This week we start with Love of Knowledge. LOK makes a sharp distinction between subject/object on the one hand and self/world on the other. In this program we are working with subject/object, which LOK describes as a perceptual issue. A central point is that knowledge based on polarity is limited and difficult to obtain.
At this point Peter’s post becomes relevant. Peter is concerned that too much analysis takes us away from the heart of experience into the dry skeleton. But the analysis that the TSK books offers is of course designed to lead us back into experience. This may seem like a contradiction, but Peter himself offers the way out: TSK shows us (both through analysis and through experience) that we have already analyzed experience a certain way, and that when experience is dead, that is a sign of this analysis in operation. The analysis of experience into subject and object is a prime example of this kind of destructive and limiting analysis. When subject knows object, there is a knowledge gap. We start from a position of ignorance. That is what we want to explore.
The second half of the chapter focuses on the self and its world. The self is more involved in meaningful projects and concerns, while the subject is just the one that knows (or does not know). We are normally selves, rather than subjects, but the reason for focusing on the subject is that the relation between subject and object is simple and clean, and gives us a place to look. The self is much more slippery.
This chapter makes the very interesting distinction between polar knowledge, temporal knowledge, and descriptive knowledge. You could build up a whole worldview based on that distinction (for instance, consider this sentence, on p. 105: “. . . descriptive knowing is necessary to give form to the content of polar knowledge [but] something vital is lost . . .”) These ideas are fun to play with, but not central. You could also just experiment directly with the relation between subject and object: not just in seeing or hearing, but when you ‘perceive’ something like your own emotional state.Â
We’re moving on to a different exercise now. I’m curious to see how people relate to it.
Jack
Jack, are there other passages elsewhere in Rinpoche’s work where he addresses the issue of the not-knowing that arises with the perceptual-level polarities? I’m exploring that sense of deficiency of knowledge, the kind that tries to bridge the ‘gap.’ – Christopher.
I respond to that “perceptual issue” – years ago I noticed that some little mental operation in me was drawing (in some kind of space that for now I’ll call mind – but not locate it in the head or anywhere) was ‘drawing/measuring’ a distance between a perceiving me and the perceived “other” (in this case a woman I was in love with) supposedly “over there.” I realised with a shock that thinking (of some subtle sort) was creating the subject-object divide and I had previously thought that the separation was a given. Lovely