Just thought I would write a word of encouragement to those of you we haven’t been hearing from. The discussion online has been very good; I love to see what people are doing with the practices and learning from the readings. But don’t let it intimidate you!
One thing you may notice is that people’s experience is very different. And that includes you. The way TSK works is this: you do the practice or do the reading, and you don’t worry about what you understand or whether you are getting the results you think you should get. Being confused, for instance, is fine. Or not knowing where to start. After all, if you don’t know, you “don’t know” in a specific way, and that way of not-knowing is a starting point for learning something new.
It’s like learning to ride a bicycle. You do it, and at first you can’t keep your balance, but then after a while you can. And all those times of losing your balance are what ultimately let you learn to keep your balance (which you actually do by learning to lose your balance in a controlled way).
The only problem with that analogy is that there is no ‘right’ way to do TSK; no point where you can say, “Now I know how to keep my balance.” You just stop being afraid of losing your balance, and you realize that losing your balance is in a sense the whole point.
Jack
Greetings,
I hope I’m not overdoing it with all these posts written on a single afternoon; however it occurs to me that the structure of this on-line posting area is organized in terms of linear time, and that making comments gets away from that slightly. The comments branch off in a perpendicular direction and in a sense are interposed between two previous posts (like new moments between existing moments). Jack’s image of riding a bicycle–wobbling off the straight line as the way to keep balance–seems a nice encouragement to trust the relevance of whatever our experience is, which also being an image of how our stick adherance to the linear path of time can benefit from a little wobbling experimentation.
–MIchael