Walkabout practice: Be aware of other people – both those you interact with and those you simply pass by on the street. Do they share your time, or are they in their own time? When you stop interacting with someone, or they stop paying attention to you, does your sense of the time you inhabit change?
 [As a drama student, and later during meditation retreats, we were encouraged to follow people in the street, unnoticed, and imperceptibly mimic (internalise) their movement patterns and gestures, in an attempt to better understand their state of mind. This exercise takes that endeavour to a new level]
‘We can…condense the dynamic of time until no one moment stands separate from the whole.’
Tarthang Tulku: Foreword to Light of Knowledge
 ‘Understanding may extend far beyond the realm of mind, beyond our present way of observation, into dimensions we have never seen or explored. It may communicate subtleties that lie beyond the capacities of our mind to observe, and comprehend, beyond its ability to conceptualise and express. Within a different view of time, these applications of mind might not even apply’
Revelations of Mind, page 344
 I am seated at a circular glass dining table in an elegant Italianate apartment with four other people. In the tone, pitch and speed of their voices; in their gesticulations; in what they choose to communicate and conceal – even in the nuances in their eyes – they reveal their timings; their rhythms of pain and knowingness. The timings that are ‘me’ expand to merge with them and in that merging (or reluctance to merge; itself another timing) are changed.
Ritzi the dog is there, too. I show him a book about Sicily. It was written in 1904 and is yellowed by its journey. My rhythms blend with his excitement in integrating the rhythmic scent of the timings of this book; from factory through a myriad of library borrowers’ times to this new encounter, one hundred and ten years later. Together, dog and I, we are encapsulated in a temporal lacuna; oblivious to the ongoing timings in the interactions around us.
Walking in the street I have a sudden flash of understanding of what Rinpoche is referring to when he so often mentions the relationship between time and mind.
So…do my fellow diners, the dog and those I pass in the street share my time, or are they in their own time? Well…Yes…and…No. It’s a bit like asking ‘When it rains, does space get wet?’ It opens a timespace/spacetime which allows access to knowledge which may not present itself in the form of AN ANSWER. We are like tuning forks; sounding out our timings and merging with other tunes to create new melodies or disharmonies; all feeding into, creating and moulding the sonorous body of Time itself.
This is wonderful Caroline, so on point, well said, and insightful. Michael was right, we feel we are there, you opened a window into multiple consciences, multiple communicative spaces, multiple temporalities.
You should definitely include this post in that interesting illustrated collection of these TSK posts you were talking about earlier. Maybe you might take on that project? :-)
Thank you …
How beautifully expressed…
I received a gift …
Wow. This is wonderful. So open, so inclusive, so insightful. You present so vividly what if feels like to be alive to one’s surrondings and–delving deeply into the past–to recognize natural connections with empathy and interest. How exciting to sit for a few moments in another’s mind (yours) and to be able to visit regions of feeling and thought that I have neither the background nor the faculties to enter on my own. I feel like I am sharing a neighboring time and space through a kind of knowledge that is simultaneously personal and universal.