It was fruitful reading your posts for the first week. i let them guide me as I turned to the readings for week 2, which continue with the same chapter in the TSK book.
The talk here is of trends and regularities (for instance, in a few hours it will get dark). This is related to the earlier talk of control of prediction, and it is all put into the category of ‘lower time’.
The suggestion is made that we can ‘discover’ this lower time and understand it. Notice that doing so is itself a kind of action, and in this sense seems to require time. But it must not be an action ‘in’ lower time. So what lifts it outside of lower time? That seems to be the role of knowledge, or (the text suggests) space.
Lower time is also ‘local’ time, the outcome of our particular focal setting on reality, our way of making sense of the world (to step out of the usual TSK vocabulary). Here we are talking of ‘isolates’ that are indexed, which is pretty much what I meant last week when I wrote of insisting on identity.It is worth reading this section (125-126)Â carefully, because it is suggesting how the past-present-future structure of linear time arises. If we want to explore the idea that time could manifest or act differently, we need to clear on this structure and its consequences. As the text says, we must see ‘why time goes.” Notice also that the alternative possibility for time presented here is specifically not the same as saying that time is subjective (p. 126). For those of you who wrote of your experiences of time in Week One, it would be worth going back and asking if those experiences were more than subjective, and if so, what that ‘more’ is pointing at (Arthur already went in that direction). See also p. 131.
The idea that things that appear in time ‘are’ time is one of those TSK thoughts that may not make much sense at first reading, but it is an idea worth carrying around with you. The exact way to “carry it” is of course the real question. You don’t just think about it. One clue (and again I am looking at my experience as i write) is to take a wider perspective on experience than we usually do, letting it include the whole of what is happening, without much concern for inside vs. outside.
Keep on with Ex. 18 and 19 in the TSK book. Arthur, perhaps you could tell us more about how Ex. 19 is central to what you do in your practice as a therapist. If you like, you can also start to work with Ex. 23, which some of you know: this is a physical movement, a slow walking, so it will help ground your inquiry.
Jack