Photo: ‘Rear-view’ by Andrew Martin – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/y3lsprtw
TSK Exercise 20 – Reversing Temporal Structure
“…with a specific thought or expectation regarding your future, reverse the directionality by which it is known in reference to your present…”
I am following my intentions, my desires, some have images of objects, some are strategic plans to accomplish something. All were future expectations, imagined, volleys of thought hurled into space based on acts of intent created from my position and identity here.
The projection–
So, I project myself into the future and imagine these intentions satisfied, objects obtained, desires realized. For a moment I’m surprised, it’s as though scales have fallen from my eyes… those images now gone, there is nothing there to achieve anymore except in their place a momentary openness, freedom from the images & objects that were attached to me. Suddenly available space is just waiting.
“…then make a similar reversal for the case of past memories and images. Look from the past to the present.”
I’m remembering a time when I made a significant decision. I tried to orient myself back then aware of what I thought I knew of how things were, and the way I felt about them at that time. I try to open up that constellation of assumptions, and delve into my presumptions. Opening up that past with me in it… it occurs that I could have seen things differently, my frustrations came largely from my own narrow perspective. I could have chosen differently, other possibilities, other reasonable choices come into focus, other threads and connections could have branched out in time.
The reversal —
Then I imagine myself living some of those different choices in an alternate future from where my lived time-line has actually brought me. The result is I feel no longer me, not the same identity in the same place. I’m some other story, at least to some degree I’ve re-written myself at a level that seems more fundamental.
I see much of the strategic planning I’ve done in my life usually involves looking at alternative paths and their possible consequences, but these exercises take this process to another level. They seem to display or open up more aspects (the whole constellation) for inquiry.
-David
After reading of Rinpoche’s above quoted words, you may…
If these quotes seem confusing at first glance, ‘confusion’ isn’t always a negative experience. Often confusion is a signal that a transition is available… a transition from not-knowing to understanding. It requires some patience, but if you continue to look into what is being said, understanding is near. It reminds me of that old play on words… “I stayed up all night wondering where the sun went. Then it dawned on me!â€
Here’s an interesting and fascinating, brief video by Jason Silva about HOW WE CAN CHANGE THE PAST… TSK says something similar…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDDlAsu2j5g
Good Morning, David. Thanks for making your post yesterday. I would have forgotten about today’s practice call otherwise: since I must have neglected sometime in the past to record the future event of this morning’s call.
I also appreciate your report on your experiences attempting to bring past and future prospects to mind and then finding in them a possible resting point from which to view the present. Further proof that wherever and whenever we are, there we are. I was struck by the basic sanity your journal reveals: there is always available to you a persona who cares about life and is rooted in the desire to make use of time for a greater good. Even if these personas of ours are the source of endless inconveniences, we can do worse.
In my case, one of the ways of doing worse is evident when I get lost in fantasies that express my resentment to imagined slights–through the invention of some future in which I will be proved right, indispensable, and in which my great value will be revealed, but too late to have me and my skills at the disposal of those who have insufficiently appreciated my true worth. I think it may be the case that on a TSK discussion site such as this, I am in the company of people who have evolved beyond these kinds of puerile fantasies. I hope so. I thought that I had–me being so evolved and all. But since recent months have revealed that I am still subject to this kind of colossal waste of time, spirit, and the opportunities of being, let me make a TSK diagnosis.
When thoughts of resentment generate scenarios of future vindication, I don’t think that the present is even involved–beyond presumably contributing a cortex in which to generate such emotion-drenched ideation. The sense of past offense leapfrogs over the opportunity to inhabit a living present in which understanding, acceptance, forgiveness, and other grown-up realizations could occur and simply projects onto a dream-scape a future that will never happen. And would be sterile if it did come to pass. It is in the context of these kinds of pitfalls that I do my best to keep busy. Because when I am busy, my inhabitation in Time has a foothold, and through this foothold a kind of taproot is provided through which energy, concentration, and awareness flow into my being. I’m not very mindful, in the way that these TSK exercises promote, but involvement in life is the indispensable starting point for all that is positive for me. –Michael