StoryLines 2 Tree section

In my previous entry (see Part 1), I reported on a number of the different "levels" and contexts in which I found story-telling to be playing itself out, but I didn't unpack these instances or offer much comment on how I understand them within a TSK context, so I'd like to do that here.  Or begin to do so.  Because I have the sense, at the moment, of standing on the edge of vista which I have glimpsed as a whole, but which I have not yet teased apart in a way that I can clearly describe or articulate.

Taking the time this past week to attend to the various ways I "tell stories," I felt on more than one occasion that I was essentially entering into the territory of Cognitive-Behavioral or Narrative Therapy -- mining for the core beliefs and cognitive frames that shape and guide my experience.  In CBT, the aim would be to identify and relinquish maladaptive cognitions, replacing them with more functional ones.  This exercise in itself can be quite powerful and healing.  The TSK inquiry I followed this week could certainly serve these aims (once I was able to perceive maladaptive or "outdated" stories at work, I had the opportunity to frame new narratives, new interpretations), but the focus of TSK is different:  it encourages investigation and identification not only of the particular historical stories we tell, but of certain meta-stories that appear to support these narratives -- stories of substance and identity.  How do they play out in our lives?  How does their enactment impact us and our well-being?

The picture above, as in my first entry, is a cross-section from a tree -- a well-known symbol for enfolded history, for the embodiment of narrative, like tangled lines of braille.  In so many ways, we also embody the narratives of our lives, in the shapes and lines of our faces; the light and movement of our eyes; the scars and tensions of our bodies; the habits and patterns of our speech, and the metaphors we use; the images that arise unbidden to mind; the states that wash over us and color our experience or inform our action; the clothes we wear and the relationships we form and the paths we pursue in the world.  In focusing on story, rather than "memory" or "thought," I experience these dimensions of my being, not merely as static texts or recordings of a given past, but as active pronouncements -- multi-dimensional enactments of narrative streams, like an oral story line, repeating yet never quite the same, catching me up each time it is told anew. 

In my previous entry, I described the embodiment of narrative on the level of reflex:  practically, allowing me to respond appropriately to an oncoming vehicle; dysfunctionally, leading me to irrationally and painfully push away my son.  I mentioned them because the focus this week is on how the interplay of stories appears to lead in the direction of substance, of a particular dimensionalized space of meaning or experience, with the limitations that entails.  In the case of the reflex, this is especially apparent.  In re-enacting my childhood story of feeling ignored (un-valued), I found myself bound in a very tight time-space-knowledge configuration, one which radically altered my experience during its re-telling.  From a CBT perspective, I could call the buried beliefs behind this reaction to light, question them, and perhaps find more appropriate ones to replace them.  But TSK asks me also to look at the relationship of story-telling itself to the "architecture" of emergent experience, suggesting that stories, in establishing the dimensions of "how things are," yet remain unestablished, non-dimensional. 

In other words, I can learn to challenge a particular story and replace it with a more convincing one; but can I also shift my relationship to story-ing, learn to somehow apprehend emergent story as story (neither dismissing it nor attempting to contrast it with something "more real")?  This is one of the central questions we are exploring in this course, and I will be returning to it in subsequent entries. 

For now, I will close with the following from Tarthang Tulku:

To imagine a world in which reality depends on constructs does not mean retreating into fantasy. Instead, it means entering that world, with its prevailing logic and its presupposed order, as fully as we can. Can we allow the governing vision of our present way of being to unfold within us? Can we savor its subtle blend of flavors? Can we explore from that perspective the ways in which we conduct our lives?

Because we rely on concepts, we lack imagination; because we lack imagination, we accept as real the conceptual structures of the world we currently conceive. What is more, we lack the power to imagine that it could be otherwise. Even our attempts to find ‘imaginative' solutions to problems are limited by our concept of what imagination is.

A good way to shift away from these limits is to imagine richly what it means to live in a world shaped by our own constructs. All that we encounter and that shapes our lives seems so substantial, so unquestionable. If this sense of substance originates through our thinking it is so, something truly magical is at work.

Bound to concepts, we have lost sight of the magical operation of mind that makes the conceptualization of reality possible. But imagination can reclaim for knowledge the power implicit in this wondrous way of being.

From the moment we imagine our way into the heart of our own being, the limits on our knowledge begin to lose their hold. It is not a matter of discovering secret knowledge or arriving at revolutionary insights. We simply find it available to us to imagine that what has been constructed could be constructed differently. With that simple move, the past and its structures, the self and its identities, no longer bind us so tightly. The gateways of the possible open to a new way of knowing.

To imagine fully that we conduct our own reality into being is to imagine the power of imagination, and thus to multiply that power. Imagination discloses that we are free to shape appearance and to choose how we respond to what appears. Once we accept that we are already at home in this new world, and that we are actually exercising our creative freedom in each moment, we can take responsibility for a knowledge that has been available always. We can conduct experience toward being, entering a realm of vision and wonder where we can dwell in deep and joyful peace (Tarthang Tulku, Visions of Knowledge).

                                                           ~*~

WINTER 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)

Balder
1.  TSK Online Course (Unit 2)
2.  Watching Thoughts (TSK Class 2, Unit 2)
3.  Telling Stories (TSK Unit 2, Week 3)

Starlight
1.  Adventures with Time, Space, Knowledge
2.  Noticing Thoughts - TSK Exercise
3.  Once Upon a Time ... 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)

Roots in Space

For our practice this week, we continued attending to the role of stories and narratives in our lives, while also taking up a formal exercise from Dynamics of Time and Space:  Exercise 9, Generating Space.  The first part of this exercise is similar to several practices we explored last Fall, but then the third part of the practice takes an unusual turn.

A. Sitting quietly, observe what is present and what is happening around you, noting how objects and events appear within dimensionalized space. Focus your observation on characteristics of the sort that we usually connect to space. Start with the attribute of distance or separation; then go on to such qualities as ‘between' or ‘inside' and such phenomena as edges and borders.

Initially, just become familiar with these elements of space dimensionality. Later, you can explore ways to open and loosen the categories you focus on so that they no longer function as firm distinctions. As such conventional space distinctions come under investigation, space itself becomes more spacious. You may notice that whatever you encounter in space shares in this newly spacious appearing.

B. Expand this way of making experience more spacious into the activity of perception through which objects become available. Each of the five senses-seeing form, hearing sound, smelling odor, tasting flavor, touching solidity-can become more spacious and open. Explore each in turn.

C. You can discover this same dynamic in the activity of thinking. As a method for exploring this dynamic, practice seeing the content of each thought as though it were a character in a stage play, dressed in its distinctive costume. Apply your inquiry to the experience of thinking (including associated feelings, images, and so forth) rather than simply to the content of what is experienced.

Later, bring into the exercise the content and significance of each thought.  In doing this practice, you may find that thoughts have a ‘body' that extends beyond their content; that the awareness of the mind and the openness of the heart are present as a kind of aura surrounding each thought. Practice expanding awareness into these domains. As you open them up, you may touch residual pockets of tension or emotionality that can be released in the course of doing the exercise.

When I had come across this exercise in my earlier study of TSK, I had always skipped over the last part of it, mostly because I didn't relate to it and I wasn't really sure how to work with it. But now, in the context of our exploration of story-telling, and after just having watched a movie related to these themes, I found it easier to make sense of this practice and I've enjoyed playing with it over the past few days.  I still don't know if I'm practicing it as intended, but in TSK that's not really a concern:  there is no presupposed "should be," apart from entering the flow of inquiry and trusting the knowledgeability of the moment.

I was actually a bit skeptical of the practice when I first started working with it this week, particularly the suggestion that I would find an "aura" around each thought, and that "expanding awareness" into these domains would release emotional tension.  And I struggled with the practice in other ways, as well, resisting the "reduction" of certain thoughts simply to "stories," fearing that such a move would isolate me in some way, maybe by putting me in a schizoid space of dissociation, or that it would otherwise deny or invalidate aspects of my life that I value.  For instance, early on I bumped up against these fears when I realized that I wasn't willing to have the thought, "I love my wife," rendered transparent by this exercise.  Calling it a story, transforming it into the pronouncement of a "stage-play character," felt threatening, demeaning, reductive.  It certainly could have that effect.  But rather than letting these concerns stop me from practicing this time, I decided to just make them part of the inquiry -- to acknowledge them and yet remain open to whatever unfolded. 

Image08

The practice surprised me in several ways.  The first surprise was how easy it was for me to personify my thoughts, to visualize them and transform them into distinctive characters, almost immediately as they arose.  My normal inner stream of verbalization transformed into a form of picture-thinking, in vivid dreamlike detail.  As thoughts arose, they carried with them emotional tones and intentional attitudes that helped me translate them, quickly, into distinctive characters.  This felt similar to the Big Mind or voice dialogue process: touching the many voices and presences that inhabit my psychic space - the critic, the narrator, the hurt child, the dreamer, the lover and poet, the analyst, the director, the angry boy, the appeaser, the aesthete or sensualist.

In the midst of this play of voices, I sometimes felt a twinge of fear, recognizing the plurality of my consciousness and the potential for fragmentation or disintegration.  I responded to this by letting the fear emerge as another character, creating space around it while also allowing it to continue with its pronouncements.

The second surprise for me was just how quickly this practice seemed to bring stillness to my thought processes: as each thought became a character with a voice, and as each affective tone or pressure underlying thought was similarly transformed -- "rounded out" and embodied -- I found that my stream of thought seemed to lose its compulsive steam, slowing down and sometimes opening onto moments of relaxed appreciation. 

I had not expected that "characterizing" thoughts, making them "players" in a story, would also help them emerge so fully and dynamically.  They became simultaneously more fictional and more present.  At times, this sense seemed to emerge spontaneously as I was going about my daily routine, looking out at the trees on campus, walking past a small lake -- a sense of luminosity, where thought and vision were equally vibrant and constructed, like flowers rooted in space.

Earlier this afternoon, while feeling frustrated by the heavy, frantic holiday weekend traffic and a tight schedule, I found myself awash in negative feelings.  They were present but unfocused, only partially acknowledged.  As I became aware of them, I felt into the knot of tension, which was largely in my forehead but which also spread out into my face and chest, and let this feeling emerge fully embodied as a character.  I saw him vividly, fuming in a contracted position, and I let him express himself - playing out his role, giving dramatic voice to his feelings.  As I (he) did so, the feeling of frustration quickly began to transform and dissolve.  A rich palette of feelings "bubbled through" and I expanded my attention to encompass and "enact" them.  Joy and wonder took the stage as the fuming man retreated, and the spacetime of my drive across town opened, becoming something playfully creative and new.

Eph Forest Stream 800

Recently, through an essay by Ron Purser (a professor at San Francisco State University and a writer on TSK, Gebser, and related topics), I was introduced to the fascinating virtual art of Char Davies.  In the essay, Cyberspace and Its Limits: Hypermodern Detours in the Evolution of Consciousness, Ron discusses the potential for VR technology and interactive digital media to undergird a collective cultural shift to integral/aperspectival consciousness, as the development of perspectival vision and art in 15th century Europe helped support the transition from mythic to mental consciousness (using Gebser's terms).  Ron suggests that many current VR technologies (what he calls VR1) actually support a hyper-modern turn in consciousness -- a form of hyper-perspectivism, Gebser's "deficient phase" of the mental-rational structure -- but the recent emergence of creative, deeply interactive virtual media (VR2) may help support the collective evolutionary shift in consciousness and space-time perception that Gebser and Wilber envisage (and which TSK also describes).

In this blog, besides highlighting Ron's essay and directing interested readers to it, I wanted to introduce Char Davies' work.  Davies has created two fascinating immersive virtual environments, Osmose and Ephémère, both of which allow participants to interact with luminous, responsive, multi-layered worldspaces, which provide "an intriguing spatio-temporal context in which to explore the self's subjective experience of 'being-in-the-world' -- as embodied consciousness in an enveloping space where boundaries between inner/outer, and mind/body dissolve."  This is accomplished, in part, through the unique user interface -- a motion tracking vest, which is responsive to the user's breath and balance, allowing for a fuller, more embodied sense of environmental immersion than standard joysticks or data gloves. 

Osm Tree Pond 800

The first virtual installation, Osmose, was designed by Davies as a vehicle for exploring embodied consciousness in relationship to space (e.g., the enactive self/world interface) and to de-automatize perception.  Osmose includes a dozen worldspaces with which the immersant can interact, from natural settings such as Forest, Pond, Subterranean Earth, Lifeworld, and Abyss, to two "parenthetical" worldspaces -- Text and Code -- which are intended to evoke the conceptual "supports" for these virtual environments.  According to the reports of approximately 25,000 individuals who have experienced Osmose to date, the immersants often experience profound shifts in awareness and perception, feeling "as if they have rediscovered an aspect of themselves, of being alive in the world, which they had forgotten, an experience which many find surprising, and some very emotional. Such response has confirmed the artist's belief that traditional interface boundaries between machine and human can be transcended even while re-affirming our corporeality, and that Cartesian notions of space as well as illustrative realism can effectively be replaced by more evocative alternatives." 

Eph Seed Bloom 800

The second virtual installation, Ephémère, builds on Osmose, extending the environment to include organic worldspaces (organs, blood, bone), and incorporating a complex spatio-temporal architecture which allows immersants to explore various "levels" of space as they undergo constant changes through time.  While it is possible for an immersant to spend an entire session within one worldspace, "it is more likely that they will pass constantly between them, immersed in transformation.  Throughout, the various elements of trees, rocks, seeds, body organs, etc, come into being, linger and pass away. Their emergings and withdrawals depend on the immersant's vertical position, proximity, slowness of movement, and steadiness/duration of gaze, as well as the passage of time: for example, in the earth, seeds sprout when gazed upon for any extended length of time, rewarding patient observation with germination, inviting entry into the luminous interior space of their bloom."  As with the Osmose installation, participants report entering altered, contemplative states of consciousness within minutes after immersion.

Both installations represent the development of what Purser, in his essay, calls VR2 -- a creative, interactive tool with the potential to evoke and support integral consciousness.

"The integral potentialities of VR2 are apparent in several respects. The VR2 user, in constructing and interacting within a highly imaginative virtual world, draws upon long repressed magical and mythical dimensions of human consciousness. The richness and depth of the virtual world can inspire awe and appreciation for the myriad dimensions of consciousness that are co-present all at once. Virtual worlds in VR2 are evocative, requiring the user to consciously become aware of their participation in the figuration of appearances. Rather than repressing or disengaging the user's consciousness, VR2 turns the lights on, intensifying verition and active imagination. In other words, VR2 could open up human experience to a simulation of integral consciousness, providing a technologically mediated glimpse of a new vision, a new way of seeing the self in relation to the whole.

This is an exciting possibility, since it could potentially provide the capacity for people to express and participate in the creation of aperspectival virtual worlds. However, VR2 differs from VR1 in that it does not simply provide more surfaces to interact with, or a greater span of visuality. Rather, VR2 offers the possibility for entering into the interiority of space, of expanding inwardly into the depth of the image. In VR2, the user can, for example, see how a rainbow arises as an active construction or collective representation, involving both the user's perception, the image that is apparently distant, and the meaning-giving process that flows between percipient and the phenomena. In other words, the user would have the opportunity to actually experience what a participatory consciousness feels like in a VR2 environment. Experience within VR2 would evoke a meta-awareness of participation-as-observer."

I share Purser's excitement, and look forward to exploring this technology, if the opportunity arises.  Just reading the descriptions of the Osmose and Ephemere installations, I am reminded of a number of my experiences working with TSK inquiry.  For example, the following is from my TSK practice notes on 10/23/08:

It is evening and I have come to the school campus to walk the labyrinth under the trees.  Following the winding narrow paths between the rows of stone, looping around the same patch of earth again and again from new directions, I think about how space accommodates form, how every movement and shape plumbs its seemingly infinite potential.  I think about how these lines of stone both constrain movement and enact new potential, as our constructs similarly shape and guide our lives: so many ways that space can flower.  We seem always to move within limits, but ... is there a limit to the forms these limiting borders may take?  What richness is available for each new pattern to evoke, for each new pathway to enact?

As I move around the labyrinth, slowly tracing out this space within the larger space of the school gardens, sensing the movements of my body and the play of thought and image "within" me, listening to the rush of cars on the freeway not far away, I notice first a layering and overlapping of perspectives and spaces, which then seems to collapse and somehow become spaceless.  Turning a bend on the path, sunlight streams suddenly through the branches of the tree, illuminating the motes of dust hanging in the space under the branches and the watchful squirrels, and I experience the whole scene as somehow virtual, a patterned readout which overlaps with other readouts -- other perspective-spaces -- without obstruction.  I do not have the impression that the surrounding space I perceive isn't really "there"; rather, the patterned space in its all-at-onceness and givenness seems simultaneously not given, but read out, as the squirrels looking on read out their world, and the trees their own as well.

VR2 is certainly not "essential" for fruitful contemplative practice, but to the degree that it has the potential to evoke the sort of aperspectival space I described above, I think it could, indeed, serve as a powerful aid in the emergence of an integral/aperspectival cultural aesthetic.