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inquiry based practice
December 2009 
The Edge of the Future - Class 3, Unit 2
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
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
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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awesome expression and awesome pics! i loved this practice and have been so there in that perspective, on the edge of time that i have been floating…it has been amazing! lots of wonder-filled things have been happening but i have only made a few notes on it b/c i have been experiencing it…i really do well with the 'time' practices…they open awareness and free being in such a way that continues to amaze…that magic of the real is always waiting to be experienced…alive and free on the edge of time, dancing in harmony with all of being…great energy!
much joy, always, star…
Thanks Star! Glad you're having fun with the exercise. :-)
D