I was taking a second look at the jellybean experience (eating consecutive jellybeans). Just naming it like that tends to isolate it from a more encompassing current of what was happening. It isn’t just about the sense of taste in sequence, there’s more going on at different levels of subtlety. There were the thoughts about the taste, of course, remembering flavors, judging them, the decision point to have another, etc. That was the linear progression I was initially focused on.
But other senses were also operating if not directly focused upon. The sense of hearing was registering the sounds around me. The tactile sense was feeling body temperature differences, skin touching areas, etc. Visually, I was sitting at my computer, peripherally there was the room and its contents, and beyond the windows outside. The olfactory sense seemed neutral, but I think it was just the underlying scent of the familiar. There was also an overall sense of overlapping awareness of all activity. That overlapping awareness seemed like an opening out, and as that all was happening the starting linear series of eating consecutive jellybeans lost its linearity.
Investigating how the self engages in narrowing focus on time actually allows for the very emergence of an active, non-fragmented knowing (intimacy). It’s when I then take the read-outs that emerge from that non-fragmented knowing, and use them to support statements and conclusions about the world, that I continue the self’s isolating and consolidating activities. To me, it seems a ‘first moment‘ is always the one that some self activity has begun after a sense of non-fragmented knowing. And to open the linear progression is to inquire into who is observing and how.
I’m reminded of the following quote:
“Concepts such as ‘progress on a path’ reflect a particular kind of time and space in which that intimacy has been submerged into the structures of distance and separation, ownership and wanting. But the intimacy itself continues to operate; in fact the apparent ‘loss’ of intimacy reflects a particular interplay of space, time and knowledge. Increased knowledge restores access to this intimacy. It reveals that the moment can be opened up, allowing space to exhibit a greater knowingness.” LOK pp. 387-8
David
Hi Michael,
Yes, that’s good. After rereading my post I didn’t mean to imply inquiry was the sole passage to a wider perspective, or that the structuring of linear time was more solid than a habitual way of looking.
Thanks,
David
Hi David,
Your post helps shed light on the discussion in LOK chapter 18 about how “the force of the self’s desire unfolds as the momentum of linear time.” Would it be fair to say that the more strongly we are in the grips of a particular craving (ie our universe collapses into the craving for the next jelly bean), the more our awareness is imprisoned within the limitations of linear time? But when our senses are awakened and we are aware of our surrondings, then we will not be dragged down into the narrow confines of that kind of linear experience. Perhaps it could be expressed like this: linear time robs us of the fulfillment of a wider perspective, while a wider perspective (however we arrive there) erodes the compelling illusion of linear time.
–MIchael