I’m sitting on the porch again looking at the field of tall grass, mostly golden, like wheat in the sun. Suddenly, flash movement from the left, a dark figure jumping running, a young buck with antlers about six inches long. He’s dark-brown in contrast to the golden grass, a silhouette in motion, and just as suddenly he stops, poised, head tilted to the side listening, smelling perhaps, as the sun highlights his muscular flank. Haltingly and alert he moves on out of view, and the field is as it was, except an interesting moment had passed for me.
The practice instructions were, “simply to be aware of what captures your attention as being given (communicated) as part of a field communiqué, an awareness that will naturally lead you to focus on the field.†It is perhaps a kind of double entendre that I was actually looking at the field behind my house, and relating it to a TSK field of co-referring manifestations, as I decided to look up from my computer and explore this practice. So seeing or looking became where or how I focused awareness. I didn’t consciously tell myself a story, “I’m going to look up from the computer and see the field.†There was just the intent to look away from the computer screen and practice, no imagining what the next instant would reveal. I was in some sense open to whatever presented through the not-knowing of not-imagining. What presented was both familiar and a surprise. I watched like one animal might watch another; intently absorbed, basic, feeling another presence. The description above in the first paragraph hadn’t even occurred to me at this point, I wasn’t self-aware of what captured my attention in any ‘meaningful’ way, until I began reflecting on it.
In nano-like increments, though, a pause in this basic absorption with seeing occurred, and there was a staccato awareness of myself watching; the reflecting observer was here, an embodiment of feelings and alert awareness, a constellation of memories about myself, past views from the porch, the passing of deer individually and in groups from other times, other days, other colors, other referrings began to flood in, identifications had begun. Naming and comparing of colors with memories, and then a pause…like the deer, haltingly and alert moving on out of view… I returned to a near hypnotic fascination with the deer standing in the field, with little or no thought. This silent moment was once again followed by more words, and a meaningful description began to take form that would eventually become the first paragraph above.
It seems the field of my awareness encompasses a constellation of all I can remember going back decades, and all I can sense here and now, and each new now, brings to the fore the old and the new.
David
On DTS p.26, Rinpoche says:
This now begins to make sense to me. I could have simply ‘not’ engaged inquiry at all to simply skim the surface of my experience to arrive at pretty much the same description in the first paragraph of my initial post. That would have been how the world was for me then, but instead, I inquired further into the field communiqué and discovered the world was not as simple as I thought, I learned there was much more to see and experience, simply by opening and inquiring into it.
David
Still reflecting on the field communiqué behind the description of the vivid experience I posted. The assigned readings tell us the field communiqué transmits itself forward through names and concepts, giving qualities that are referred to entities.
I sensed the unseen hand of the field communiqué honing and shaping not only through the ‘logic‘ of the telling, the coherent unfolding of the story of my experience – the field is there bounded by the limits of my view of it – and within that view objects are named and identified, colors are noted, entities were probed. Even deeper than the logic of the telling was the back and forth flitting of mental pieces being put together that was under no one’s control. The quality of heightened alertness or aliveness was referred to both observer (the self), and the observed (the world that was being set in place by the field communiqué) — ‘the view from the porch’. And I was the self that ultimately claimed the experience, the lord of the field – the one who knows, as I reflected on it. But I was also aware at a deeper level that there were flash impressions ricocheting of co-referring field contents, too fast to grasp or ‘re-cognize’ them.
So what was the insight that I came away with from this experience? What did I see not just conceptually, but in a very direct, experiential and most memorable way? I saw/felt it happening, that within aware space ‘I’ and ‘the world’ arise and take form. It is a profound and jolting realization. I may ultimately claim knowledge as the knower, but actually the ‘capacity for knowing’ is available for intimate contact, and it’s prior to the arisings the field communiqué structures.
David
Thanks for the kind words Tina,
Observation gets better with practice, as you know. Not only does the observation improve, but so does the ability to reflect on it. The intent to practice, for me, also includes the intent to remember what I observed. Then, it’s a matter of slowing down my tendency to rush through time and just replay the memory almost in extra slow motion in order to write it down. Something like that. :-) It even reads like that doesn’t it!
Best wishes,
David
You are an awesome writer David. The way you express experience is so TSK…LOL…it helps me so much to read your experiencing, and explanation of it. I am doing a little better with that, where as usually, I have been able to express my experience in poetry, I am now learning how to disect it as you do in more expanding ways. Thank you for your excellent contributions. I have learned so much from those that do post on the discussion board, and I hope that we can do more of that. I did some practicing along the Sonoma Coast a bit last week, which as it turns out, was similiar to what this practice suggested. You have encouraged me now to write about it, after reading this beautiful piece of yours. Love to you my tsk brother, always, Tina.