The arrow goes and the arrow comes

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Michael Gray

In the final paragraph of this week’s reading is the statement: “In each moment, we can know with the records of the past and the possibilities of the future.”  And on the top of Page 9 of Knowledge of Time and Space is the similar statement, “Perhaps the future gives the present form, allowing it to emerge, and the past gives it substance, like an object casting its shadow.  This idea that both the past and the future infiltrate the present moment in their own ways, feels similar to the two-way flowing of knowledge in eknosis.  Except eknosis is more mysterious than that.  The image of an arrow arriving back at its source without deflection or reflection, and thereby circumnavigating the whole,  questions the reality of separation and the claim of a self who knows that it resides at the center of experience.  I wonder if it’s possible to view the self, residing in this present moment, in a comparable way.  Or is there some truth to the sense that we are only alive in this present moment, more fundamental than the self’s belief  that he/she resides there.  –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 The arrow goes and the arrow comes

  1. Soudabeh says:
    February 26, 2012 at 10:16 pm

    Hello Michael:
    Thank you for your post. You wrote, and asked:
    “I wonder if it’s possible to view the self, residing in this present moment, in a comparable way. Or is there some truth to the sense that we are only alive in this present moment, more fundamental than the self’s belief that he/she resides there. ”

    I have an intuition, I imagin or it seems that by being open to training/practicing in new ways of experiencing… the mistaken modes of appearing ( that once were fundemental) can slowly give way to new ways of appearing/experiencing… and so their way of fundementalness slowly shifts and no longer stays or is viewed as fundemental as it used to…
    Soudabeh

    Reply
  2. Brigitte says:
    February 26, 2012 at 3:05 am

    You have condensed the paragraphes in a very clear way. It is always a relief to hear what one might have glimpsed in a kind of sensual way in other words, then it becomes again more graspable. But for me it is still very difficult to put my own words around it. So your question is still expanding in space…

    Reply

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