Since it is still a little early for people to have started making comments on this week’s unit, I thought I would add a few thoughts about the Ex. A.
First, I have been experimenting with at least two different levels of Expanding and Condensing. One relates to the content of my experience. The other relates to what I might call the context of the content, which includes myself as the one having the experience (not quite the same as the one doing the exercise.) Of course, the context itself has many elements and layers.
If you are new to TSK, it may be best to focus on the content rather than the context. But as always, feel free to explore in your own way.
The second point: I was surprised recently when someone said that the practice of expanding seems to them like dissipating. If he meant by that the experience grows ‘thinner’ or ‘weaker’ (the way that clouds dissipate), that is not my experience. But I would be interested to know what others experience.
By the way, as of this Post (Thursday, October 5), we have 26 participants in the program! I urge everyone to post some information about themselves in the “meet the participants” section; I am really enjoying reading the entries I have read so far.
Jack
Hi Leslie
You mentioned that when you are in an uncomfortable situation that you feel “condensed.” Could you also mean that you feel “contracted” as compared to “condensed”? I suppose condensed could mean smaller or tighter or tense too — but maybe condensing can retain the open qualities with more intensity as Jack alludes too?
Ron P
This business about being hungry and expanding/condensing has potential. Bruce expanded the hunger (it got more intense), and then (roughly) expanded the intensity, whence it dissolved. Some other possibilities would be to expand the experience of eating/tasting (this is closer to what Lesley suggested), and (especially interesting for me) to expand/condense the feeling that leads you to want to eat in the first place, which is so often based in emotion rather than the needs of the body.
Anyway, if we look to the larger question, this is a great example of how you can play with the usual identity we assign to a particular experience (“I’m hungry”). Once the experience is labeled, it is out of signt and unavailable, and we are stuck with it. Keeping it accessible via practice makes life a lot more interesting.
I love Jack’s note about condensing: “More generally, it’s okay to start by thinking of condensing as “making smaller.†But it is not only this. When we condense something, we make it more intense, more alive.” I’m going to try this! I had been getting smaller.
Lesley
To Bruce: Interesting that people seemed to respond to your sense of expaning or condensing! I had been thinking, also around Ex A, that when I’m not in a comfortable situation I feel condensed (small, not as Jack mentioned the sense of intensifying). When I am comfortable in a situation, I sense expanding or perhaps a not holding back).
Ha! to the diet aspect — expanding condensing — it’s not been tried yet, so maybe this is your chance to write it up into the next nutrition best-seller. On the other hand, mindful eating, which can include expanding time to enjoy food can be quite successful for some people. :-)
Lesley
About David’s experience with Ex. A
Again, this is a sophisticated analysis. People new to the exercise may not find it easy to work with the idea of expanding the sense of identity, though you should of course feel free to try.
The second paragraph, where you write about expanding the sense of what is allowable or possible, is very central in TSK inquiry, though I haven’t thought of it in terms of Ex. A before. When you write about classifying a thought as impossible, I suppose you’re speaking of the content of the thought, as in your “bicycle-fish.” It’s interesting that you want to distinguish (and ordinarily discard) this kind of impossible thought, and clearly for you an expansion not to do so.
The very idea of expanding and condensing challenges what is usually possible. In the approach you describe here, the challenge is at a different level. I won’t try to say more about that right now.
On “figuring out condensing.”
Frans had difficulties with the “condensing” part of Ex. A. Many people do. I think reading Bruce’s comments may help. More generally, it’s okay to start by thinking of condensing as “making smaller.” But it is not only this. When we condense something, we make it more intense, more alive. Here’s one way to think about it: if we expand something far enough (see the very beginning of Dynamics of Time and Space), it disappears. In the same way, if we condense something enough, it also disappears. But the two kinds of “disappearing” have a different “residue.” Expanded emptiness feels open. Condensed emptiness feels alive. Of course, these two modes can also connect.
Reply to Frans’ comment
The point you make about the basic impact of Exercise A is important. It is a very effective way to make “experience as a whole” into a theme or object. It gives us a way to experience experience, instead of just experiencing the content of experience.
A central theme in TSK is that what we usually experience (the content of experience), is limited in many ways. Ex. A gives us a way of experiencing how we experience, in part by letting us experience differently.
Here is a response to Bruce
(By the way, how about if we change your log in to Bruce, since that’s the name you go by?)
Very nice description of doing the exercise while walking. Many years ago I took an acting class in which we did a similar exercise with an expanded body, and I remember that same sense of greater confidence, and (I would say) greater presence. Now, one could expand that sense when it comes up. But in itself, what you’re describing is really powerful. Isn’t it remarkable that we can change something fundamental in our own self-image, our own way of being in the world, through an exercise that takes less than 10 seconds?
A feeling like hunger is a good candidate for the exercise; so is any kind of pain. I mentioned in my post the notion that expanding dissipates experience — thins it out. That is not my experience, but perhaps something similar: as it expands it, it becomes less real, and then disappears.
Your point about a fixed reference point is interesting. Trying it just now, I experience something more like a sense of being situated in a place, which is not quite the same as having a reference point. Definitely worth exploring more.
I want to stop here to say to readers who are new to TSK to say that this is a sophisticated analysis that Bruce has been doing, consistent with his lengthy experience with TSK. But I hope it gives you a good flavor of some possibilities. Thanks, Bruce, for suggesting so many fruitful alternatives and places to look. “Fruitful alternatives” and “places to look” are very much at the heart of what we are looking at in this first unit of the program.
Jack
Hello,
Here are my notes on Expanding & Condensing so far.
Best wishes,
David
Expanding –
I started with a feeling of myself, and my sense of identity, I tried to expand that from the current moment of ‘I am’ to include the room in which I was sitting. I closed my eyes and felt the sense fields of sound, touch, and internal vision and expanded those fields, moving my boundaries outward to include my neighborhood, and the further out I went the harder it was to hold the identity I started with. It seemed as though I was dropping positions or at least some part of them as I expanded. At some point the tension became too much and snapped, or I let it go, or time just erased it to present a new set of sense elements for the self to momentarily anchor to. This was an interesting point or space along the progression of the exercise; where the past is continually dropped and the new is experienced, and the tendency to take a new stance of I am to expand from. There was a controller trying to expand ‘from’ until it was simply dropped through tension or released for a microsecond, and then a new gathering of I am, and so on.
Another time, I sat with thoughts, and let them flow, and allowed myself to let go of my normal tight reign on them, and to expand beyond the tendency to be involved with them or limit them by classifying them as illogical or impossible. After awhile thoughts or images combined that seemed to make no sense, it was almost dreamy, but instead of discarding the nonsensical, I simply allowed them to enter awareness as a kind of display that arose, that joined others and passed, to be replaced by more impossible thoughts and combinations. I can’t remember the nonsensical (bicycle-fish) thoughts but they were linked with brief impossible scenarios or images.
At some point I realized my perspective was from outside my normally accepted standards of meaning, and allowing the impossible was an interesting possibility from a nonstandard expanded perspective. It was definitely something I didn’t ordinarily do, and allowing the unreasonable and impossible to have equal weight or stature along with what was ordinarily accepted as true and logical, gave me a wider perspective that relaxed preconceived judgments.
This time I decided to expand a word. I took the word ‘What’ and attempted to open its meaning on the exhale. As an adjective without a subject, I wanted to explore the feel of the space of the open question ‘what’? Linking it to breath helped to embody the meaning of the word. Focus on a question seemed to preclude arising of extemporaneous thoughts and other minding. Each time the question was posed, and breath expelled, there was a space, small at first, but after awhile it expanded, there was an open feeling, a spaciousness that I was able to expand further. That open feeling was very free, like a sort of expectancy without object, or witnessing the unknown.
Condensing –
When I condense something, I run into the same thing as when I expand it; there is a point at which I seem to let go of the tension, concentration, or the moment, and there is a transitional space or boundary for the next position or focus of concentration. So there seems to be a point or space between each momentary focus. I’m not sure what causes concentration to break, but it seems as if the moment becomes too full of sense data, so a new moment must begin collecting it while I attempt to maintain focus there.
Exercise A was understood differently by me: the first thing it did for me was very basic; I was feeling glad because I was making my experiece as a whole into a theme or object. That gave me a feeling of freedom not being locked into my experiences. Expanding the experience as a whole made me relax even more with a feeling that I could rest just where I was, and breathe. I became more aware of my vague sensations. I couldn’t really figure out the condensing though.
Frans
Hi, Jack, just to get started, I decided to post some notes from a month or so ago, when I first purchased your book and was working on the exercises for Unit One. I’m not sure if we are supposed to post notes here, or start a separate thread, but I’ll put this here for now. I am now redoing the readings and exercises and will post “fresher” material soon.
“I’ve been working with both exercises this week, but have not journaled much about my experiences yet. I bought a new notebook yesterday and will be using it as I go deeper into this course. I did write about one experience yesterday, which related to a spontaneous practice of expanding and condensing I performed while walking down the street. I first imagined expanding my body out to enormous proportions, head level with the rooftops of office buildings, body taking up the sidewalk and part of the road. I was a little surprised at how easy it was to inhabit this expanded body sense (please, no jokes about inflated egos!), and noted how a sense of (almost childlike) vitality and strength seemed to surge in me as I walked down the road. I then shrank my body down to about half my size and concentrated the intensity I was feeling into that smaller space. It was a little harder to get into this condensed condition, but once I was there, I was able to feel it just as clearly.
(Interestingly, while I was imagining myself in a giant body, a woman moved out of my way even though she already had enough room; and while I was in the small body, a man almost ran into me, as if he hadn’t noticed me.)
A few days ago, in a meditation session, I was working with expanding different aspects of my experience — the size of my body, the size of the whole context I was experiencing (self-worldspace), the size (spaciousness or density) of different sensations, the size of the intervening distance between me and the sounds I was hearing, and so on. During this exercise, the feeling of hunger was persistent, so I attempted to expand it. Based on previous exercises up to that point, I had expected the hunger to ‘thin out’ as it was spread out over space (thinking, this might be a good diet technique!), but instead the hunger intensified. I then worked on magnifying the intensity of the feeling as well as the ‘size,’ until spontaneously it seemed to shrink in and assume more habitual proportions.
Throughout these expanding and condensing exercises, I have noticed that they seem to demand that some portion of my experience remain fixed, in order to achieve the (relative) feeling of expanding or shrinking. Noting this, I have then tried to expand or shrink the reference point, until the ‘boundaries’ line up and become seamless, or the relationship between the center and the context is again reversed. Sometimes, at the edge of coherence, when the sense of ‘order’ begins to be challenged, I feel a sense of exhileration. I have also noted — but not yet pursued this week — different emotional constellations that arise during these shifts. For instance, at work, I practiced expanding and contracting my hand — either allowing the felt sense (and faint internal image) of my hand to balloon out, or to shrink down to a size slightly smaller than my palm. The small hand, in particular, seemed to bring me into direct contact with myself as a child. There seems to be a ‘charge’ in that space, which was activated once I aligned myself with it again.”
Best wishes,
Bruce