Bystander and Outsider

Reflecting on the last paragraph on page 25 of KTS, the following thought arose: in the model of a “Bystander-self experiencing outsider-world” there is no insider; at least in the experience of the self.  The word “bystander” is most commonly used to describe someone standing at the edge of an accident who was not directly involved and whose witness may be called upon for its lack of bias.  How strange and thought-provoking to use this word to refer to a self whose defining characteristic is its claim to be at the very centre of the action.

            So is there an inside, if the self is just standing by?  This paragraph goes on to present time as the fundamental driving force within both poles of the self/world picture, so perhaps it is the dynamic of time that is inside the content of the self’s experience, including its experience of itself.

            If the eyes and ears through which we see and hear are bystanders to the dynamic inside both self and world (seer and seen, hearer and heard); if experience itself requires that the perceiving self must withdraw from the dynamic that fuels these perceptions, then a further question arises.

            Is it possible for a human being to engage the dynamic of time in a more direct way than as a self who experiences a world?  What would that feel like?

            In later chapters much is said about how the dynamic of time is the fuel that feeds self, world and their interaction, and that before the frozen patterns of this face-off are firmly set in place, we have an opportunity to contact the dynamic of a time whose momentum is present everywhere and every when: in self, in world, and in the inquiry through which we seek to be less imprisoned in these restrictive patterns.