaguely similar, or fireworks in the night (for they emerge in brilliance and fade), but instead, I used a zero center with 16 extensions, (which seemed to suggest both), each extension terminating at another zero-point with a potential for connecting to 16 more extensions, and so on. I used the zero-point and 16 for their symbolic significance of the joining of the 'I' and the 6 senses, and the interconnecting potential as suggested in the book, "Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space".

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PRACTICE NOTES TABLE OF CONTENTS

Fall 2008 - Unit One: Inquiry, Space

October 6 - December 5, 2008

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

Balder

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

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Tagged with: Jack Petranker, Tarthang Tulku, Time Space and Knowledge, TSK, meditation, When It Rains Does Space Get Wet, Spirituality, Inquiry based practice, Transformation

How Time Recreates – Class 3, Week 4

Posted on Apr 23rd, 2009 by

Davidu

Edge of the Future - photo by Garry

For the last couple of weeks the class has been working with what it's like at the edge of the future. Asking: Can we see what it feels like at the open edge of infinite potential? Does that have a different feel than the way we usually think of the future, the way we usually project into a space our hopes, fears, assumptions, images, values, etc.? I sometimes have the felt-image when I look into the future in my usual way, I'm leaning into a wall of jelly; a gelatinous medium filled with interconnecting, sticky stuff. On the other hand, when I move to the edge of the future, and look with an open and welcoming attitude, there is a palpable vitality, like standing on the bow heading into unknown winds, the spray of the fresh and new hitting me full on.

Our TSK readings point to the usual way we look at the future; by gathering the past into the present moment, and then projecting the past into our ideas of a future. In the book 'Dynamics of Time and Space', it says regarding future moments, "...the part of the metaphorical timeline that comes 'after' the present -- are indistinguishable from past moments. They are the playing out of the past. We could put it this way: Although what appears now or will appear in the future has not yet happened, it has already 'happeneded'." [p.85]

The use of the term 'happeneded', suggests the notion of when thought is cast in iron, named, and becomes solid like concrete, coined, or 'habitualized', the way we think of ourselves and the world, so that in a sense it preordains and shapes the grooves of how and what can or will happen, in accordance with what has already happened to us and others. 'Happeneded' is like a stutter, we articulate by reanimating and duplicating -- stumbling in the present over past utterances. We proclaim, then live into the echo of our proclamations! Like prophets of the same, we take our stories for how it is, and how it will be is unwittingly foretold. "We are like a piece of music that has already been conducted: There is no chance to act or create anew. Time has passed us by." [p.85] As our teacher, Jack Petranker reiterates, "Nothing is allowed that has not already 'happeneded'. It is as though we are characters in a play, following a script. As this image (and those in the text) suggest, our sense that we are free is mistaken in a fundamental way."

For this week, we are advised how important it is not just to understand the reasoning behind how we use the past to structure the present and intend into the future, but to see how time creates itself from moment to moment by looking directly at the dynamic of this recreation. When we look directly at how we conduct the 'happeneded', the content is no longer engaged the same way, we suddenly shift to a different temporal mode with much greater clarity. To help us do this we've been given a couple of exercises to try.

1^st exercise - Often we use a lot of energy justifying or narrating to ourselves why we should or should not do something, why it's good or bad, worthwhile or not. Notice this tendency in operation, the narrative and stories, experiment with letting it go and just act. Also, set aside time each day to reflect back and notice times when you did this, either to justify a small action to yourself or in interactions with others

2^nd exercise - Take about 30 silent seconds or so and see if you can notice how one moment ends and another begins. Then, comment on what you noticed.

'Time Blossoms' Forsythia - photo by Garry

1^st exercise - notice how we narrate and justify to ourselves.

I am forever telling myself something. It's easy to notice when I must articulate to a loved one why I said or did something. Explaining myself to another is often how I objectify a feeling, so that I have an issue to deal with, rather than to just be swept along by the emotion or presumptions of the moment. I particularize what might be a wash of different, even contradictory feelings. On the other hand, noticing how I justify to myself I noticed something else. I tried to catch myself in the act, but I seemed to catch it just afterwards, or even later, but not in the act. This makes sense, in that to catch it, I objectify the doing of it, and to objectify the doing of it -- to set it apart from being lost in the flow of the narration itself -- I must stop and look back on the memory of it. And I see, "Ah, I just did it again!"

For instance, if in childhood I was often concerned for my safety because of a parent's unpredictable rage, I might tend to view the world as basically unsafe, and spend at least some of my time being wary about anticipated situations. My concerns for the future conduct the 'happeneded' by my preoccupation for safety. Or perhaps if in childhood I didn't receive the affection and attention I needed, if I was often left up to my own devices, then my 'happeneded' world building would focus on trying to fill an emptiness that feels impossible to fulfill, and so I might continually look to the future as a source of happiness, making plans for new experiences, the next new place to go, a new adrenaline rush. Always looking ahead, I miss the fullness available in the present, at the open edge of the future.

It isn't that planning into an idea of the future is wrong, it's realizing that conducting the past into the present and future without being aware of what we are doing, by relying on identity and position, allows only certain kinds of preconceived knowledge to operate.

The readings tell us: "To be and to be alive I must connect with the full dynamic of time. Coming to the future from the past, letting go of the past to open to the future: In the vital 'hereness' of the actual I implicate both past and future, which are 'here' with me." DTS p.86

'Time Blossoms' Cherry - photo by dolphin

2^nd exercise - notice how one moment ends and another begins.

Lately, I feel time hidden within the evident. The seed of spring has been emerging from the roan and russet contours of the winter soil. Each day has been like waking up to time-lapse photography; changes in the field out back have been dramatic. Cherry blossoms and lemon-yellow forsythia appear in the midst of diverse greenish shades surrounding. What's particularly interesting about this vision is that a glow seems to come not from a diffuse grey sky, but from the budding growth and tender colors of the nascent earth, as though there is a light inversion, a kind of gloaming from within. Spring is radiating out, time is unfolding, and I am none other than this.

I float along the visual plain to a specific point in the distance, I notice what I'm doing, and in that instant of reflection, the 'floating' moment became old, as a new moment emerged at this shifting. A green sloping hill slightly rolls into a field of abandoned cornstalks. Time rolls on like the undulating earth while focus, like a butterfly, is lilting and light. I notice what I just did; aware of myself and my 'doing', and the act of looking back makes a periphery for an objective past, and a hollow for the emergence of a new moment.

During this little exercise I have no thoughts of a future, no images projected ahead, but the unrestricted and unshaped openness at the future's edge is intimate. The 'between' of now, and the immediate past -- 'the transition' from one to the other is open.

This quote from Tarthang Tulku is particularly striking: "Between future unborn and past passed away, the transition does not stay... the pastness of time binds us only so long as we insist on position and territory; on a place of our own. We have staked our lives on our identity; invested all that we are. Are we willing to give up our position as witness and owner -- the one who claims and proclaims what arises?" DTS p.89

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PRACTICE NOTES TABLE OF CONTENTS

Fall 2008 - Unit One: Inquiry, Space

October 6 - December 5, 2008

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

Balder

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

Access: Public 4 Comments Print views (251)

Tagged with: Jack Petranker, Tarthang Tulku, Time Space and Knowledge, TSK, meditation, When It Rains Does Space Get Wet, Spirituality, Inquiry based practice, Transformation

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