Hi All
I appreciate the comments to my posting on Exercise 16. I am now beginning to feel the group presence, or a derivative of the Great Presence as Jack creatively puts it, of this TSK online community. There is nothing like a peer group, or “sangha in Buddhist circles,” to help sustain practice and reflection.
I am not sure how to categorize my posting this time; I started out this evening with a sitting and with the intention of doing one of the exercises, but I did not have a clear sense of which “exercise” I was doing. I didn’t let that concern me too much, and had faith to allow some direction or inkling of an exercise to emerge. I did, however, have in the “back of my mind” that Space would be the focus, as we are on Unit 3.
I have to first say that I spent about 30 minutes doing Qigong exercises before sitting down, so I felt alert, embodied and not too distracted when I started. I just focused more or less on the sensations and tried to enjoy and expand them. Pretty much what you do after doing a Kum Nye movement or exercise. That got things moving. As I settled, and deepened, Exercise 4 seemed to want to come forth, so I went with that. So when sensations arose, I opened them up. I kept doing this repeatedly, until there was a feeling of momentum or a circular ball spinning inside me that was erasing the boundaries that demarcated my inner experience and organs and skin. As that continued, I felt more pleasant, moving towards lightness feeling. I stayed with that for a while, and then a mental thought arose–“the only thing creating distance, separation and boundaries in space and time is your perspective–now open that up too” — as I worked with that, it seemed I may have jumped into Exercises 10 or 11 in TSK–but I didnt care too much–I was more intrigued with playing with this statement–I shifted more to the observer as a focus–and tried to look at how it was looking at the experience–but that opened up into an image of light beam–and all I can say is that the light beam seem to symbolize a de-centering of the observer so that it felt like the observer was just one possible position that was coming into being vis a vis the light beam–maybe it was not a light beam–but more of a subtle feeling of Space–and that my sense of being the observer became a little more transparent–certainly I felt a great sense of bouyancy and freedom–and then I got some sort of insight that what I take to be the boundaries of immediate perceptual experience–are arbitrary boundaries–but very persuasive and convincing to my thinking/experience–and it dawned on me that this must be the meaning of what the “field communque” is all about–that my ordinary sense of limitation of my identity and existence–as being bounded by this moment, this experience, in the so-called present–defined my immediate thoughts and identity–is a product of being dominated by a strong signal from my own preconceptions–confirmed through collective consensus as the field communique–and the analogy seems to be like a radio that can only tune into one frequency or station. There are other stations/frequencies available (for Being), but the bandwidth is too narrow/limited. Other strange phenomena occurred also, and I dont know if it is worth sharing–but I felt a distinct presence of deceased friend who died about 2 months ago suddenly–and I had not really been thinking all that much about him–and when I felt it I was sort of shocked and jumped off the cushion…sorry for the over-dramatization–but it is all true.
Ron
