Gaynor and David both seem to explore in an effective way how the conventional temporal structure unfolds. Emotions and stories make linear temporality possible, and linear temporality in turn is what supports emotions and stories. The two go together. And underneath that structure is the story of the self, which ties it all into a unit.
Often in morning practice I find myself entering a very sleepy time toward the end. Often at that point I am doing a TSK practice related to the program. In the last few months, I have been trying to work within the sleepy, dreamy space, and I have found that it is more fluid and open to experience than my wide-awake and (often) preoccupied self. It is an interesting place to be in, full of the ‘nothing special’ quality that TSK often talks about, yet at the same time rich with rather surprising possibilities. Maybe it’s the self that goes to sleep first and foremost.
For this unit, I started with the last paragraph on p. 315 of KTS, the one that promises to go beyond a hypothetical approach. My sleepytime experience was something like this:
What time presents and space exhibits is not so bound up with a past and a future. It doesn’t come from anywhere, isn’t caused by anything. Yes, the past is there, but it is there more as an aspect of the present. It is something like flattening linear temporality, or condensing it all into the same dimension. What this seems to lead to (and again I emphasize that I experience it as ‘no big deal’) is a sense of freedom, a sense that in the next moment anything can happen and probably will.
So here are two ways to approach the themes of this unit: on the one hand, clarity about how we engage time; on the other hand, timing differently, without insisting so much on the self.
Jack