Responses to Caroline’s TSK Questionaire

TSK Questionnaire

 

Briefly outline previous spiritual/philosophical study & practice.

In the 1970’s, I read all I could by George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky.  In the early 1980’s I was introduced to meditation and Eastern spiritual traditions by an Albuquerque minister, whose church I attended.  In the mid-eighties, I read several books by Tarthang Tulku (Skilful Means, TSK–A New Vision of Reality, and Gesture of Balance, among others).  Then, around 1986, I attended an individual TSK week with Bob Pasternak in Berkley.

What drew you to TSK? 

I was strongly drawn to the first book (which I picked up in a local bookstore after a couple of years of working with Skilful Means).  Living alone after my first marriage ended, I started getting up at 4:00 am every morning and practicing the 35 TSK exercises.  It was magical how my perceptions started transforming.  A year or two into my private study, I spent a week with Bob Pasternak at the Nyingma Institute.  Bob helped me to further open to the special quality of the vision.  He would sit with me for an hour or so after his day at Dharma Press, and we would pracitice “Marriage of Sound and Breath” together each evening.  My sense of space became open and alive.  During the day he had me do the Blue Sky practices on a Berkley hillside for hours at a time.  One day there were no edges to my visual field.  I’ve never experienced anything like that since, but ever since I have known that there is something alive within experience that is not accurately represented by ordinary consciousness.  

How long have you been a student of TSK?

About 25 years, off and on.  After the experiences described above, I took several study by mail classes on Buddhism with Jack Petranker and Hal Gurish and I read pretty much all of Tarthang Tulku’s books plus a few other Dharma titles.  I also read with considerable interest every new TSK title as they came out.  I have not resuscitated those experiences of the 1980’s in my subsequent TSK studies.  However TSK has become my best way to keep alive the transformative experiences of the Human Development Training Program I attended in 1991.

Are you a student/teacher/writer about TSK? Please comment briefly.

Jack asked me to write an article for the TSK Perspective volume A New Way of Being, which appeared in the Applications section of that volume.  He had previously asked me to write something about “Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space” for Gesar magazine, but I don’t think that issue of Gesar ever came out.  I wrote an essay about my experience of the 1991/92 Human Development Training Program for Gesar that appeared as Gateway to the Past (and I gave a weekly Sunday talk at Nyingma Institute on the same theme). Back in Albuquerque, I gave a couple of TSK presentations (one with Lee Nichols) at the Albuquerque church where I learned to meditate.  I also participated in a TSK group (with Lee Nichols and Harold Cohen) in Albuquerque.  My book, The Flying Caterpillar, was in large part inspired by the new way of looking at Time which was seeded in me by several years of Jack’s TSK on-line classes, notably in our study of the Time sections of KTS & DTS.

What does TSK offer which isn’t found in already existing philosophical, spiritual, religious or ‘self-help’ approaches? 

I picked up from my mother a distrust of groups, especially ones that promote an exclusive religious dogma.  I had to overcome that influence in a more general way in the early ‘80’s, when it became clear that I wasn’t doing so well with my supposedly private spiritual life.  TSK sidesteps my tendency to hold back from the “authority” of a teacher, it invites inquiry without legislation from beyond, it stimulates and rewards the mind in a way that is its own reward, and it provides tools and methods for pursuing that invitation in daily life just as it presently arises.  As Tarthang Tulku himself makes clear, TSK offers an alternative way of attending to the possibilities of being more human, more aware, and more alive, without the need to deny or repudiate our own flawed impulses.

Do you feel TSK is particularly relevant to the present day (given its first publication in 1977)? How?

Yes.  This vision provides a way to appreciate the three most fundamental facets of our time and place and of our unfolding lives.  Unfortunately, it seems doubtful that the rich and powerful who hold society in thrall will be drawn to TSK.  When panic and greed are the driving forces on a macro level, it may be that any teaching that awakens people to a path of growth and creativity will only appeal to people who are already walking in the same neighborhood.  On the other hand, if more people become aware of the wisdom and healing quality of TSK, perhaps its healing vision will start to enter societal awareness as meditation already has.  The environmental movement seems one area where TSK could find interested parties, because TSK is so fundamentally about our time, our world, and our consciousness.

How does TSK affect your personal life and professional work? 

It’s hard for me to separate out the influences of Buddhism and TSK, since both provide empowering insights into the wisdom of appreciating our possibilities of life.  Professionally I work with sufferers of MS and ALS (through my non-profit “Friends in Time”), I am board president for a school for kids who have Learning and Autism issues, and I write fiction and non-fiction.  In all these areas, time is of the essence.  Progressive neuromuscular diseases only go one way and a two-year waiting list isn’t much help for a man who has two years left to live.  In the field of special education, kids shut down forever if they aren’t provided a nurturing environment early on.  And with writing, trusting the knowledge within is a sure cure for writer’s block.  I think that TSK needs to be applied in life in order to come alive and I feel that I owe TSK (and Skilful Means, and Buddhism) the understanding that has awoken me to the gift of my present human life. 

Would you say that the study/practice of TSK is ‘healing’? If so, how? Do you have personal examples from your life (or the lives of those you know) to illustrate your answer?

I think I needed a non-theoretical practice in my life before I was able to benefit significantly from TSK.  I received that from Skilful Means, which helped me to use work and my patterns of resentment and avoidance at work, to reclaim vital possibilities which had lain dormant during half my waking hours.  This prepared me to open to TSK in a way that has struck deeper than reading alone could have accomplished.  The exercises create the potential to be influenced directly, but allowing myself to be healed by a new vision perhaps required that I first acknowledged a willingness to be healed.  About five years after first encountering TSK, I participated in the six month HDTP at the Nyingma Institute and my life dramatically changed.  Now I can’t be sure whether TSK is simply the best way for me to keep alive a vision initiated elsewhere (notably during the HDTP retreat) or whether TSK is itself the source of deep insights which allow me to enjoy greater engagement with life.  However I am certain that the TSK vision provides a deeply fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human being and thereby has the power to awaken us to the gift of a human life.

Are there any other comments you would like to make about TSK? 

In the past few years, I have been most engaged by the idea that the future is the source of present aliveness.  This provides access to a realm of hope that lives in a kingdom of infinite possibilities.  What a beautiful alternative to the tendency to project anxieties and cravings, familiar from the past, onto a “future” that is thereby dragged down by fear and confusion.  Opening to the future as our friend and sponsor in Time is deeply empowering.

NAME: Michael Gray

Yes you are welcome to quote me.