Fields in ever-extending fields (Assignment due 9th March)

“ Open Field” at TSK28 suggests a new type of knowledge more concerned with the idea of a dimension in which it is possible to “take up various points of view” rather than with the observed objects deriving from points of view.

“Higher-order space or field” at TSK30 appears to go a little further, suggesting the idea that the appearance of discrete objects does not falsify or block out this field.

The “field of possibility” at TSK67 , provided by the Great Space dimension, goes even further, making available a “kind of wide-angle lens, or Great Knowledge, that in some way might free us from the limits of the “knowing” and “doing” mind-self that we are usually bound to.

TSK75 goes further still, unfolding the infinity of Great Space as “an indefinitely–extended field of places and times populated by innumerable particulars.”

At TSK97, this gradual opening of the idea of field, characterized in the 4 previous uses of the word, takes an apparently different direction. Now the field is a “polarized field” with the world as background and “here” as foreground and the polarized field characterized as a “being ‘given together’ as a ‘meaning’ ”.

At TSK110 Rinpoche seems to close the circle. We are now in a “heavily structured and stratified field” in which it is very hard to relax. However, if we include all these structures and stratifications in our Space-time-Knowledge vision, we can relax, with everything contributing to this relaxation and there are no obstacles or distractions.

A possible summary of all this, that comes to my mind and, sometimes to my experience, is:

All that there is is an indefinitely extending field, that encompasses higher and lower level fields. The normal self perceives itself within, and its access to knowledge is limited by, a lower level field within the all-encompassing indefinitely extending field. However, being somehow a temporary manifestation of the entire infinite field, there is a possibility for the normal self to relax and open to all the other field levels, since they are all infinitely and indefinitely interconnected, possibly without (need for) reference to space and time.

This all seems to come together in an even more liberating, although so far mysterious, way at KTS179. Here we have space as “simply another aspect of the ‘field’, given together with ‘outsiders’, the ‘bystander’, and the ‘natural laws’ that govern the cosmos……… ‘given together’ is an aspect of the ‘field’ in operation…….. ‘being given together’ manifest through fixed juxtapositions….. possible transformation of the field in which, if the ‘field’ “traced to an unknown ‘source’, it seems that an entirely different ‘field’ could operate as well.”