TSK exercises are always fresh. Each time you do them, they offer something new. This is especially noticeable when you return to them for the first time after a few months or even years.
By the same token, what I discover in doing a TSK exercise today may not be at all what you discover, today or any other time. So when I raise some questions growing out of practice, that does not mean that these are the “right” questions. Your experience might be very different. It is engaging your own experience that matters.
The very idea of “moments between moments” is puzzling. If I identify two moments, T1 and T2, then in order to do this, I must have already “reached” T2, or it wouldn’t be a moment. But in that case, how can I go back and “fill in” the moments in between (T1a . . . T1b . . . etc.?) So how can I ever discover a moment “between” two already existing moments?
Exploring this, I find myself wondering about “moments.” What makes a moment? For instance, if I am looking at a flower (actually, it was a flower arrangement), what separates one moment of looking from the next moment of looking? One answer is that I can make the separation deliberately, because I am trying to do the exercise and looking for a moment in between the two moments. But that is pretty artificial. If I don’t do that, does the “moment” of looking continue forever? Is it timeless?
Clearly that is not my ordinary experience. So something interrupts one moment and gives it an identity as that moment. What is the interruption? It seems to be that my attention moves to something else, before returning. And in fact, my choosing to create the next moment is just an example of that, because there is the moment of deciding to make the break, etc.
So that is one way to find moments between moments: seeing how my mind moves from one thing to the next. And if I try to trace that movement, I have introduced another moment. But notice that all this is looking backward; having returned to looking at the flower, I notice that there was a moment between. Can I also do this going forward? Can I see how the mind creates a moment by creating/acknowledging a different content? In that case, I could discover moments between moments without having to return to the same content as the first moment (the flower), and that seems helpful.
What this suggests is that wherever and whenever I look, that act of looking creates a new moment. I can do this actively, or try to be actively aware of it happening in the more ‘passive’ stream of experience.
Jack
Practicing the exercise for LOK chapter 14 this morning, I had a response very much like the one Jack expresses in this post: that any two moments I may notice are already in the past and therefore it seems paradoxical to then look for anything in between them. I.E, it’s too late to look for anything I didn’t notice at the time. In my case, I quickly leap to the conclusion that it only makes sense to look for some kind of medium from which moments jump out–like fish jumping out of a river and then falling back. But I’ll try to bring into my practice of this exercise an awareness of what Jack proposes about attending to the future stream of perceived moments. I think I tend to jump to quickly to the conclusion that some unfathomed holistic medium underlies moments and desciptive knowledge, but then remain firmly stuck in those narrow confines for almost all of my lived life. So I would benefit from banging my head against these paradoxes a bit more, before pretending I have moved beyond them. — Michael