KTS exercise 56 D invites us to see what determines the boundaries of the subject? How is it related to space? Can the self be understood as the allowing one?
I would like to tell my experience about it.
When I carefully observe what is going on, I can feel a distinction in the perception of my body and space. As two separated focal points touched by awareness, the body shows up as more evident and alive, and the space appears as another element, another planet around the dense “selfâ€. The boundary is evident between these two elements.
Likewise planets, the self exhibits a drive to the center, a holding sensation sustaining the boundary between body and physical space. Mental space is also tense, perhaps a fear of losing control, a fear of losing the ground. It is like closing the door to prevent space to get in. In this way, space is definitively conducted toward the physical, and the self toward the protection of its property.
Insisting on identity, we become strangers to space, visitors taking advantage of its hospitality.
This holding back freezes the experience, burning out its energy, letting me get tired. From the awareness of the clinging sensation, arises the intention to let go, to relax.
When the relaxation begins, the boundary between body and space, between private thoughts and sensations stars to dissolve. It is like sky diving, in the beginning there is the fear of losing ground, but when your jump and let go, you merge with space, and it is a delight.
When Knowledge embodies space fully, it becomes the Body of Knowledge, space itself is alive, the exhibition of what is.
Like two lovers exchanging kisses, space and knowledge find each other delicious. KTS 252
I would like to add that when the “self” is at the center, its role is to freeze the experience rather than allow it. Still, if the experience is at the center, it all might happen very differently.
Without boundaries, space is beneath zero, and the “self” loses its substantiality.
Hi Eliana,
I always enjoy your reflections on the TSK vision and your drawings from daily life. So you have jumped out of a plane? I tried to do that when I lived in Montreal, but after driving 60 miles several times, packing and getting into the parachute, and then being told that the ceiling was too low for a first jump, I stopped borrowing my parents car to make those Saturday morning trips. What a wonderful sense of the openness of space you must have had.
Your image of being our own planets, held in by insistence that we are the gravitational center of all we behold, sounds familiar from much of my experience. But how refreshing when that sense of centrality gives way to the feeling that we are perfectly safe within an open spaciousness.
Michael