Reflections on TSK Exercise practise

A few reflections on my personal practice, in anticipation of the review day on Sunday:

-          Observing the ppf structure of my thoughts and thought processes, I note how pre-occupied these tend to be with anticipations of the future. Yet even these thought processes seem tinged with the impact of past memories and of conditioning. After all, it is this conditioning which has built up my self-identity, an identity which co-exists with ongoing labeling. I note that the only really ‘present-focused’ thoughts/images in my mind seem to be those arising as sense impressions, ones in which I am responding to external material stimuli rather than generating internal reflections.  I am more located ‘in the present’ (to the extent that there is such a thing) when I am ‘walking around’, i.e. in Exercise 18B, interacting with a material world, than when I sit in a formal meditative practice i.e. in Exercise 18A. Once I ‘sit’, the plans, anticipatory thoughts, memories of past events – and the emotions - just spill out. I try generating ’what if’ scenarios, but, even here, my musings are predicated on memory. Everything I conceive has ‘happended’

-          I can’t envision how my thoughts and images, however much I may open them, can ever be entirely free of the samskaras of conditioning. My very ‘character’ is formed by these. Without these, every experience becomes entirely new, with no structure whatever extant. While this is wonderful in theory, it seems to me a completely impractical way to function and interact with a material world. Some labeling, in this linear time context, is inevitable

  –  Exercise 19 – As I sit practising, my cat sits with me. I interact lovingly, almost instinctively, with him, in what is almost our own little purely ‘present’ world. Yet even this apparently spontaneous interaction is tinged with elements of the past and future. My consciousness holds memory of his past frail health, and anticipation of his  inevitable death some time in the future, making our present interaction all the more precious for me

 -     Exercise 20 – my initial reversals from future backward or from past forward have a very structured reality, a very ego-centred form, full of substance. As I gradually move away from this to a more ‘knowing’ quality, this structuring drops away, leaving only a continuum, a flow of time, a perennially moving present contained within it, impossible to pinpoint within objective time

-      When I read a work of fiction, what temporal continuum do I enter? Am I in a fantasy state, an ‘unreal’ world? An alternative temporal structure?  – Yet if my personal reality is only what I perceive, then this current perception, this ‘fantasy’ world (based on memories of chapters already read, anticipations of where the story is heading) is as real a ppf continuum as any other,  more ‘objective’,  part of my perceptual world

-     Exercise 21 – as I practise, I hear my husband playing the piano in the next room. Reflecting on the music, am I in the present? Even my hearing of the music is past. Letting the music flow over me, drinking it in, feels like the present. Yet his playing of the music itself is already part of the past when I hear it. In the time that it has taken to travel between rooms, register in my hearing and perceiving brain, it is already gone. Am I always therefore living in the past? In yogic discussion I often hear said “The only moment that you really have is the present moment”. But do I even have this?

-      Exercise 22 – I’m not really sure how to practise this exercise. How do I enter a moment? Through thought/image? What is this moment that I can enter into the future of it? There seems not to be one ppf structure. Many pasts lead to a present moment, and it flows out into multiple futures, different futures for each aspect or to each entity involved in its occurrence

I hope your discussions tomorrow are valuable for everyone participating. I hope that I may be able to hear them via podcast later this week.

Gaynor