Personifying Thoughts, Embodying Space (TSK Unit 2, Week 5)

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. 

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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.