Good Evening Group
While walking this morning our recent readings fell into place and I am very enthused. Forgive me if the below is already obvious to you, but the concise clarity is fresh for me.
Rinposhe tells us that the past is a corpse and can not support the birth of our future. The future, it seems, flows from upstream. We can position facing and receiving the ever arriving clarity of this current and enjoy the aliveness of our being.
Our historic sense of self appears prerecorded and is merely thought and memory. The aliveness of our being is not sourced by the past; does not come from the “already happenedâ€. Our aliveness is sourced by the ever arriving future and therefore we are never born “once and for allâ€. Instead of thinking “no selfâ€, we might think of “self unborn†for self and all experience are ever arriving.
The relationship between the arriving future and the self structure makes the self a tendency of time and not a thing that has already happened. This is good news for this psychologist and all of his patience :@)
Hayward
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Yes, the volcano, the spark of aliveness. I was reading in DTS about ‘nuclear-time’ being differently dimensioned, as time just prior to the ‘zero-point’ of conducting, that is before the point-instant that we begin the process of structuring time so we can better slow it down for our own purposes of making meaning for ourselves. Rinpoche says:
“But in the prior of conducting, before the zero, the qualities of time are very different. Let us call this differently dimensioned timing ‘nuclear time’. Nuclear time is not one-pointed in the conventional sense. It is not originating time or founding time, though this is how it may appear from within the conducted order. Nuclear time moves, and in its movement includes past and present and future, death and life; includes us all. Without participating in the identities of what is included or has been con-ducted, it does not negate, nor does it negate negating. Operating before each measured-out move, prior to directionality, it is the not-not-not. ‘Gradually’ the nuclear point becomes a round unique—unique in quality, unique in dimensions.” DTS p.149
If we consider the present as arising out of the future infinitive, which is the unshaped possibilities of the future, then it seems to me, ‘nuclear time’ is very much like the ‘future infinitive’. For living beings, where the spark of life resides.
David
I appreciate the clarity of what you have written, Hayward. Your observation that ‘our aliveness is sourced by the ever-arriving future’ and that ‘the self is a tendency of time’ resonate with my experience of settling awareness at the point of the lava arising from the volcano. It struck me that time and ‘I’ were arising simultaneously and that this point of origination was mysteriously in a place beyond space and a time out of time.
Oh what a gifted class we have here! Such skills of expression, the penetrating and clarifying filters of experience. Just love this Hayward! Thank you. Thinking ‘nuclear-time’ equals the ‘future infinitive’.
David