Inside Out

There’s something strange about this new chapter, the start of our new theme, “Knowledge Ability”.  It reminds me of Euclidean Geometry in its systematic analysis of perception, but instead of imposing axioms from outside (e.g. “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line”), it starts form a zero-gravity reaching out: projecting, reflecting, reacting, and describes how a self and a world are built up from there.  Kind of like the guy in the Tibetan Buddhist Wheel of Life paddling a boat with no rudder?  This chapter strikes me as somewhat different than others: those in which our noses are rubbed in our unsubstantiated beliefs about, say, linear time, or those in which we are provided with stirring exhortations about how our lives can be richer, freer, deeper, if we allow them to be.  Instead, in this chapter, there is a bold setting forth from nowhere at all.  Rather like when we get up and wash the dishes and thereby feel less depressed, or when we take a step out of confusion and find ourselves on a new journey. — Michael

About Michael Gray

I first started studying TSK in the mid 1980's and have since attended a number of retreats and workshops at the Nyingma Institute, in both TSK and Buddhist themes. I participated in the life-changing Human Development Training Program in 1991, and upon returning to Albuquerque co-founded an organization, Friends in Time (with a friend who has Lou Gehrig's Disease), which continues to serve people with similiar disabilities. I contributed an essay to "A New Way of Being"--the last one in the book--in which I describe how learning to honor who I have been has broadened and deepened my openness to present experience. I live in New Mexico with my wife and two sons.
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2 Responses to Inside Out

  1. erino says:

    ” Instead, in this chapter, there is a bold setting forth from nowhere at all. ”

    Michael, I find that line is a wonderful description of how nowhere is not nowhere…I find nowhere to be rich with infinite possibilities…and which ones will we enact, bring into our present…do they all exist in timelessness…

    While our brains seem to need a mode of measurement, surely linear Time and conventional Space is not defined by our understanding of “time” and “nowhere” :)

    Fascinating! Cheers to boldly setting forth — to and — from nowhere at all :)

    ~ Erin

  2. Soudabeh says:

    I agree with you Michael…
    It helped a lot that the previous chapters kind of prepped the way … by the ideas of the fields… although it was nothing as bold as this chapter, that smacked me right in the face … of how ( as Rinpoche has put it some where…) one has a hand/major role in making one’s life drama , and then (ignorantly, not knowingly) one sheds tears over the content of one’s own made-drama …or believes in its objective reality…
    Through the power of this chapter, and Jack’s elucidation of it, it is more clear that one has a major role in the way one assigns meaning (pronounces, allows/presents, projects) to the subjectively positioned experience … that’s where the idea of taking responsibility hit me …

    And finally a remedy is offered…. that by making the determinating fields (senses, emotionals, thoughts) more transparent, not taking them too seriously, or concretizing them, there is more chance for opening towards seeing other possibilities in experience.

    It is so exciting to see decades of erroneous way of perceiving… alas finally there is a new possibility that makes complete sense… now I am going to test it out in the laboratory of my daily experience…
    Soudabeh

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