I enjoyed working with this complementary but challenging suite of “variations” this week: LOK 14, LOK 22, and the three additional variations Jack suggested in his overview. LOK 14 was challenging for me because I really do not know what a moment is. I can isolate a particular duration here or there, an event or experience here or there, but this always feels “after the fact” and somewhat arbitrary. But noticing this arbitrariness allowed me to more easily declare the whole teeming flux of my experience “one moment,” and to have that feel as “real” (and constructed!) as any other smaller division I might make. When searching for moments “between” moments, the “between” seemed to arise at the same time as whatever other “slice” I decided upon (a breath, a second- or micro-second-long pulse, a thought, a momentarily passing experience, etc).
The teeming quality of my experiential field challenged the dualistic habit of thinking in terms of “this moment” followed by “this moment.” It was just as easy to say that moments were between, under, around, alongside, and within other moments, as to say that they were “between” — lots of parallel happenings and “times,” which brought up the metaphor of rhythm for me (discussed in TSK, but also by Raimon Panikkar in The Rhythm of Being). Like others here, at some points in my explorations this week, I found music was a very helpful support. One song in particular — “Games Without End” by Adelaide — brought participatory fullness for me of the sense of multiple bubbling “moments” circulating around each other, percolating and seething in many directions at once, like one of Rinpoche’s pictures of the unfolding cones in Sacred Dimensions.
This experience carried with it a mixture of joy and relaxation, an openness and spacious (polycentric) abiding — and was akin to one of the other variations this week, of “hearing” and “seeing” at once. For the “doing” mind, the agentic mind, it seems you have to oscillate back and forth, but there were also glimpses of the always-already simultaneity and polyphony of these sensory rhythms, a rhythm in which self has a hard time getting a foothold and instead must simply let go.
Yesterday, I went to a park to experiment with these variations more. I sat down on the shore of a pond, near a fountain which provided a nice continuous sound to work with. Sometimes the fountain was a confusing rush of many “moments” at once, and sometimes it shifted and became a single dancing moment or boundless duration. Practicing seeing along with hearing complemented this: the fountain provided a continuous column which nevertheless was frothy and “dancing” all around the edges. I sat for a long time watching this, and folded other sounds — children, cars, another distant waterfall-like fountain — into the dancing spray: an abiding dynamism, still and in motion at once.
Looking for moments on an ever smaller scale, I tried just to open up my sensitivity (by “not trying”! or relaxing), so I could sense ever-finer fluctations or “occasions.” After a time, I reached a limit — I couldn’t seem to sense anything “briefer.” But then as I waited, something relaxed more deeply and the fine moments became incredibly smooth and continuous seeming — reminding me of the super-slippery sense of time Rinpoche describes.
Looking for transitions, rather than moments, I could see what seemed like “prompts” for a change, little associative links from one moment to the next, although the moments themselves seemed discontinuous. But when I looked closely at those links, they also seemed just to pop up, to be discontinuous. Perhaps I could describe this sense as dis/continuity.
Ha Bruce. Reading your post there are two things that stand out for me “at the moment”
First, that it is possible, for you when you experienced it and for me when i read your post and went along on your trips into the music and the waterfall, to have this “parallel happenings” and “David’s funky wonderfulness” with something natural as a waterfall. But also with listening to what in essence is so digital. Or maybe the essence is not digital, but it can be connotated like that . The 1 and 0 of the computer creating the same aliveness. I don’t know if this is an important observation, but something in it sticks with me.
And the second thing that struck me was the happy, wonder-ful quality of your post. Today I was talking to my Turkish friend Cetin of the Turkish diner I often visit about the subject time. He told me that there is this Turkish saying that there are two kind of people to be afraid of: hungry people and people who are in love. Because both of them are so singly motivated, only open for this one thing they need, that they have no regard or care for the rest of the world. So I thought, maybe this is one of the things of what it means to do TSK; to become someone whom you do not have to fear.
Here a little clip about the same happy wonder-fulness
http://vimeo.com/84802749
Hahah, nice! Yes, I think David’s funky wonderfulness jived its way across the country and got into my bones that afternoon….
Ah, that’s where David’s “buble-burping” went. Into a man sitting on a park bench who became a fountain of sensation, insight and appreciation, as he watched a stream of water and listened to the songs of an afternoon. The next best thing to having the kinds of experience that you and David bring alive is reading abou tthem on-line.