rounding out week one

It’s time to move on to week two, but first a few comments on the last couple of days of posts on week one.

 Linda responded to my question about the physical precursor to thought. Linda, if I understood correctly, you say that darkness of mind precedes (?) thought, and this is what you mean by physical. I’ll leave it at that, but feel free to comment if I’ve misunderstood.

David picks up on another aspect of Linda’s comment, one that I had not reflected on until David pointed it out: Does a dog appear as dog because the dog is constructing ‘itself’ as dog or because ‘I’ am constructing it as dog. As David says, this is a great question. I am going to respond on a fairly theoretical level: it seems to me the dog and I share some constructs, having to do with being embodied beings on this earth, etc. But it would be much better to look at this question experientially. This area of “intersubjectivity” is not much discussed in TSK that I can recall, but it would be fruitful indeed to explore. To take another sentient being as an ‘object’ for purposes of investigating the relation between subject and object could open whole new vistas. David’s thoughts, and the TSK quote he cites in his comment, are good pointers.

David, good job of being concrete ! :>) (smiling face) I like the way you dissolved the distinction among the senses (not to the point of synesthesia, but to the point of not making such sharp distinctions: a hearing-seeing-tasting experience. My hunch is that insisting on subject vs. object is not so easy when you are open to more than one sense-field at once.

Arthur, your very sense of being frozen/rigid in your ordinary experience seems to me to go to a key point in TSK, and your conclusion: “I am an unconscious being” is one way of experience this very directly. The question for us is how much the distinction between subject and object depends on (and creates) this stiffness. I think we should be careful not to jump too quickly to a conclusion (to decide we already know what the right answer to this question is), but to stay with our experience.

The CD does not have a glossary, but it does have a search function which can access all the TSK books. To use it, click on the image of the binoculars in Adobe Acrobat.

Jack