Hello everyone, and welcome to the 2d program for this year. The focus is linear time. Those of you who did the last course will find connections, since linear time is what supports subject and object, and the subject only finds its home in linear time.
An apology in advance. I am about to start a 5 day retreat, so I won’t have access to the site during that time. So you’re on your own for the next few days, after this post.
By way of general orientation, I want to emphasize that what matters in exploring time is the experience of time. In fact, this is a general rule for TSK. The theories and explanations we may offer before or after the experience may be helpful, but they are just as likely to be distractions.
 What does it mean to experience time, anyway? If you set out to experience time, do you only experience the events that happen in time? This is a question to ask in this moment, and a question to take with you. Is it possible to connect with a flow or dynamic that is time, or the ‘timing’ of time? The answer you get one ‘time’ may not be the same as the answer you get the next ‘time’. Stay with it, and be open. Even the reference in the text to how we are ‘helpless’ in the face of time is an assumption that we would rather set aside at the outset. Can we be innocent about time?
The discussion in the text about “control and improvement orientation” seems to point to something basic about time. After all, we have things to do, places to get to, etc. That is what linear time is all about. Before we decide there is something more basic, we should ‘take the time’ to get familiar with this dimension of ordinary experience.
 Another really general question: What is our relation to time? Does time happen ‘to’ us? Are we happening ‘in’ time? Is the happening of our lives time? Is it us? In asking these questions, I do not of course expect that we want to arrive at answers. The asking is all.
Perhaps you can make up your own exercise. How would you tune in to time?
 Well, I have more notes, but I think that’s enough. For exercises, do TSK Ex. 18-19. Note that these are more structured versions of the questions asked above, ways of ‘calling time into question’. See especially the comment on p. 175 about “a knowing brought by time.”
Especially with time, which is so intimately involved with who we are, it seems important to activate this inquiry on an ongoing basis. I’ll try to do the same over the next few days. Let’s compare.
Jack
“If you set out to experience time, do you only experience the events that happen in time?” The zen tradition mentions a “beginners mind”. The zen saying is that “in the beginners mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” If I set out to experience time it seems to me that expressions as ‘beginners mind’ or ‘stepping into the present moment’ describe much more the kind of experience we are talking about. Very much like the Kum Nye instructions: “relax the sense of the “I” doing Kum Nye and let Kum Nye do itself.” This “doing itself” feeling seems to relate to the “experience” of time. The ‘subject’ is there but it is not “controlling”, is just present and open and curious and sensing and surprised by each moment. If I lift my arm controling the movement there is a sense of an “I” doing an “exercise”. But if an arm just floats by itself and there is awareness and stilness and a sense of surprise and ‘not knowing what comes next’… there is not a sense of an “I” any more, and there is not an “event” happening to me. You say that the subject only finds its home in linear time. Is it appropriate to say that the subject is the one who controls in the example given by me? It creates linear time out of a need to ‘control’?