The graphic depicts a view from ‘X’ in glowing space.
“…there is a moment of transition – ‘X’ – that cannot ordinarily be directly observed and thus remains unknown.” (LOK Ex 22)
When I first looked for a transition I found only a stream of input, looking further revealed a structuring of time taking place, triangulating over past-present-future points, and a subject vs. object perspective. I could see the activity of appropriating positions, knowings, and feelings, but not the one seeing. If a self was appropriating the me-here-now positions, I could not see myself seeing that, I could only be the seeing activity.
Investigating further meant looking beneath my first-level assumptions about time, at the structuring of time by the self. If I am taking momentary fixes on what appears, between those fixes there is more going on than the exclusionary and narrowing act of fixing. But even seeing between moments had me questioning, if I don’t fix a frame by bracketing moments, what is prior to that, what is looking? What is looking whether there is fixing or no fixing? Even when I experienced the most basic glowing awareness prior to blank, I questioned what was looking, what was experiencing? It seems there was nothing, and then I noticed this quote from TSK p64:
“The mind is not a palpable or solid thing (except insofar as we take feeling tones and other mental events for the mind). Rather, it is perhaps simplest to say that the mind is a sign of a specific focal setting being taken on Great Space. The mind is like the viewing aperture on a camera. It is a focus on Great Space, being open to it in various ways and degrees that we could call parÂticular focal settings. It is not surprising that this mind is hard to find when we search for it, for how can we locate a ‘setting’?”
The exercise asks: “how do we move from point to point in awareness?” It seems from a more fundamental level, there is basic open awareness (X), and ‘A’, and ‘A1’ are structured representations in that awareness, as is perhaps everything that arises. The arisings are all time, and they are all degrees of the glow of awareness, a presence that is always now, a presence I cannot ordinarily see but only be. Within this presence there is a unity of seeing and what is seen, unified in the glow; appearance is the stuff of the glow, and I operate (although often not recognizing it) at various levels, and not just within the ‘as if‘ separate, momentary linear structure of a self along ‘A’ positions in time. Open awareness X is available to everything that arises, because everything that arises partakes of it. I’m reminded of the quote, [zeroless space is] “the background for a fullness in time and knowledge” DTS p67.
David
