Jack’s notes for this week included a very paradoxical claim: “the self itself is a story told by the self.” My own self protests: surely everything has a cause outside of itself.” And the example given, a few sentences later, in Jack’s notes–of a character in a novel–doesn’t resolve this issue. Even in a first person narrative (where the “I” character tells the entire story of the novel), there is still an author outside the world of the novel who is composing it all. So the idea of a self telling its own story, of being its own story, begs for another entity outside of the story that is being composed. Who or what could that be? If the self were really its own creation, who could communicate with it, possibly “liberate” it (as in “The Four Noble Truths”, where the fact that suffering has a “cause” is held to be crucial to the possibility of liberation from that suffering)? Doesn’t the self also need a cause, if there is to be any hope of transforming it? –Michael
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enjoying reading about this Tapestry of Knowingness you’re threading as Time in Space…lol
Hi Michael
or we could say Knowledge knows time unfolding space as self and all appearance. Hence appearances have no founding substance beyond appearing that way.
Hi Michael
We can go several ways with this. We could say Knowledge knows, or we could say Time knows or tells the story. Nice chatting with you
Hi Hayward, That’s a very thought-provoking connection you make between the self and a focal setting through which we see the world. It’s been awhile since I studied the original TSK book, and I suspect it doesn’t talk about the “self” in the way we are studying it in Love of Knowledge, but that seems a really pertinent association you make. There’s still a mystery, since a camera can’t see itself or tell a story about how it works, but what you say about the self being a tendency to know in a certain way, in time, invites further thought. Since Knowing does seem to be able to know itself (and if the self is mainly a form of knowing), it may make sense to say that it can tell its own story and even be that story. In that case, can we say that the outside cause, which makes this all possible, is Knowledge? –Michael
Hi Michael
What if the self is an organizing, interpretative tendency of knowing in time.
Self might be an apperture that changes settings. At various setting (or ways of knowing) appearances manifest; a locus of knowing is established, time appears linear and space three dimensional.