It’s always interesting to come to the end of a TSK program. You realize you have not really arrived anywhere. Instead, you have opened up new questions. Very often, if we are honest, that openness closes down again fairly quickly, but it does not close completely, and in that openness, we can breathe deeply and with new appreciation.
For me, this has been an interesting program. I have been thinking a lot about how to present TSK. I appreciate that all of you have been taking part, some participating actively, others silently, but I suppose you are there. But I would like to find some ways to engage more people. I think that next year (after course three), I will do things a little differently.
i will write something more like an introduction to Week 9 tomorrow morning. Right now (it’s evening here) I will just comment briefly on the two posts for this week (besides mine), from David and from Arthur.
David does well to remind us of the three ways of understanding the present on DTS 77. It is always good to remember that many paragraphs of the TSK books can be approached as exercises. That is what David has done here, asking when he treats time in these three ways. For me, this question is very much tied up with the way we organize experience into stories. Stories are closest to the third view. But part of the story is that time operates in a particular way, which is usually the first view.
The second view is more that of science, which adopts “the view from nowhere” (a phrase made famous by the Western philosopher Thomas Nagel, and a very useful phrase, I think.) Anyway, I think David has found a different way of working with it. To say that the present is an empty hollow is also to say that we are ready for anything, right?
Arthur, I like the way you work with time and breath. Rinpoche writes in one of the TSK books that human beings discover linear time when we measure out the seasons and the days. But in our own daily lives, the marker for time seems to be the breath and the heartbeat. So it is a good place to experiment.
Arthur, I appreciate the frustration of not being able to do this in German. I would consider doing a program auf Deutsch, but we would need enough people. I suppose Peter would be interested, and maybe some of the people from Heckenbeck last year. I will also ask Roland Walter, whom I will see on Wednesday; perhaps you have met him?
I also like “over is over.” In English we have the expression, “What’s done is done.” This would be worth exploring. Because so often, what’s done is not done. As a therapist, you must have this experience all the time. But at the level of “one breath, then the next,” it makes such good sense.
Jack