My Summary of the TSK Class

In summary then, we spent the first nine weeks inquiring into Space, attempting to see beyond content, to see into the layers of our own mental activity.  I observed how I put together the content of my own experience, looking deeper beyond surfaces of 'things' where a process of layering is going on -- sensual input, and patterning of that information seemed to flow in space.  I saw directly how I created 'sub-spaces' to remember and process 'things'.  Then, Space revealed more; not just distance between things, and around ideas and images, but space as an allowing medium, an aware field.  And then even 'things' imagined or remembered seemed to become transparent, flimsy, not so set or fixed, in fact, they began to be seen as space too, as space itself became aware or knowing.

We explored aware space as a 'field', within which, as perception happens, and there is an unfolding from a point along a linear path, there's what we might call the 'field communiqué' transmitting forward to its parts, like the way rules to a game include certain kinds of activity while excluding others.  In this way 'field communiqué'  ripples out from a center, and seeks, through referral, to control or conduct what is focused upon.  I observed an often vague sense of where I wanted to arrive, through my intent, as I embarked on various expanding scenarios.  I gradually realized that the constant circular referring to 'things' gave me a sense of solidity, so that it became easy to get carried away from space awareness toward fixed content.  I learned there are simple exercises that can generate space, which can refocus awareness back to an allowing and more encompassing perspective.

I wrote in my practice notes:  "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 -- appointments, upcoming events.  I pick up stories as If putting on 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."  But I also discovered that opening space by inquiring deeper into my thinking, my internal dialogue seems to shift perspective to a different and more spacious level, where other possibilities can be narrated.

I saw that I 'inhabit' stories, they were what I normally identified with, they gave me a sense of place, they were a kind of vehicle that carried me through time, while models were a little different.  Models were an abstraction that explained things, but I could not inhabit them.  A model was a short-hand summary for a story previously understood for the way things are.  Linking models to stories increased the bandwidth, so to speak, of the stream of thoughts.  But as our teacher said:  "Stories are just stories.  No story can be the last word, the final truth. Yet that is exactly what stories claim.  The magic of our being is that we are never bound by the story."

For the final nine weeks the class focused on 'conducting time and knowledge'.  I saw that inhabiting my stories and the self-structures I impose permit only certain kinds of 'things' and events while excluding others, like the rules of the 'field communiqué' discussed earlier.  We read about, and investigated 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', that projects the self into a future.  We're advised 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.

We were introduced to the idea of the 'happeneded', 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.  Our teacher said:  "We all operate all the time with a 'conceptual' understanding of our own experience that limits what this experience can be, and those limits must first be expanded or set aside." 

We discovered that we could reorient our conventional perspective of the self by going "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."  Reorienting toward the edge 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.

By taking a perspective at the open edge of the future - the 'future infinitive' -- self-projecting concerns into the future were halted.  The present, thus, proceeded openly, without the ownership and location that normally comes from triangulating between me, the past, and an imagined future.  Here was a modulation of focus, present to both the self's 'coming-out' tendency as well as the melting of its frozen positions.  In a sense the now contained the past and the present, and the future-infinitive provided the open, potential of the not-known.  And it was from this open attitude toward the future that the sense of aliveness came, filling the present to the brim.