Session 5, Assignment for Week 6.
Q: Why study about By-standers and Outside-standers?
A: Well, knowing that my methods of knowing are flawed helps me to not expect accuracy or clairvoyance from my bias-stander perspective of outside-standers. Realizing that my understanding of the environments I enter and the interests of the people with whom I interact is approximate, and possibly little more than my own projection, is empowering.
Q: Why is that empowering? It sounds disengaged, nihilistic even.
 A: Not at all. It allows me to be more engaged and present. Since I know I don’t know (what is in the hearts and minds of friends, family and associates) I feel called upon to pay more attention to what they are actually saying and how they say it. I have to remain present– like someone visiting from a foreign land who doesn’t know the language or the local customs–if I am to connect in any meaningful way with others.
Q: Kind of like Socrates saying, “If I know anything that others don’t know, it’s that I don’t know�
 A: Perhaps. But I find that TSK keeps the door to the unknown open longer and wider. In the Socratic dialogues, Socrates seems to already know what he believes and is able to manipulate less developed minds to arrive at his own beliefs. TSK is more concerned with opening the mind of bias-standers, such as myself, to the possibility that a vast unknown is out there in time and space, and that the winds of knowing are even now catching at the main sail.
Dear Michael,
thank you for asking these questions and answering to them in your own words. I am feeling your personal concern and experience and it is resonating to mine. Relationsships to students, their parents, my friends and relatives are getting more open – ways of communication are shifting. There is always another door. Thats´s one effect I really love on TSK. Karin
Michael,
I would like to comment your post by giving alternative answers to the same questions.
Q: Why study about By-standers and Outside-standers?
A: Either By-standers and Outside-standers are out of the experience, out of life.
“While experience is inseparable from the flow of time, and is in fact the way that the flow presents itself, the self is an ‘outsider’ with respect to the temporal dynamic.
As an ‘outsider’, the self occupies the specific role of ‘bystander’, unaffected by the ‘passing’ of time.” KTS 24
So one reason to study more this subject is to try to change this vision of isolation and separation from experience (that I have when I am self-centered), to another one more whole and more connected and more meaningful.
Q: Why is that empowering? It sounds disengaged, nihilistic even.
A: It is empowering because it helps to see where I am and to comprehend my relationship with other people and know what set us apart.
Q: Kind of like Socrates saying, “If I know anything that others don’t know, it’s that I don’t know�
“To begin to know something new, we first must realize that there is something we do not know.” By admitting he didn´t know Socrates is open to know something new.