Tarthang Tulku writes about an “alert poised quality, a kind of expectancy or readiness” before the self responds. In last Sundays phone conference, Jack calls this a “readiness to respond”.
Since the TSK vision is not limited to a linear appreciation of time, the notion of “before” can be called into question. Jack says this readiness to respond is the alivenss in the reactivity.
Could we say this quality is what is pointed to as “knowledge or knowing” and not only is it in all experience; all experience is of it?
Hayward
Interesting discussion. I think Hayward was not equating the aliveness in the readiness to respond with the self. Perhaps quite the contrary–rather a quality that the self covers over when it proscribes some conditioned response to the openness. The question of time was also raised. I think it’s Loren Eisely who begins a book with the description of a tick in Africa who can sit on a branch for years until a wiff of uric acid from a passing mammal intrudes into its dormant hibernation, and then it leaps forward. If it finds a warm body, it will drink. Otherwise it climbs back onto the branch, ready to wait another few years. It makes you wonder about linear time, doesn’t it? However, in human life, it seems a sad fact that our bodies doen’t wait in hibernation for us to respond to life. And if we find ourselves at the end of our lives without having responded to the true opportunities of a human life, then regret will be the companion of our last days. — Michael
Ron
Forgive our misunderstanding.
I was merely positing that the openness that occurs prior to a reaction is present in the reaction.
That this openness is knowingness.
And that all experience are forms of knowingness.
Hayward
Hi Hayward,
I have several responses to your notions of “readiness to respond.”
Certainly a formal meditation practice that involves a discipline of observing the stream of ongoing experience, without responding to the content, will, over time, deepen that sense of readiness to respond without having to respond quite well. We might even pat ourselves on the back after having sitting so well in this manner.
However, if our development only amounts to having appropriate a “special experience,” I don’t see how it is integrated into day-to-day, moment-by-moment lived experience.
I am also suspicious of the frame of the question–the notion of “an alert poised quality — before the self responds.” It seems here we are taking for granted the self as a given. Perhaps the responding with a certain desire for a certain experience is the what the self is. That is, there is no self sitting behind experience–waiting on the sidelines to respond.
I am not so sure I about reactivity and whether the readiness to respond is the aliveness in reactivity. I just don’t quite see that.
I can accept as a theory–but in terms of experience–it seems reactivity is quite solid and intractable.
Ron