1. Briefly outline previous spiritual/philosophical study & practice.
I had sixteen years of Catholic education growing up. As I matured, making more of my own decisions, I found Catholicism and the rigidity of its faith based doctrine less appealing. Searching for a more personal, experiential truth, I read a lot of books by many masters, but was particularly struck by J. Krishnamerti and his philosophy around choiceless awareness, and the use of inquiry in the opening of awareness. I also read all the Diamond Approach books by A. H. Almaas. (A former student of Tarthang Tulku) The Diamond Approach is a path of wisdom, that involves investigation and work on oneself spiritually and psychologically that leads to human maturity and liberation. My study helped me understand many root causes of my reactive behavior from childhood.
Later, I spent several years in sustained practice of insight mindfulness meditation, as put forth in the book, ‘Diamond Mind: A Psychology of Meditation‘ by Rob Nairn, while simultaneously studying and practicing the Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep. It was around this time in the late 1990s that I discovered Tarthang Tulku’s books on the Time, Space, Knowledge (TSK) vision. Because of my prior experience of inward looking, use of inquiry, experiential understanding of ‘space’ derived from meditation and the Sleep and Dream Yogas, I came to TSK at first from a Space perspective, a deepening understanding of Time came later.
Working with TSK, more than any other vision or model, has provided me with the tools, (language, benchmarks, and guidance), and a path, for discovering a world that was not what I had assumed. Awakening to how deeply conditioned the interpretive process actually is, continues to be thrilling and deeply revelatory.
2. What drew you to TSK?
Primarily, the desire to know. The memory of unexplained experiences throughout my life since childhood had me questioning – Do others experience this too? Why, after mindfullness training and at other times in my life prior, why did my thoughts sometimes suddenly stop revealing vast vistas or even blanks? Who am I? Why am I here? Am I my thoughts?
My lifelong questioning of experience brought me to discovery of the TSK vision, which itself is based on inquiry, a vision that did not require a rigid belief system, a vision that has provided me over the years with a language to describe and explain myself to me, a way to externalize the unformulated – the very questions I hardly knew how to ask in order to discover deeper meaning.
3. How long have you been a student of TSK?
Probably about 15 years [20+ years as of 2017], but the last 6 years [10 years as of 2017] my TSK teacher has been Jack Petranker, founder and director of Center for Creative Inquiry and regularly offers programs and online courses. A student of Buddhism since 1973, he is also the director of the Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages and a faculty member at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute. He served as Dean of the Institute in Berkeley from 1988-1991 and as North American Vice-President of the World Fellowship of Buddhists from 1988-1992.
4. Are you a student/teacher/writer about TSK? Please comment briefly.
I am a dedicated student of TSK, not a teacher. I also co-author, with Bruce Alderman, the TSK Inquiry website, which explores the Time, Space, Knowledge, vision.
5. What does TSK offer which isn’t found in already existing philosophical, spiritual, religious or ‘self-help’ approaches?
There are many paths to self-actualization and deeper spiritual realization, TSK is but one. I think it’s important to pick a path that seems to tug at us, one that seems to speak directly to our deepest nature, and then set out upon that path to see what unfolds. For instance, one Buddhist approach to the Dharma may be to tame the mind, another approach might be a faith based devotional system; so for some, a belief system with with prayer meets their needs, whereas for others, exploring experience and inquiring inward seems more authentic to them.
One important thing about TSK is that it was written primarily for the Western mind that is steeped in science and heavily influenced by technology, as opposed to the Eastern mind perhaps rooted in centuries of mysticism. TSK speaks to the scientific method applied to inquiry into all of experience – to observe and challenge the obviousness of what presents, explore through open inquiry, and finally, resulting conclusions are never fixed, but are the bases for new exploration and inquiry. This is the essence of TSK.
6. Do you feel TSK is particularly relevant to the present day (given its first publication in 1977)? How?
In these turbulent times, as cultures meet and merge, the cultural mosaic begins to look less like a harmonious design and more like chaos. As information accumulates, knowledge increasingly seems pointless – dead facts to be filed away and retrieved when useful. We sense that more fundamental ways of knowing have been lost. Without a sheltering framework of meaning and significance, we live in a strange, in-between kind of world, trapped by a logic that makes no sense. DTS p. xiv
We are doing this to ourselves, and we can change this momentum. The extraordinary promise of the TSK vision is that if we understand our own space, we can become more open; if we know our own time more intimately, we can transform our living; and if we investigate more deeply, we can discover the roots of knowledge everywhere. p. xvi
These quotes from DTS are as true today as they were in 1994 when the book was published, and are perhaps timeless.
7. How does TSK affect your personal life and professional work?
I am retired, no longer a professional, and my 34 year career as a manager is a memory, or a contextualization of countless remembrances. TSK did not figure in to the first twenty years of my career, but its last ten years or so it did. During the first twenty years I was struggling to make a mark, to get ahead, make money, gain recognition, acquire things, it was a rather self-centered perspective and the feeling of spiritual starvation was growing until it was no longer an unformulated urge, but a palpable realization that something was missing, and whatever it was, I had not been addressing it. That is around the time I began a spiritual quest. During the ensuing years introspection and a focus on discovering clarifying space within began my understanding of the importance of depth. TSK afforded my efforts at introspection an ever deepening realization that there was more to life than the myopic way I had been living it. I became more open with my relationships, more caring about others, with more wisdom about all my human questions and explorations.
8. 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?
Inwardly, I’ve noticed a memory of some event in my life is often not crystal clear, not all the light of knowing of that remembered moment is with me now, so I see shadows and dark areas in my inward looking. If I sat with the memory over a period of time, hours or days, more of the memory would appear from the dimness, but not all of it, because a memory is just that, a dim reproduction of the actual event. The memory involves what I have through process constructed it to be, what I conducted over time.
So I look to the present as ‘things‘ arrive out of the dark horizon into the inward light. Just observing is calming, it slows breathing and calms all the appearances down to a trickle, and I seem to shift to what Jack describes in a recent class Orientation as, “a deeper knowing, an ‘at-homeness’ in the dynamic flow of time”. Here, there appears to be illumination, but not off the surface of things so much, though there is still darkness that I can’t seem to penetrate. Perhaps this is near the spark of life, near the zero-point prior to conducting light and darkness, in which sometimes a sense or feel of me is present, and in another moment that ‘me-sense’ is forgotten. It feels like there is a knowing of the capacity to know. Emerging from this calmness feels refreshing, the feeling of something fundamental has occurred. I am happy to be alive.
This may sound odd, but the past weeks have actually been a sad time for me, my wife passed away about a month ago, but I rely on TSK and practice to nourish and help me through this difficult time. Beneath the normal day to day living, even the sadness, there is the spark of aliveness that is always available. Tapping in to that aliveness is enormously helpful.
9. Are there any other comments you would like to make about TSK?
TSK is a jewel conceived in the mind of a master Tibetan lama. It is a vision that employs reflection and investigation into personal experience that allows for continuous revelation, like a refreshing spring, ever available and nourishing. You might say ‘Open Inquiry’ is the essence of TSK… and the essence of ‘Open Inquiry’ is the ‘Unknown’…
NAME: DAVID FILIPPONE
Do I have your permission to quote you by name?
Yes…
