Changing
TSK Ex. 12, asks that we observe our thoughts for the moment when one thought fades and another arises, in order to discern that subtle transition, which involves the momentary availability of space that has the quality of openness free of the usual discursive and discriminating thinking.
And in the conference call there was a discussion as to what constituted a thought, and was appearance a thought? And Jack inquired, if you have a direct sense experience, and there is no discursive thinking going on, aren’t the senses structuring the sensual input in some way in preparation for thought. (Something like that :-) So while working with Exercise 12 I’ve been watching for this.
It occurred to me I could broadly call all mental activity thought, but that doesn’t help me differentiate between different kinds of mental activity. It just seems more fruitful to distinguish what goes on at different levels. For instance, my controlling self that positions and claims ownership by naming and labeling, etc., is the one that tells stories and constructs meaning, but at a deeper level there is a process going on where flash impressions are happening, they’re ricocheting of co-referring field contents, too fast to grasp for me to ‘re-cognize’ them. That is a ‘structuring’ that is not the same ‘thinking‘ that the more surface oriented ‘controlling self‘ is operating at, and therefore, would not be described as “the usual discursive and discriminating thinking“. Perhaps I should look at these ‘co-referring field contents‘ without an owner, as pre-thought structures, or just sense data, but regardless of what I name or label them, I can get glimpses of their activity as they formulate when I ‘relax‘ into the space of thoughts. When I relax into that openness there is more space, there is a lot more going on too, I’m aware of all of my senses, not just my previous narrow focus. Aliveness enters, feelings of fullness emerge. I’m also aware of my ‘self‘, but those usual activities are not my primary concern. In fact, I may not have a primary concern for there is just observing and being aware going on.
I described this a little in my post and comments: “Be aware what captures your attention as being part of a field communiqué.”
Hi again Michael,
I probably should have added when Rinpoche says, “it is not difficult for consciousness to generate a ‘no self’ thought“, I think he may point to the idea that in TSK ‘the self’ is a process that does more than surface thinking. In LOK, p.170-1, there’s an interesting quote on different levels of the persona of the self, which tends to consolidate in certain ways in our experience.
In light of those levels of self ‘activity’ it may be more fruitful to focus on specific activities that ‘hide’, or get out of the way, and thus it might be better to say the self is usually there performing at some level, but that does not preclude the availability of space awareness.
David
Hi Michael, Thanks for the very kind words. :-)
Regarding your question whether it’s better to quiet down to stillness or to focus on the ever-changing river of appearance in order to enable space awareness, I suspect it depends on us, on how we arrive at ‘presence‘. There was a time when I wouldn’t know the ‘now‘ if I tripped over it, because I was forever looking ahead, dreaming, wishing, avoiding, and so on, and as we’ve learned in our TSK classes, our usual sense of the future is based on the past so that we are, in a sense, preordaining a life that has been already scripted for us, as we continue with our scripting habit. At some point, at first through calming down meditation, I became aware of the mental hum; my scripting, measuring, and meaning making, the way I structured mental activities in terms of linearity. Later, thanks to that space awareness it was easier to observe the flow of appearance. There’s a great cautionary quote, however, in DTS Ex. 5 that says:
I spent a lot of time early on fascinated with, and chasing after the depths of that “deceptive darkness” that Rinpoche mentions. I think what we’re focused on here is not just space, but also the flow of time, and that happens when we are present, not carried away by the discursive and discriminating thinking that habitually narrows our focus.
David
Hi David. I always appreciate your penetrating steadiness of observation and your ability to express unusual experiences in vivid language. You go to the edge of civilization and bring back exotic slides for us home-bound folk. I sometimes feel like Grasshopper on the way to the park with his kite, passing the home of neighbor Ant who is making thoughtful preparations for the winter. A phrase came into my mind this morning: “Our lives are written on water.” No sooner does an image form than the wind scatters and distorts whatever picture we have been trying to make. No wonder we keep thinking: we’re always trying to reassemble our vanishing identities into something once more coherent. Perhaps our dog, chasing the cat, has knocked over the jigsaw puzzle on which we were working. Or perhaps we feel that our impulse to make sense of things is more creative, yielding a new way of looking and of responding to appearance. Do you feel that the way to sense the space between thoughts and inside the thinking of them is to quiet down, and to become very still and alert? Or can we sense an expansive allowingness even while cavorting on the surface of the flowing river in which the incidents of our lives come and go? –Michael
I am continuing to watch for space at the transition of one thought to the next – that expansive feeling like a narrow lens shifting to a wide-angle view, a sudden feeling of openness that comes like a rush. Sometimes it’s so startling that it takes a while before other thoughts fill in, that is, before I narrow on ‘things‘ happening. Other times for instance, if I’m writing, the space between thoughts opens up and thoughts begin to arise, but when they do, they seem more coherent and fresh, as if rising from the deep, like mountain spring water, clear and translucent. Sometimes I can abide in that spaciousness before the return to my usual thing-focus of discursive and discriminating thinking. Afterwards, I often try to figure out how I lost that space.
David