From Caroline

Hello Everyone:

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to participate in the first online meeting (tech problems). Hope to join you next week.

I often read TSK aloud and often, when I read, I weep – with relief, gratitude, joy and yearning. It’s like Nectar; speaking to the deepest part of my being; to my most inexpressible questions. THIS VISION is something really worth ‘taking Refuge in,’ it seems to me.

But, now – to the redness of an apple (or the yellowness of a Post-It note, for that matter – thank you, Michael for gloriously zany comment) – I found that my breathing changed (slowed and deepened) and the relationship between ‘seeing’ and ‘breathing’ was somehow the key to ‘diving into’ the redness of red which is akin to a new world, with its own attributes; its own kind of ‘consciousness,’ even. There was fire and heat in the redness (though this may have been partially due to having just drunk the hot tea in the mug on whose side was the red design I was contemplating!).

This red-ness was so different from diving into the silvery ‘consciousness’ of a chrome door handle later in the week. I had the sensation of a ‘communicative flow’ between my molecules and its molecules, so to speak: That we were quite literally (at some level and in some way) moving ‘in and out’ of each other.

‘…what about the one who perceives the patch?’ asks Jack and what I have just said seems to have something to do with that, though I admit to being stymied as to how to proceed really effectively in relation to this question, which I sense is THE question, if one may such a thing within TSK, without resorting to known philosophical learnings and trotting them out like a parrot. It would be good to have a fresh approach to responding authentically to this question.

I did write this immediately on reading Jack’s question, but I’m not sure how valid it is. ‘Entering a deeper dimension of 1st field; dimensions within that. The one who perceives the patch is a field (a series of inter-related fields?) interacting with the deepening layers of the patch? Don’t know. The one who perceives the patch needs to be as closely investigated as the patch.’

Simultaneously with studying online, I am working through ‘When It Rains, Does Space Get Wet’ and am on Unit 11. There is a certain wonder in the fact that this (miraculously?) happens to be dealing with similar issues to those we are exploring online.

In the chapter on Field Dynamics, headed Potential for Existence, on page 195 of KTS, I keep asking, ‘Is this the Dharmakaya’ that Rinpoche is referring to? I know he says this is NOT Buddhism, but it seems to me, it is. I would like to get clearer about this. I also have a huge question about TSK being effectively a ‘Mind gTerma’ Is this so?

In response to Jack referring in the phone call to Rinpoche being ‘playful’ in KTS, I wanted to quote this wonderful paragraph to you from page 198:
‘We might say that the ‘field’ comprises the ‘notnonexistence’ of the possibility. More precisely, a particular mode of existence can arise when obstacles to such existence (which do not themselves implicate substantiality) are not ‘not not-there.’ My first response to reading this was mind-scramble; utter perplexedness, followed immediately by bursting out laughing, which allowed a huge space of newness to present itself in my awareness. This reminds me of something I read by Longchenpa years ago which ends with the line ‘one may well burst out laughing.’ Jack will no doubt remember the full quote, I can’t find it at the moment.

Forgive me if I am rambling off the point, but I love the way everything in this Vision seemingly seems to interconnect.

Caroline (in England).