Week 1, TSK Ex. 9A

Hello,

Rinpoche speaks of ‘open uncommittedness‘ that consolidates or ‘freezes’ into subject and object, and it resonated with a book I’m currently reading on cosmology by Paul Davies in which, among other things, he attempts to appeal to scientific inquiry and reason in order to address the big questions of existence. He talks of the latest scientific discoveries and explains current cosmological theories.  While explaining the favored theory of the origin of the universe he talks about space at the time of ‘the big bang,’ not as an explosion in space, which is the popular way we envision it:

“The big bang happened everywhere, not at one point in space. The big bang was the explosion of space, not an explosion in space.”

He goes on to explain the expansion of the universe from that singularity, “it is not so much the migration of galaxies through space as the stretching or swelling of space between the galaxies.”

When I look inward to investigate the operation of my senses I see something similar to this ‘expanding of space‘. For instance, sitting quietly to observe my sense of taste, at first there seems to be nothing there, an ‘open uncommittedness‘, but continued investigation reveals a near neutral but slightly acidic flavor, perhaps a hint metallic. I sip from my coffee cup and my sense of taste (space) explodes and expands to include, the taste of coffee, cream, and sweetener, as I consolidate, recognize, and freeze (name) the tastes in knowing space. These tastes became objects in a space revealing (exposing) a self-subject who was organizing their comparisons and focus. Tasting became an explosion of sensual space, but also a burst of expanding events in/as time.

I can see this ‘open uncommittedness‘ in each of my senses. The auditory sense is another easy one to point to (for the sake of brevity) of a near silent base of open uncommittedness, upon being stimulated by a sound nearby and another sound farther away, space expands well beyond the physical bounds of the body. This space can expand for miles. This is an example of the perception of separation (distance) between the self-subject attempting to recognize and name or figure out what the sound was (the object) so far away. When really, there was no distance at all, it was a value or quality my organizing-self automatically assumed between subject and object in mental space (the organizing and knowing space).

So in terms of the ‘open uncommittedness‘ and the consolidating tendency, the more I look inward to investigate how I perceive, I discover what at first was thought to be the given world, gradually reveals a contextual world contingent upon read-outs. It becomes more intuitively apparent that as a sentient being, I may be a functioning and recurring echo of the history of the budding cosmos; from the surfacing of spacetime from a zero time-space (a nothing more than 13 billion years ago), to the relatively more recent echo of the individual experience of a knowing space, along with the very human activity of patterning.  Looking inward reveals an ‘open uncommittedness‘ – continuously stimulated by unfolding time, engaged in measuring, comparing, and judging the stream of incoming and overlapping sense data – a recurring tendency toward specificity, but at the same time there is valuing of ‘open uncommittedness‘ as the prior to all engaging.

David