Reversing Flows in the Field

In our final week of the first unit of the TSK course, we are working with an exercise called Subject-Object Reversal.  I haven't been able to keep up  with posting my practice notes for the past several weeks, which I regret, but in spite of the gap in continuity, I'd like to post a few notes from my  inquiries this week.  If you'd like to get a sense of what we've been working on since I posted last, check out Davidu's recent entries, which I've linked below.

In general, we've continued to explore "space" in relation to the sense of self, layers of mind, perspective-taking, and the construction or enactment of experience.  As you might expect, some of these inquiries overlap with the "knowledge" aspect of TSK, and this week's practice is no exception.   One of the important TSK ideas we've explored in relation to space, for instance, is the field communiqué.  This term refers to the ways in which our experience is communicated forward -- to the active enactment of a worldspace, with its given "order," its limitations and borders.  This worldspace includes the "self," rather than being a product of it:  self and world are a co-emerging communication, a communication which is understood here as a certain "field dynamic," an emergent patterning of meaningful (if  also often restrictive or frustrating) experience.

Many of the exercises and inquiries we've worked with consist of not-doing experiments, in a sense:  taking a conventional aspect of our experience and somehow reversing or violating or opening it.  Subject-Object Reversal also asks us to do this:  to first take note of normal subject-centered experience, exploring the sense of being located 'here,' observing objects 'there' (physically, but also in terms of thoughts, images, etc); and then to experiment with reversing this dynamic on several different (increasingly  subtle) levels.  On the first level, we 'allow' the objects in our environment (including even abstract, 'meta-level' features of our experience) to be the knower(s), and ourselves to be the known.  Then, after  practicing this for a time, we make several subtle shifts -- for instance, allowing thought or perception to 'do' us rather than us being the thinker  or perceiver, or allowing embodied experience to be 'experience knowing us.'   Later, we are asked to challenge even the sense of inhabiting or "being" a constant, abiding point of reference, releasing our hold on self-image.

The Seeing Tree

I have been working with this exercise throughout the past two days, doing it as I take my walks, but also as I'm sitting quietly, or as I'm doing other daily activities.  Each time I've worked with this exercise has been different (I've worked with it before this class as well), but this week I've noticed two different ways it has unfolded.  In one, where I concentrate primarily on moving the sense of being a positioned observer 'out' into the environment, I have a definite sense of being held intimately 'within' a sentient field -- like I'm re-entering an animistic worldspace, surrounded by many different intelligences or knowing presences.  I start with prominent objects like trees and plants and various inanimate objects, and then move on to more 'background' elements like the air or the ground, allowing the sense of 'knowing' to emerge from them towards me.  I feel immersed in a sensuous field of relationship, an object held by innumerable subjects.  Sometimes these "subjects" were prominent, and the "body" was an object under these teeming gazes; and sometimes there was more of a sense of I-and-Thou, where I was also a small but knowing presence in this field.  This is most certainly an imaginative exercise, but it is revealing -- because it highlights the conceptual or imaginal dimensions of the conventional order as well.  It reveals, by contrast, the psychological contours of particular communicated meaning spaces: whether I am 'suspended' as a 'receiver' and 'responder' in a living, knowing field (with the senses of intimacy and reciprocity that involves), or whether I am an active knower apprehending and relating to various distant objects (with the senses of power and alienation that entails).

Knowing Field Diatom Shell

On subtler levels, which did not involve imaginatively transforming the world into an ‘animistic' landscape of knowing subjects, I simply dropped the sense of being the "knower" and explored what it would mean for experience to be experience-knowing-me.  Here, my focus was not on objectified knowers ‘out' in the world, but on the unfolding of experience (as impinging knowing events).  It is hard to describe what this subtle shift was like, but in general terms, I felt it first (somewhat conceptually) as "being sounded" or "being plumbed" by the world.  It was like my body was a particular "space of potential," and experience was the knowing sounding of that potential: the moist, cool wind on skin, the play of light and color and shadow, the rich play of vibration and sound, were knowings of me (in the intimate Biblical sense) -- an intercourse, an intimate exploration of me (as a fecund space of possibility), a ravishing.  Emerging experience was the light arising of bliss.  At different points, I would find aspects of my experience which were unconscious and more solidified - anchors for the knower - and I would reverse them, too, so there was an ongoing, multi-dimensional sense of "being known," "being thought," "being felt." 

Flowing into Stillness

Even now, as I write this while listening to the music of Arvo Part, I find myself oscillating between normal modes of subject-object experience, and this "reversed" sense of experience-knowing-me, though at the time there is not a strong sense of "me."  Just this receiving of richly layered knowings, like liquids flowing and curling into stillness.

I plan to continue with this practice over the week, and may write more in the comments section below.  This is a powerful practice, in my experience, particularly as it aims so directly at the heart of our habitual modes of organization.  For instance, this afternoon, an unexpected but apparent outcome of the practice occurred as I was concluding my walk.  I had been exploring the "no distance" insight of another TSK practice (where subject is seen as the inseparable glow of objects), applying it to the Subject-Object Reversal practice as Rinpoche suggests, when suddenly I felt a rush of energy run up my spine and out the top of my head.  This blissful current flowed upwards a moment, and I paused just to allow it to flow, then resumed walking.  At that moment, I felt a strong pressure on the top of my head and I paused again, feeling a bit overwhelmed and dizzy.  I took a few slow breaths, allowing the experience to unfold and pass, and then returned to work.

~*~

Photomicrography from Nikon Smallworld Gallery.


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

Debyemm

1.  Layers of Mind (TSK Practice Notes)

eternal now

Recently, Hokai posted a blog on stages and states of time awareness that invites us to take an integral perspective on what we mean by "the power of Now."  Here is what he says:

You know about present, right? While there are quite a few perspectives on present, including past present and future present, there are also developmental stages of presencing, simply conceivable as prereflective now, reflective now, and postreflective now. Everyone interested in the power of now, whether traditional Zen or Eckhart Tolle, would do well to distinguish between these three. Here's an example of a prereflective now, and since we all seem to know what reflective now means, postreflective now would be that which goes beyond both of these.

"Pre-trans fallacy" refers to the mistakes by the reflective in an attempt to identify the other two. It may be either elevation of pre- into post/trans or reduction of post/trans to pre-. To keep it simple, it's a mess.

But that ain't all, however. In each of these there is nunc stans, eternal present (i.e. dharmakaya for you buddhist folks) and the nunc fluent, flowing present (i.e. rupakaya, whether gross or subtle). And the relationship of these two, their separation/difference and unity/ identity will have to be addressed from one of those three nows. Gets interesting, right?

As Hokai suggests, the question of what constitutes the "Now" is not a simple one, and it is easy to make pre/trans confusions between pre-reflective and post-reflective forms of it.  If you would like more information on the contours of the pre-reflective Now, check out the following videos on the tribe mentioned in the essay Hokai cited:  Out on a Limb over Language; Missionary Linguist Loses Faith (Part One and Part Two).  The latter videos make an interesting point:  the pre-conventional perspective of this tribe actually leads them to reject a reflective-level faith like Christianity as "superstition."

What I'd like to explore in this entry is the contours of a post-reflective Now.  To do so, I'd like to take a brief detour and look first at the future infinitive, an alternative temporal mode to either "past-centered knowing" or "being in the now" that is discussed in TSK literature -- a view which I think is especially useful in the context of modern living and an evolutionary spirituality.  And then I will connect this mode of temporal knowing to an integral model of post-reflective presence.

The Future Infinitive

With the notion of the future infinitive, TSK challenges conventional understanding of the future as a continuation of the patterns and "prerecorded structures of the past."  Instead, we are invited to relate to the future, not as something that will "eventually arrive" or as a space into which we will eventually move, but rather as the unfoundedness and indeterminacy of being that is always with us.  Here is how Tarthang Tulku puts it:

When we refer our present situation to experiences that lie ‘ahead' in the future, we are conforming to the structures of the past... But this constructed future has little to do with the future as time's transitional indeterminacy: the future infinitive of time. The future as located ‘up ahead', projected forward along linear lines of force, is not the same as the future that will never arrive and thus never restrict.  It is in this ‘never arriving' of the future that the dynamic and power of time make themselves available (italics mine).

Tarthang Tulku contrasts the future infinitive with the future as the projected past; in this sense, knowing the future is to be distinguished from reflective-level anticipation or prediction of particular outcomes.  Rather, knowing the future is a form of active presencing which "encompasses" and is sensitive to time's creative vitality.  The future infinitive refers thus to the indeterminate aliveness of time, in which the "coming" but "never arriving" of the future presents "what is" as clear, vivid, precise, and yet also, in an important sense,  transparent and unfounded.

This indeterminacy finds expression in our knowledge, as an active not-knowing that allows for the new.  To engage the future infinitive is to embrace openness and the unknown in the midst of the familiar.  As Tarthang Tulku says:

To engage the future directly, we can practice com­ing toward the future with a way of knowing suited to its ongoing becoming. This means coming to each moment with an active not-knowing, aware that there is nothing to be known. If we are truly confident that "anything can happen," we will find that the future activates a powerful new dynamic for knowledge. Because it never comes to be, it opens immeasurable opportunities-not for ‘later', but ‘right now', in the heart of a time that is no long conceived in linear terms (DTS, pp. 93-94).

Glowing Infinity

Focusing on the creative indeterminacy of the future infinitive is not a repudiation of conventional structures of past and future, but a reconfiguration of them.  Tarthang Tulku suggests taking the infinity sign as a symbol for this dynamic, where the point at the center represents the present "crossing" of the shifting potentials and possibilities of the past and future.   In this image, we do not simply inhabit the center; rather, the ‘whole' of time is equally at play at every ‘point,' in the ongoing ‘transition' the openness of the future infinitive makes possible.  Eventually, as our understanding of time deepens and matures, we may find that looking at time in terms of ‘moments' and ‘transitions' is no longer tenable.

This way of relating to and ‘opening' time, which Tarthang Tulku explores more skillfully and in greater depth than I am able to here, is in my view well suited to an integral, evolutionary approach to spirituality or ‘being in the world,' as I think the next example will make clear.

Triple-loop Awareness

In an essay published in Integral Review in 2005, Anne Starr and Bill Torbert attempt to explain and illustrate a transconceptual mode of experience which they call triple-loop awareness.  This mode of awareness appears to involve both post-reflective experience of the Now and creative participation in the future, and so is especially relevant to our concerns here.

To get a better grasp of what Starr and Torbert mean by triple-loop awareness, I recommend taking the time to read their whole article.  I will offer just a brief definition for now. 

Triple-loop awareness or learning is conceived as a developmentally sophisticated, transconceptual mode of action and inquiry, incorporating and building on simpler modes of awareness (and temporal consciousness).   As first described by Gregory Bateson and later elaborated upon by Peter Senge, single-loop learning involves incremental learning and behavioral adjustment, whereby new skills and capabilities are gradually acquired over time.  Double-loop awareness and learning involve apprehension of and change in underlying patterns of organization, not just behaviors.  We perceive and work with process in addition to content.  And triple-loop learning, then, involves a transrational apprehension of all patterning or schemata - where conceptuality itself, with both its weaknesses and strengths, becomes an object of awareness.   As Starr and Torbert put it,

[Triple-loop awareness] is the simultaneous awareness of all 4 territories of experience - of the outside world, one's own behavior, one's own feelings and thoughts, and at the same time, a kind of witnessing of all this. It can be called presencing (Senge et al, 2004). Triple-loop awareness occurs in any moment when there's an attention distinct from the mental thinking, from the physical sensing, and from the objects of perception, infusing them all with an immediacy that is at once passionate, dispassionate, and compassionate.

This is clearly different from pre-reflective consciousness, where in one's embeddedness in the present, one cannot step outside of one's context to take in all of these rich territories of experience.  The temporal implications of this mode of awareness and learning are clear, as Starr and Torbert also recognize. 

In discussing these issues, Starr and Torbert propose a multi-dimensional model of temporality.  Normally, they argue, humans operate with either a zero- or one-dimensional time consciousness: either we are oblivious to time, simply caught up unreflectively in our activities, or we are aware of the linear pressure of time - say, while waiting for an appointment or trying to make a deadline.  One-dimensional time consciousness, which apprehends time sequentially, allows for single-loop learning, in which we are able to " identify a gap between act and intended outcome, then adjust one's action, and [possibly] achieve one's goal."  As they point out, sophisticated versions of this mode of temporal consciousness inform certain historical models of evolution and development.

Two-dimensional time contrasts with the narrow moving point-instant of one-dimensional time, involving an expanded sense of open presence - the timeless Now or nunc stans of the mystics, within which functions such as memory or anticipation arise as ornaments or expressions of the overall field.  Starr and Torbert suggest visualizing it as a "line" which intersects linear, sequential time, creating a plane - an open state which does not foreclose and may include zero- or one-dimensional activities (sensory engagement, sequential reflection and anticipation).

And three-dimensional time, then, "can again be imagined as orthogonal (the Z axis) to the plane defined by chronological time (X axis) and eternity (Y axis). The three-dimensional ‘volume' of time can be imagined as holding all possibilities, all the potentialities of the future and the still-hidden meanings of the past, some of which emerge into the present (become act-ualized) and then pass into linear, historical time... [This mode of time involves a] different quality of awareness that goes beyond a deepened sense of presence in the present to sensing oneself as a creative subject actively participating in midwifing an emerging future."

SDTS

This description, I believe, echoes the perspective explored in TSK as the future infinitive (as well as other perspectives not mentioned here), and clearly defines a post-reflective, integral mode of time-consciousness that should not be confused with the present-centered and exquisitely sensitive, but nevertheless still narrow prereflective temporality of the Pirahã.  It also appears to go beyond Tolle, in that it evokes a "Power of Now" that embraces rather than excludes - a temporal fullness in which thought, analysis, and evolutionary unfolding are accommodated, and the value of the past and future is not denied.

Towards the end of their essay, Starr and Torbert ask the following question:

Is it even conceivable that there is a spiritual / political / scientific / business inquiry and practice aimed at generating an ongoing triple-loop awareness that transforms outcomes through changing the quality of one's actions, of one's action-logics, and of one's very attention? To what degree can what kind of a spiritual community of inquiry support one's efforts toward a trans-conceptual awareness that can host all three dimensions of time - 1) the ‘line' of mundane, durational activity; 2) the archetypal, eternal, fractal "circles" of time that durational activity embodies; and 3) the ‘volume' of possibilities, from which spontaneous, imp-possible, trickster-ish violations of past pattern are drawn?

I take this as a vital question for the integral spiritual community, and it is one to which I believe TSK can meaningfully contribute. 

With thanks to Mascha for bringing this to my attention... Amazing work!  Playing with the unseen, carving beauty out of "nothing at all"...