Let’s stay with the complex of exercises from LOK 14, 22, 23. Move around among them as you like.
The reading for this week is Chapter 18. There is a sentence at the beginning of the week that I long ago memorized, because I like it so much: “In one unified action, the self takes a position, posits a situation, and imposes meaning.” There is of course a play on words here: posing, positing, and imposing. They all relate to the word for “to put.” So the self is doing all this. But where does this self that puts take its stand? For time to go by, does the self have to be on a kind of stationary platform? These are questions the exercises may help clarify (not necessarily answer, just clarify).
Once the self comes into play, once we look at it seriously, our whole way of relating to time changes. Now the future is the ‘location’ that will give us what we want or fear, while the past is the source of our limits and our identity. How does this way of doing/viewing time fit with the linear momentary time we have been looking at? See the last sentence on p. 149, another one I quite spontaneously memorized, because it is so powerful. I invite your comments.
Jack
Hi Jack,
You invite comments on the power of the last sentence on LOK 149–“The force of the self’s desire unfolds as the momentum of linear time.” This seems to be the main thrust of the entire chapter. Earlier on that same page there is a sentence that relates “hope, fear, and longing” to how the self relates to the future. It struck me how this hunger (or aversion) for what the future may bring, links all three times in a compelling way: our attention is placed on the future, the imagery of what we fear or crave comes from the past, and the emotions occur in the present. Related to fear and craving in this way, one can wish to be free of this dynamic, but at the same time this chapter reveals how powerful this dynamic is, and how it fulfills an important human need . Compared to the dryness of polar and descriptive knowledge, the self’s confidence that it can make a link between moments appears to satisy a natural human hunger for “continuity over time” (LOK 148). If the self can provide a sense of abiding in time, isn’t that what we most long for? What a challenge the TSK books have to show us a more fulfilling way of relating to time. This chapter raises the possibility that there must be at least three ways of relating to time: polar knowledge where the self has a place in an objective world; time that draws it’s force from the yearnings of the self; and something deeper that does not have the horrible side-affects of linear time. This is the background of how I have been trying to approach LOK exercies 23. Is it possible to excavate between the moments of linear time and break through to something greater? Is it the fear and longing of the self that keeps the bricks so close together that a wall of time seems to be all there is?
–Michael