KTS 8, 56
Hi all, I hope everyone has access to Knowledge of Time and Space, for this week’s reading and practice. It’s a book with a very different flavor, often challenging, but also beautiful.
 The KTS chapter starts off with the bystander and outsider, but for our purposes I don’t think we need to be too concerned about this vocabulary. We could also so “self” and “world,” which is the language from LOK. Take a look at p. 19 of KTS for some discussion of how self, bystander, world, logos, etc. relate to one another. I have always loved the description on p. 20, by the way. The idea that self is the expression of a certain tension suggests that relaxing this tension will also loosen the hold of the subject-object way of looking.
 This section of KTS is about time, and time involves a movement ‘beyond’ the spatial structure of subject and object. As the text says on p. 36, ‘subject and object’ are no longer the key actors. As an analogy, consider subject and object as characters in a novel: while you are reading the novel, they may be the key actors, but if you step back and think in terms of the author of the novel, yourself as the reader, and perhaps the background that makes the novel meaningful to you, or that got the book you are reading into your hands, the focus of inquiry shifts.
Still, the main focus here is on time’s momentum, which in effect presents subject and object again and again, communicating it forward. The whole description at the bottom of p. 36 invites a very subtle inquiry into this interaction. Then on p. 37 there is an invitation to go still deeper, looking at the ‘founding activity’ that establishes the order in which subject and object function. In a variety of ways, the suggestion is being made that subject and object could be viewed more dynamically; that the solidity of this way of viewing the world could be dissolved.
All this is related to the self’s ‘need to exist’ (p. 40). And while this structure is more fundamental than the subject-object split, it is presented as the source of this split. This means it should be accessible to investigation within the subject-object structure. All of which leads to the practice of “Co-Relation,” KTS ch. 56 (at pp. 253-5). My sense is that all four parts of this exercise flow easily into one another, and could be done in a single session. If the focus on ‘space’ is confusing, feel free to de-emphasize it.
I look forward to seeing how people react to this very rich material.
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Jack