Jack asked me to comment on what I had noticed re: time and space in our sensing exercise yesterday. I went blank when he asked me, and said I needed ‘to think about it.’ Here are my jottings:
Attending to arising experience and noticing how time and space feature in the process of sensing: sounds traverse time; some communicate time as they unravel. Others communicate space. Focusing lightly, but determinedly, like this – time and space both seem to expand – a sense of constriction in both falls away. Some sounds demonstrate rhythm, eg in the cawing of a crow, the whoosh of a bicycle passing beneath my window, footsteps on the street outside. There are rhythms within my attention: sometimes it’s muffled and dull, sometimes crisp; sometimes it’s concertinaed, sometimes spacious.
As for knowledge: resting in a receiving awareness like this reveals a background sense of knowing-ness which feels alert, rich and fertile and which could, at any moment, manifest as Knowledge – a bit like a miraculous rabbit out of a conjurer’s hat. In other words, Knowledge seems to be inherent in this sense of knowingness. I have noticed that there is a fashionable resistance to this idea in the world. I’d love to have your responses to this… Am I going too far if I say that this ‘resistance’ seems to be connected to a profound, unconscious addiction to misery, powerlessness, ignorance and failure which is subtly transmitted from generation to generation?
Caroline in England