Space: the raft of being

Dabbling in TSK feels like taking a guided tour through a foreign land.  This morning I read a good part of Jack’s Space essay in A New Way of Being, and at some point I realized with pleasure that I was being led to approach Space in a new way.  Not as an abstraction and not as a sacred cow of TSK (and hence too deep and meaningful for me to really understand).  But as something more like the “Lipid Raft” in the Life of the Cell video to which Bruce posted a link.  In that video, there is a cylindrical raft on which a loan sailor (I guess he must be a lipid protein) is skudding across a truly exotic region from some part of the world I can’t remember ever visiting, even in dream.  And reading Jack’s essay, in which he explores what space projecting space into space might mean, it all seemed so simple, so true of my own experience.  I expect there is a double simplification going on: 1/ Jack trying to make the arcane familiar, and 2/ me trying to make the familiar true (because I would rather feel competent than incompetent, and in the swim than drowning in obscurity).  But I felt that I understood while reading Jack’s essay that the individual spaces–which float every experience, thought, sensation, perception, theory, and insight–are all sailing across a sea of space too vast to comprehend in its totality, but on life rafts of space, specially outfitted for their cargo, which I am able to understand.  The ocean is always there, in local manifestations which are more accessible because they are part of my experience.  Drawn out of  a more fundamental space, these individual rafts are fashioned from the same ocean brine as the larger sea from whence they have arisen.  In a sense these rafts are limited, occupying only the range needed for their particular space application, but they are also a doorway into an all encompassing space.  Made of space, they come and go like morning mist, but while we are sailing on them, we can contact a spacious presence that is approachable because it is intimately connected with our interests, focal lengths,  and intentions.  –Michael