In the brochure for the upcoming TSK Intensive Retreat it says, among other things (see link):
“At present, we live in a world where our options have been set out in advance. We rely on fixed identities, solid objects, and pre-established patterns. Moving from the inaccessible past into a future shaped by our own needs and longings, we have to cope with a world frozen into fixed structures. Filled with the sense that something fundamental is missing but not knowing what else to do, we fall victim to confusion and disappointment.
The TSK vision lays the foundation for a fundamental shift. We don’t have to settle for the role of a consumer choosing from a limited range of options. We can draw on time’s dynamic and the freedom that space allows to enter a different world, a world we can inhabit with joy and an ongoing sense of adventure… If you want to get a taste for what a life lived in this way might be like, here is a simple, informal practice to try out from time to time…”
The Unnamable
As you go about your day, ask yourself what is happening in your immediate experience that you can’t give a name to. Don’t focus on the things you see and hear, or the memories and plans your mind drifts off to, or even the emotions and reactions that shape how you feel. Look for something more fundamental. You might call it the ‘quality’ of your experience, like the quality of a work of art that makes you love it.
I’ve been working with this exercise. There are a number of qualities in experience I have trouble defining or naming; they seem so ephemeral, and boundless. One for instance, is like a fathom or depth to what’s happening at the surface where my usual thing-focus of discursive and discriminating thinking is taking place. As that thinking process is happening, while observing lush-green, windblown leaves, for instance, the presence of communing with nature silences the narrative, and there’s an underlying good feeling, a welling up of well-being. It arises, lingers, and recedes like a spent wave, replaced by more thing-focus thinking.
There is another interesting quality that comes and goes in my experience that always leaves me wondering about it. It’s so unique and distinguishable from normal experience that I’ve silently searched years for ways to describe internally this feeling or quality. It is subtle and feels like mental space or perhaps ‘capacity‘, but not the kind of space I use to imagine and then fill in names and labels, like place-holder space, and not the blank space of memories, where I recall things but leave out things, or visualize things but have gaps or blanks in the memory.
The openness I’m referring to, if I can even call it that, seems to resist a narrow thing-focus. It’s an occasional all-encompassing feeling/quality that whatever I’m doing, (watching TV, reading, planning, whatever I’m engaged in), I’m aware of this greater awareness. It is as though my normal thinking activities and structuring processes are occurring on a little surface place within this ‘Unnameable‘ feeling/quality, a wellhead of activity over a vast expanse of my own awareness — the secret pleasure of my whole being.
I often wonder if this occasional unnameable has a cause, because my mind is usually engaged in something, so I look for a trigger there, but I can’t be sure I’ve pinpointed anything definitive. The closest I’ve come is noticing this quality after I’ve been working on something for a while and I successfully conclude it. That is, a problem has been focused upon over time – attention engaged in solving an issue by weighing outcomes, considering alternatives, and enacting a resolution. I could have worked on the problem for days or weeks, or simply hours, but it was important enough for me to invest my attention and focus in a dedicated and enduring fashion. Then at some point, it’s solved, worked-through, and I feel great relief, with a sense of self-satisfaction. There’s a mental clearing of sorts, and I suspect that’s when the unnameable becomes evident in my experience. It’s as if, after being tightly or intently focused for so long, the solving of the problem releases me to involuntarily ‘relax‘ into the full awareness of the unnameable. However, the TSK books say that we can practice ‘relaxing‘ into this multilevel awareness, by just ‘noticing thoughts as appearance‘, without being caught up in their content. This is what I’m working on now, and DTS Ex. 3 – Playfulness of Thoughts, seems to speak to me directly about how to do this.
David
