Gaia Community: Balder's Blog

The Mercury Program

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:00:11 GMT

Two videos featuring music from the post-rock group, The Mercury Program.

The Mercury Program

The Mercury Program - A Delicate Answer

Ronin

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Sun, 10 May 2009 00:13:04 GMT

A two-part piece from Nik Bartsch's quintet, Ronin -- sometimes described as minimalist jazz or (Zen-influenced) 'ritual groove music.'

Nick Bartsch's RONIN @ Vilnius Jazz 2007 (part 1)

Nick Bartsch's RONIN @ Vilnius Jazz 2007 (part 2)

Tags: Ronin, Nik Bartsch, jazz, minimalism, zen

How Many Horses

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:43:40 GMT

Here's my first Youtube video -- a recording of a song by my old band, The Dog Soldiers. The band was led by Jimmy Thornton, Billy Bob Thornton's brother, and the song was recorded in a little home studio.

How Many Horses

And here is a video of another one of our songs, "Island Avenue," which Billy Bob later covered on his album, The Edge of the World.

Island Avenue

Tags: Dog Soldiers, How Many Horses, Island Avenue, Jimmy Thornton, Billy Bob Thornton

Post-metaphysical Buddhism

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:35:23 GMT

NewThangka

Here's a truncated but enticing excerpt from an essay that was recently posted on the Integral Post-metaphysical Spirituality forum (thanks, Edward).

"Towards a Postmodern Middle," by Roger Jackson; from Buddhist Theology by John J. Makransky and Roger Jackson (Routledge,2000):

"At this point, nine years after taking refuge, my belief in the basics of the Buddhist worldview -- of those metaphysical doctrines I had first imbibed at Kopan, and sought for a decade to comprehend -- had almost completely evaporated. Logically, I should have stopped being a Buddhist. But I did not. I reached the end of my long skeptical inquiry and found that my sense of "being Buddhist" was nearly as strong as ever. How could this be? Shouldn't my painful awakening from religious dogmaticism have spelled the end of my relation to Buddhism? That it did not is due, I believe, to at least three separate factors, which may not be entirely idiosyncratic to my own personal history.

First, while over the course of time my confidence in the literal accuracy of metaphysical Buddhist claims weakened, other aspects of Buddhist doctrine and practice continued to seem irrefutable. In particular, I still found utterly compelling, and endlessly fruitful, (a) the central Mahayana philosophical claim that all entities and concepts are empty of self-existence because they are dependently originated; (b) the basic Mahayana ethical injunction, that one ought to be a compassionate bodhisattva, working as much as possible for the benefit of others, and; (c) the basic Buddhist claim that meditation -- whether concentrative or analytical, complex or formless -- is the best tool yet developed for disciplining one's mind, hence of altering one's way of seeing the world and living within it. All three of these perspectives, it seemed to me, were valuable quite independently of whether there are or are not multiple lives, does or does not exist a universal karmic law, is or is not a transcendent perfection like that ascribed to buddhas. In certain respects, to focus on emptiness, compassion and meditation, while letting Buddhist metaphysics go, is to make a move very much like that chosen by many Christians in the last two centuries: demythologizing one's tradition, and selecting from it certain doctrines that, whether or not they can be upheld in a traditional manner, seemed existentially meaningful and useful, regardless of one's historical or cultural situation. The advantages of such a demythologized, bare-bones Buddhism is that is allows one to preserve a core set of Buddhist beliefs and practices without having to subject oneself to the cognitive dissonance involved in trying to subscribe to "medieval" beliefs while living in a world shaped by modernity; its disadvantage is that it threatens to deprive Buddhism of the majesty of its vision, the mystery of its great narratives, the resonance of its art and rituals. Indeed, bare-bones Buddhism has little to differentiate it from secular humanism; one may as well read Camus as the Dhammapada.

There was, however, a second, crucial dimension to my sense of being Buddhist in a post-metaphysical mode, which put some flesh back on those bare doctrinal bones. Not only had my confidence in certain key perspectives survived my skeptical inquiry, but so too had my "feel" for the myths, symbols and metaphors, the sights, sounds and sensations of Buddhism. Subtly, inexorably, years of exposure to and internalization of these "aesthetic" aspects of the tradition had brought me to a point where they became the most powerful, single lens though which I viewed the world, a paradigm to which I had grown so accustomed that it seemed to form an a priori condition for much of my experience. So, my confidence in emptiness, compassion and meditation was not deprived of its rich, surrounding context; indeed, such doctrines and practices were for me quite inseparable from the scent of juniper incense on a cold morning, the sense or rightness I felt when prostrating to an image or circumambulating a stupa, the shiver sent through me by the very word shunyata, the sweet possibilities conjured by certain ritual songs, the mystery contained in the smile of a Buddha statue from Borobudur. Nor, despite my skepticism, did I separate those basic doctrines from the rich vision and language of traditional Buddhist metaphysics: I still could recite the Buddha's life-story, Mara and all, though I knew it bore little relation to what historians accept; could praise enlightened beings for qualities I doubted they, or anyone, literally could possess; could vow to liberate sentient beings in future lives I was not certain they would experience; could contemplate as primordially pure a mind I was not convinced was more than a byproduct of the brain. This "aestheticized" but non-metaphysical Buddhism has an advantage over the demythologized version of thoroughly engaging not just the intellect but all of one's imaginative and sensory powers, thereby providing a fuller context and greater incentives for belief and practice (see, e.g., Guenther; Trungpa). It is possible, on the other hand, to interpret such an aestheticized Buddhism as a mere exercise in nostalgia and self-delusion, a predictable by-product of the perpetual human need to create a vision, with reinforcing experiences, that will help make sense of a chaotic world. On such a view, an aestheticized and non-metaphysical Buddhism is the result of a cowardly compromise, in which one has the courage neither to accept traditional metaphysics in the face of modern doubts, nor to rest satisfied merely with those doctrines that stand up to the rigorous empirical and logical tests to which they, like all truth-claims, must be subjected.

The inadequacy of this critique of an aestheticized Buddhism lies, I believe, in a third factor of which I had become aware by the time I had finished my dissertation: the postmodernist discovery of (a) the impossibility of determining finally the "truth" of any particular worldview or vision, whether traditional or modern and (b) the inadequacy of defining religion on the basis of primarily core metaphysical doctrines, or determining the meaningfulness of a religion on the basis of the "correspondence to reality" of those metaphysical doctrines..." (pp. 223 - 225).

Tags: Buddhism, post-metaphysical, postmodern, Roger Jackson, aestheticized Buddhism

Bhutan: Gross National Happiness (ABC Australia Documentary)

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:01:53 GMT

Gross National Happiness - Bhutan

Tags: Bhutan, Buddhism, environmentalism, modernization

The Preciousness of Form

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:54:13 GMT

Seimiya-Flower

I had an interesting dream last night. I entered into and merged with a sense of boundless space -- no forms, no experiences or discriminations for an indeterminate amount of time, until the world began to coalesce 'out of' this space, showing up first as transparent, luminous outlines, like a visionary field. The interesting part of the dream for me was being at the 'edge' of space and form, where form was experienced as being 'pervaded by' and an expression of space. At this edge, I recall a moment's pause, like a question, and then a distinct feeling of 'Yes.' The transparent expanse of form filled out, becoming substantial, heavy, opaque, an abundant multiplicity of objects and beings. This transition was very satisfying, and momentarily, I 'felt' all these distinct forms at once, not as one, but as multiple, teeming. It was beautiful, precious, 'right.'

The next thing I remember is not the dream, but the waking 'me here,' looking out at the world.

Tags: space, form, creation, multiplicity, TSK

Math Rock and Burmese Classical Music

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:05:34 GMT

Two math rock tunes from Battles...

Battles - Tonto (from the album Mirrored)

Battles - Atlas (taken from the forthcoming album Mirrored)

And a sampling of some Burmese Classical music. I think there's a similar aesthetic here. What do you think?

Myanmar (Burmese) Saing Waing (Pat-waing performance)

Tags: Math rock, Battles, experimental music, Burmese Classical, Hsaing Waing

Javanese Master of Chi

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:36:20 GMT

New John Chang video

John Changs 1st Westerner student

Tags: John Chang, Dynamo Jack, Java, Chi, Chi Gung, Mo Pai, Nei Kung

Virtual Reality, Integral Consciousness, and TSK

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:46:30 GMT

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.

Tags: Virtual Reality, Ron Purser, Integral, Aperspectival, Gebser, Wilber, TSK

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

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 04:43:14 GMT

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.

Transistor Radio

"Where I've been,
Where I am,
Is the show."

~*~

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)
4. Unit 2, Week 4 - Defining Stories

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

Starlight
1. Adventures with Time, Space, Knowledge
2. Noticing Thoughts - TSK Exercise
3. Once Upon a Time ... TSK Exercise
4. Restoring Multidimensionality - TSK exercise week 4
5. Memories, Models, Stories, Immediate Experience ... TSK Exercise

Tags: TSK, Time-Space-Knowledge, Tarthang Tulku, Jack Petranker, inquiry, story, thought

Telling Stories 2 (TSK Unit Two, Week Three)

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 01:29:13 GMT

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)

Tags: TSK, Time, Space, Knowledge, Tarthang Tulku, Jack Petranker, Stories, Story Telling

Telling Stories (TSK Unit 2, Week 3)

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:44:27 GMT

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]

Tags: TSK, Time, Space, Knowledge, Tarthang Tulku, Jack Petranker, Stories

On Embracing the Wide Sky (Daniel Tammet)

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:54:08 GMT

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.

Embracing The Wide Sky - Daniel Tammet

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.

Tags: Daniel Tammet, Mind, Brain, Synaesthesia, Imagination, Embracing the Wide Sky

Watching Thoughts (TSK Class 2, Unit 2)

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 06:44:19 GMT

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)

2. Week Two - Thoughts that Establish

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)

Tags: TSK, Tarthang Tulku, Jack Petranker, inquiry, thought, space

TSK Online Course (Unit 2)

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:34:03 GMT

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)

Tags: TSK, Time, Space, Knowledge, Tarthang Tulku, Jack Petranker, story, thought, self

Winter Songs (Bon Iver)

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:15:23 GMT

"Wolves (Act I & II)" by Bon Iver (Better Version)

Bon Iver - for Emma

And several more, if you enjoy Bon Iver's work:

Blindsided

Re: Stacks

Skinny Love

Tags: Bon Iver, Justin Vernon

Exhibitions of Zero, Flowers of Space

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 19:38:38 GMT

The following video, a visualization of the beauty and artfulness of math, resonates with me also as a sort of meditation on space, time, and knowledge. As you watch it, I invite you not merely to observe it from a distance, but to allow it to interact with you -- to find its traces in your own being and knowing.

Mathematics & art

What remains in play, vital, undecided, around the positions we take? How are our positions also openings, exhibitions of zero?

What boundaries trace out the shape of your being -- of your body and mind, self and relationships? Are those boundaries any different from the bounty of space? What might they yield, if you cease taking them as given and, instead, 'zero in' in ever-deepening circles of intimacy?

"Like an unimaginably beautiful space flower, Great Space blossoms into unknown Being" (Tarthang Tulku, Knowledge of Time and Space).

Tags: Time, Space, Knowledge, boundaries, being, intimacy, Tarthang Tulku

To the Evening Child

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 18:14:19 GMT

One of my favorite Stephan Micus pieces, to close the old year and welcome the new.

Stephan Micus - To The Evening Child

Tags: Stephan Micus, To the Evening Child

Sculpting in Micro-Space: The Work of Willard Wigan

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:54:00 GMT

Willard Wigan micro sculptor

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

Tags: Willard Wigan, micro-sculpture, space, TSK

The Great Toumani Diabate

http://brucealderman.gaia.com — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 06:06:29 GMT

Toumani Diabate 'Cantelowes'

Ali Farke Toure & Toumani Diabete - Kaira

Tags: Toumani Diabate, kora, griot, Ali Farke Toure