I’ve been wondering why I keep being drawn to TSK. Â This weekend I attended an opening lecture of a weekend workshop celebrating a spiritual path called “MasterPath”. Â The core book, “Soul’s Divine Journey” uses words that I don’t personally use and which are not particularly evocative for me: God, Soul, Levels of Heaven. Â But I was drawn to read the book and attend this lecture, which only happens twice a year, when the “Living Master”, Sri Gary Olson, comes to Albuquerque, because I am impressed with a woman who is very severely disabled with MS. Â She has a presence and glow that I would like to have more of myself. Â I’ve also met other individuals on this path and am impressed with them also. Â Then at the event, standing in line with at least 1000 other people,I found the woman behind me to be an inspirited, open person, who gladly shared the 20 year dedication that brings her to Albuquerque twice a year for these events. Â Even the book is written in a vivid, appreciative way about a world I recognize along with a cogent exposition on why religions, in looking outside of the individual for “salvation”, have all strayed from the inspired understandings of their founding masters.
And yet, this morning, I return to TSK with gratitude.  Why?  Thinking about this, I came up with the following: even an appealing story (such as MasterPath’s story about how our souls are drops of the great ocean of God to whom our souls yearn to return, but are prevented from undertaking that journey home  because our ordinary minds stand in the way) feels like yet another way to look outside of our current lives for a greater reality to which we would aspire to return if we hadn’t buried our souls under the domination of our minds.
TSK doesn’t require a journey, a pushing aside of obscuring entanglements, or a deferral of full engagement with and appreciation for what is present right here and now. Â This works for me and I suspect that it offers a vision for which our accelerating, crowded world hungers. Â If only we could find a way to express this vision in ways that our neighbors and work-mates might understand. Â I scarcely dare to mention TSK to people in my personal world, unless they ask about it. Â This difficulty of sharing the TSK vision with others perhaps has two main aspects: 1/ hardly anyone wants to know about someone else’s spiritual interests, especially if they suspect that they might thereby unleash a proselytizing rant; and the concepts used to express the TSK vision are simultaneously too fundamental and too intellectually demanding to share around the water cooler. Â I’d be interested in knowing: have any of you been asked about TSK by family and friends over Thanksgiving dinner? Â Just asking. Â –Michael
Just finished teaching a TSK workshop at Nyingma Institute. The eight or so participants were also doing a four month Human Development retreat so they were dedicated meditators. Hardly any theory today, rather steady practice with intermittent conversations. To many of the questions posed directly to me, I responded with a “Let’s find out’,” and moved the group into experiential inquiry. I, for one, thought we were deepening our inquiry and moving beyond a strict set of conceptualizations into a more directly nourishing and refreshing space. But heels really dug in when we entered “Conducting the Vision” from DTS. The effortful assertion of the need, even the responsibility, to build a structure through which do the practice brought on a felt conflict with behests along the lines of “you can swim in awareness”, refining it as you embody it, or the advice that one didn’t have to hire an agent to work on one’s behalf. That seemed too much. Of course we need agents, we need swim instructors. In a sense I was being accused of abandoning students in mid stream. Perhaps. I don’t know. Yet later at lunch, the usual quietness was interrupted by bursts of laughter and a general sense of a wonderfully accommodating and helpfully open etiquette the likes of which I have not experienced before, a general buoyancy that lifted the day; an occasion of open ease and shared delight, it didn’t attach, didn’t stick, didn’t impede the getting on with ordinary plans and obligations, just the usual given in an unusually light way. Hmmm.
Ah Michael! What a great question! And Caroline, what a wise and compassionate response!
Bruce recently said about our recent TSK retreat, how great it was to have TWELVE long-time students together under one roof. How rare is THAT!! :-)
I encounter the same problem that Michael describes with friends, they might ask what I’ve been doing, and if I mention TSK, they might look quizzically. I might try a superficial explanation of the vision, I have perhaps ten seconds to explain before eyes glaze or fidgeting begins. I am not one to evangelize so I end the explanation quickly. By those closest to me I’m described as ‘my boyfriend the Mystic’, which I suppose is better than ‘my boyfriend the psychopath’. Anyway, when the topic comes up at Thanksgiving Dinner, or if I’m a guest at any other dinner, I have something to point to when asked questions which appear to represent genuine curiosity. And that is what I have written describing my experience with the TSK exercises, either on my TSK Inquiry website, or on the CCI website. Making proclamations about the way the world is doesn’t help and isn’t what TSK is about, all we can do is describe our living experience. The description is either intriguing to those who listen or read it or not. We are the living examples of the TSK vision.
David
Michael, I think what you are asking is of central importance to all of us as students of TSK, and perhaps of particular importance to those who aspire to teach. I don’t have anything to say by way of a response to your question about friends and family at Thanksgiving (all my friends either know about TSK or have their own committed spiritual approach, and I have no family contact these days). However, I am, as you know, an enthusiastic promoter of TSK. Part of the creative delight for me in TSK is allowing unexpected ideas to surface as to how to present it freshly. I think we can actually invoke this, by simply energising the willingness to be so inspired.
A couple of things from my life spring to mind in response to reading what you have written: I had a wonderfully gifted maverick teacher from 1973-1980. He is now dead, but a couple of things he counselled rise in response to your post. The first was ‘Dare to be wise’. Wikipedia tells me he was quoting Horace (later referenced by Immanuel Kant in an essay (significantly titled, What is Enlightenment?). It is interesting that the Latin ‘Sapere aude’ contains our word ‘audacious’. I think, at least at first, we have to step outside our familiar comfort zone or idea of what we might be capable of and exercise a certain audacity (at least in our own eyes) in order to do this. The second was, ‘When you’re ready to teach, people will come and ask you, until then mind your own business.’ Actually what he said was less polite than that (he was a brusque northerner who didn’t mince his words) but this is a public website.
I’m not sure that we actually need to tell people about TSK, unless it comes easily to us to do so, rather I think we can let its alchemy work within us, being confident that this will make our presence in the world helpful without actually necessarily having to do or say anything. Then when we see an opportunity to contribute something helpful or of value to a person or situation– we can dare to be wise. What we say or do may not even look like TSK: Time, Space and Knowledge will find the words or the way to express what is needed without it necessary presenting itself in the form or using the language of TSK.
I hope this speaks at least a little to what you are voicing – I’d love to read others’ responses.
Caroline