In several days, I'll be starting the second unit of the TSK Online Course I began this past fall, and as before, I plan to post my "practice notes" as weekly blog entries.

This unit is entitled, "Thoughts, Story, and Self."  We'll be exploring the following topics:

* The relation of thoughts to stories and thoughts to space
* Ways to penetrate thoughts and thinking
* Tapping the multidimensional creativity of thinking
* Self as Story
* The Subjective and Objective Realms

We'll be reading short selections from Love of Knowledge and Dynamics of Time and Space, and will be doing various exercises and inquiries related to them.  While TSK has a number of practices that are best engaged intensively, possibly in a retreat setting, this online course uses practices that we can explore in the midst of ordinary, daily activities, without having to set aside any formal practice periods.

Davidu, Starlight, and several other Gaians will also be participating in the class or just doing the practices and readings, so we'll be linking our blogs (see below).

~*~

Note:  Members of Gaia participating in the 2008-2009 online TSK course.  See below:


WINTER 2009

Davidu

1.  TSK Course Two - Time (Thoughts, Stories, Self)

Starlight
1.  Adventures with Time, Space, Knowledge

FALL 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)

Bubble Worlds

For the first two weeks of the TSK course, we've been reflecting on the consolidating, worlding power of thought -- its capacity to establish substance and identity, to project familiarity forward, to construct seamless, bubble-like wholes -- and exploring what happens to 'space' through this activity.  To approach this question experientially, our practice has been simply to attend to thoughts as thoughts, to note their arising and movement, and to entertain the suggestion that thoughts, as the establishers of identity, are themselves unestablished. 

This exercise is a familiar exercise for me -- it was a regular practice when I lived in India -- and yet, in practicing it this week, I find it has taken me to unfamiliar, sometimes unsettling or invigorating edges of my experience.  In this entry, I plan just to post a few notes on insights and experiences that have arisen through this inquiry.

Over the past few days, I've found that thought has shown up quite differently, sometimes diffuse, dreamy, and unfocused; sometimes clear and crisp; sometimes vivid and charged with feeling.  Last night, as I attempted to meditate before bed and was feeling tired, I had a hard time finding the "edges" of thought and could not trace its movement clearly.  It seemed almost indistinguishable from other elements of my experience, and I found that after a few moments of watching it, I would be pulled in to a trance-like, magnetically attractive state -- a state that was full and strangely closed or 'occupied,' seeming to foreclose any possibility of movement.  I didn't notice this while in the state, but only once I was out of it and could see how my attention had been captured by it.  What's interesting is that I can feel this same gravity, this same semi-trance-like quality, underlying or accompanying some of my thinking throughout the day.

At other times, especially during the day when I'm practicing on my regular walks, I have been more alert and have been able to notice several layers of thought.  On the grossest level, there is internal dialogue, the reflexive self-talk which seems to be present much of the time (Tarthang Tulku describes such thought as "almost an unconscious nervous habit," and that feels right to me).  On subtler levels, there are faint images and impulses, inchoate conceptual/feeling tones, and "narrowing" or focusing intentions and orientations.  It is easy to notice internal dialogue as an "object" within experience, a conceptual "thing" or "movement" arising in the midst of non-conceptual things (whatever else I happen to be seeing and feeling at the time).  But when you begin to pay attention to subtler layers of thought, to thought as orienting intention, as the "insurer" of familiarity operating in the background, etc, it becomes harder to distinguish thought from the "whole."  Then, as Jack suggests when talking about thoughts as carriers of the field communique, it seems more like we are in thought.

Dark Branches

As I was exploring these layers this afternoon, I inquired into what thought establishes, and questioned that establishment.  As I held this question, I found "familiarity" begin to unwind a bit.  It became clear how the sights I was seeing plugged immediately into recordings, expectations, and those no longer held.  I found the environment suddenly uncanny, disturbing and attractive at once.  It was a grey, drizzly day outside.  The dark branches of the trees looked new, startling, a little menacing.  They were an unknown presencing -- still recognizable to me, of course, but somehow not the "same."

Later this evening, I went out for a walk again, and found simply that challenging "establishment" and familiarity, there was a shift from being amidst "objects seen" to a very fine sense of unfurling seeing, curling around on itself.  An ongoing knowing that did not foreclose itself, that did not reach to anything already established.  At one point, a thought arose that some things just couldn't be challenged -- they were too obvious.  The thought that came to mind is "I am here."  When I didn't accept it as given, I felt like something gave way beneath me; there was the sudden sense of a gulf and a stab of anxiety.  I felt a similar sense of dynamic, bubbling knowing emerge as the bubble of identity momentarily popped, but a familiar bubble-self soon re-emerged. 

I looked around at the gorgeous shadows of trees against a purple, misty light that seemed to suffuse the lawn.  I heard chimes on a neighbors porch and felt them lapping through my limbs like waves of mercury, subtle, almost painful in the pleasure they evoked.  The scent of meat cooking was round, palpable.  All my senses were alive.  Everything was knowledge, and newly unknown.

~*~

WINTER 2009

Davidu

1.  TSK Course Two - Time (Thoughts, Stories, Self)

Starlight
1.  Adventures with Time, Space, Knowledge

2.  Noticing Thoughts - TSK Exercise

FALL 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)

I first heard the story of Daniel Tammet, the savant and synaesthete with incredible mathematical (and other) abilities, a year or two ago.  Recently I just came across a video describing his latest book, Embracing the Wide Sky.  Check it out.

If you haven't seen any previous documentaries on him, they're worth viewing.  Here's Part 1 of The Boy with the Incredible Brain.

StoryLines Tree Section

For the third week of the TSK course, we have shifted our focus from thoughts to the stories that inform and inter-link them -- taking more of a temporal perspective on thinking.  As Jack points out, however, there isn't really a firm distinction between thoughts and stories:  many thoughts that engage us are already stories (stories are implicated in their content), and the history, the story of temporal lineages or sequences that underlie the arising of a given thought can be seen as part of the overall content of the thought-bubble itself.

For the exercise this week, we have been asked just to attend to the stories we tell ourselves -- the narratives we weave about our lives.  According to Tarthang Tulku, the interplay of interconnecting stories serves, on a conventional level, as "the dynamic that pulls thoughts toward substance" -- a movement which orders our worlds and assures us of "the way things are."  (This relates to the discussion of the field communique in the first unit of the course.)  Noticing my patterns of story-telling over the past few days, I was struck both by the pervasiveness of these narratives, and, at times, their compelling force.  And yet, like bubbles, when "touched" they also seem to pop in mid-air:  nothing much at all.

We do not often "touch" our thoughts and stories in this way, however, and then they seem to impel us with the force of a strong river current.  (I say "seem," acknowledging that I'm telling another story here!)  But this is what I found more than once this week:  myself in action, carried on the force of a narrative, and only afterwards becoming aware of the way in which my body, speech, and mind had all been swept up in its currents.  Sometimes the compelling story was innocuous, as when I found myself laughing out loud as I walked down the street, caught up in a memory of a funny incident at work.  Sometimes it was more like an automatic reflex or preprogram, as when I heard a whirring noise behind me and I stepped quickly out of the way, expecting a car behind me and then seeing it was a bicycle.  The action took place without conscious deliberation, but looking back I could see the immediate chain of associations, a narrative string of images, that was "implicated" in the reflex.  Functionally embodied story. 

But at other times, the narrative and its consequences were neither innocent nor helpful, as when I found myself reflexively dismissing my son after a small incident.  I had called him over to look at something, and when he came, he ended up knocking some important papers on the floor and scattering them.  At first, I ignored that, trying several times to direct his attention to something fleeting I wanted him to see before it was gone, but he was focused on the papers and wouldn't look.  Suddenly, irrationally, I found myself telling him just to forget the papers and to go away.  He went away, a bit hurt and confused, and I immediately looked at what had led to my sudden reaction.  The "story" present here was a primal one:  the hurt of being ignored, of not being listened to.  But the story was also a deeply buried one, and it showed up in me more as a bodily state than a verbal train of thought.  Deeply entrenched, it acted through me unconsciously - another embodied story: "People ignore me and do not value me."

When I attempt to re-live the incident, I see how shrunken my awareness was at that moment.  It seems like it was restricted to a small space immediately around my body; I actually was not seeing my son as I spoke to him, but only my pointing finger.  Time pressed on me with an unyielding urgency:  there was only one option open, to push away.  I am reminded of Tarthang Tulku's description, in Knowledge of Time and Space, of the intensification of time and the indensification of space: here, this primal story enacted a restricted time and space that allowed for no alternatives.  I replayed a charged, hurtful childhood experience, and created a new one for my son.  (I have spoken to him since then and apologized for sending him away so abruptly.)

Beyond these three incidents, I noticed (and reflected on) the interplay of stories on a number of different levels throughout the week.  Often, I found myself weaving together memories and expectations into various justifying, clarifying, or reassuring narratives - finding substance in them, a place to "be."  Sometimes I would notice, while watching this activity, that "stories" appeared to me as thin, transparent overlays on top of the "reality" of the moment - the concrete situation in which I found myself.  So I would take a step back and look for the "story" in that reassuring solidity, sometimes experimenting with ways to challenge it too:  saying, "This is a dream" (as I used to do when I practiced dream yoga) or "This is a story."  I practiced shifting perspectives, and reflected on the ways that Wilber's "quadrant perspectives" could be seen as different narrative streams, different ways of "storying" the world.

While listening to the radio, I marveled at the stories about Obama I was hearing from right-wing radio hosts and callers - how they saw him as menacing and cunning, a Manchurian candidate with plans to destroy the country.  Just an hour earlier, I had been listening to a Hindi song praising Obama as a "treasure of virtue" and a symbol of hope for the world.  What stories we weave!  How they sustain and guide us, and how they carry us away.

[Go to Part 2]