I sat this morning before the sun rose with no purpose other than to sit without nodding off. In the middle of the silence, a calm slowly dawned, like diminishing shadows in a valley. I came to a perspective where observing was spacious. Space was more than just area between objects, but felt like a knowing of a valley of contours only because the light allowed shadows. Light was the FEEL of awareness before or as individual differentiations. Freedom from the pressures of asserting identity and no need for moment-to-moment reassurance was noticed. Noticeable by whom? Noticeable to a shadow-self allowed to co-exist within the light, but which can become enlightened. There is an alternating as mind process carries away thoughts and feelings between me and not me. Observance alternates with object-less, concept-less knowing, the moments mix and entwine in recognition of light with shadows of not-knowing in a rhythm. There is this sympathetic interweaving of rhythmic flows, like breath, one full of self, timed with intent and looking for things; then alternating with its focused release, emptiness, weightlessness, freedom from measurement and meaning — lightness.
I felt one moment my diaphragm was reflexively tightening as attention was gripping thought: Clenching it with body language as mental language carried me away with a story line – then sudden realization, ‘clarity’ – seeing the process. In that seeing was letting go of the linearity of story; space opening into knowing space, the knowing capacity, the light… something like immense relief as in letting go an isometric clenching, but feeling that opening expand exponentially.
In terms of color, I often see internal light (with eyes closed) as a glowing perspective, like a golden-reddish glow in the dark, as the picture above shows without any objects in it. But often there can be blues, rust, white light, and others too. Knowing has a warm and energetic feel when I allow a more open access to it. While it’s true, I’m looking with my eyes at the inside of my eyelids, however, not focusing on what the eye sees, allows a deeper, more occipital kind of seeing. Beyond a certain point there is just light, until darkness is approached. If total darkness comes it happens as ‘a blackout’, as if going to sleep, except I’m not asleep, just gone – no light; and when the blackout goes, the light of awareness returns.
The blackout is curious to me, and Rinpoché says in the exercise, “If ‘no basis’ has a meaning, it will become a basis for excluding light. If it has no meaning, it will lead to the lostness of the dark. Perhaps it is better not to focus on ‘not there’ at all.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it seems to point toward the light, that the point of time, space, and knowledge is in the light of knowing and not-knowing, but not the blackout, which is the absence of light and TSK.
David
Thanks Marcia,
I understand what you mean about the poetic language, in this instance I was trying to express a meditative experience that was behind language, and its expression just came out closer to the open side of the words than the precision of parsing, leaning more to the “inner aliveness” as you put it, the light of my life.
Best wishes,
David
I find it amazing how whenever one tries to put insights into words one has to resort to a more poetic language. I found your text inspiring… there is beauty and creativity in the images you chose to express yourself and a kind of ‘wisdom’ which is stimulated by experience itself. I find that language itself can be ‘alive’ in the sense that while one is reading one is transforming something inside. This is clear in the works of great writers and poets, but also in TSK teachings if one tunes in the inner aliveness of TSK language. No more effort is needed to ‘enliven’ things and then experience happens by itself leading to unkown territories. Could we say that it is light which carries the ‘life’ of experience within words themselves?