How can the past happen at the same time as now? How can there be no distance between what happened before and what’s happening now? Well, here’s a way it’s possible. Read on… :-)
To attain this ‘knowingness’ we can begin with objects and experiences, using them to work back to the knowingness and clarity which they bear. Then, using that clarity, we can see all experiences as being preserved in a common ground in such a way that there is nothing separating them, one from the other. Our experience of last year and our experience of today both have the same clarity within them, and that clarity shows that they are even more fundamentally linked—the idea that one is ‘previous’ to the other is incorrect. The previous is not previous, the distant is not distant. DTS p.282
Michael Gray, Author wrote an article for ‘Gesar Magazine’ a couple of decades ago which stands as an example of how a higher Knowing in the ‘space of the present’ can open the past and present, and inform both in fresh and new ways. The link to Michael’s short article is here:
http://www.michaelgrayauthor.com/download/The-Past-as-Gateway-PDF.pdf
In the article Michael demonstrates by tracking back through his past experiences as a new knowingness ‘dawned’ with fresh clarity. As long as the remembrances are not accepted as fixed, the way we normally summarize these limited recordings and impressions from a moment in time, they can be opened in the present moment, for they are still alive in us, along with so much more that was present in the open moment we originally experienced the events.
It is fascinating to see how the memory shares the same ‘knowing space’ as the current moment, and how a higher knowing can reveal the open moment of time – then and now.
In the moments he described where remembrance shared the same space as the present, there was no distance, no previous, his dawning clarity, and Time, was all Now…
the point of decision…
the edge of the future…
Hi David,
I think this discussion inspired me when I wrote my weekly blog yesterday about “free will”. For instance, in the following:
If anyone is interested, my blog post can be viewed on my website:
http://www.michaelgrayauthor.com/home/dh_hr278g/cciforum.dreamhosters.com/2015/09/free-will/
Thanks for the nudge toward the light . . . Michael
YES Michael!!!
Thank you for continuing to engage…
As with your ‘Gesar’ article, and that dawning clarity! I feel it in the space we share here. Thank you.
David,
I feel that I didn’t do justice to your spirit of engagement in either your initial post about “Healing through Light” or your subsequent attempts to deepen the discussion.
For a start, I looked up DTS, pages 93-94, to remind myself how the phrase “Future Infinitive” is used.
I wonder what that means for me right now–as I try to back-pedal from prior superficiality. It must the opportunity present “right now” that somehow draws upon an open-ended, never-to-arrive future–full of an infinitude that circles around the present. Can a sense of the nearness of this infinitely possible help to instill an aliveness in the present–an aliveness without expectation or projection, simply a willingness to welcome what comes, like the wind stirring the branches before rain blows in. It’s worth practicing–something I know you do more than I do
You had me at “what if you stop there?” But neither of us are stopping.
My mind is like one of those home-delivery dairy trucks and bakery-goods vans–which Ken and I were fondly remembering as childhood’s friendly alternatives to pushing our laden shipping carts down the isles of Costco and Smiths. My mind still has a few glass quarts of whole milk to put on the front stoop (logic with three inches of creamy emotion risen to the top); tasty extrapolations of imagination (drawing from my bag of “happeneded” images and yesterday’s reheated leftovers).
What could go wrong?
Halfway down your comment you said:
What if you had stopped there?
What you said after that was ‘minding’. You continued by speculating, laying the ‘happeneded’ over your arriving moments. After that you soared further into the unknown arranging TSK terms like a jigsaw puzzle trying to see if there was a conceptual fit. Finding none, you felt confused, perhaps a taste of despair, lamenting about paradoxes that don’t compute.
That’s okay! That not-knowing is the beginning of the dawn.
What if you had stopped at your question… “So what is the future infinitive? Is it simply allowing the future to offer infinite possibilities?”
What if you just held that openness? Right at that point clarity was trying to dawn. It stops the minding clouds… Sit with that… THAT is the future…coming at you like the winds of Time… FEEL it…don’t think it. If you feel it, the light of clarity will dawn.
If you do this, you set the stage for insight…. It may arise.
Thanks for keeping the inquiry going, David. Let me practice allowing “the next moment to emmerge without expectations” and confess that I don’t remember how the phrase “future Infinitive” is used. I wonder what it could mean. I think the past infinitive is a way of stating the past as something definite, not conditional or speculative. But I think that the Happeneded takes care of an inflexible, definite view of the future. so what is the future infinitive? Is it simply allowing the future to offer infinite possibilities. And would that infinitude offer a landscape of possibilites that remain transparent to clear light because there are no particular entities to block the light and cast shadows over that landscape? Perhaps there is a fruitful connection to be made between the infinite and clarity. Just as zero dimensionality leaves room for everything, perhaps infinite possibility must be completely open to everything and therefore empty of anything established.
TSK is so full of paradoxes that it’s impossible to feel “By God, I’ve got it.”
What of the future infinitive? Could this be from where the dawn of clarity emerges? The ‘happeneded’ needn’t be the only way to look to the future.
Isn’t that what we were practicing at the retreat at Ratna Ling? Feeling into that space of open possibilities? Which then sets an open stage for the present, allowing for newness in previous categories, making transparent previous structures…
There’s a really useful Walkabout exercise on p. 214 of ‘Inside Knowledge‘ based on TSK Ex. 30.
We practice this to exercise the pathways, for who knows, perhaps we prepare ourselves to allow for Eknoses to emerge as a higher way of knowing…
I wonder if our capacity to sense that there is a common clarity in experience–whether it is of today or last year–is connected with the fact that our experience of the future is of the already “happeneded”.
If everything we categorize is molded from past categories–including what we notice in the present–and we ordinarily anticipate the future in terms of those same familiar categories, then perhaps the clarity that unites all three times is equally necessary to improve our relationship with either past, present, or future. Perhaps the only way to experience past, present or future with any kind of vividness, is to see the clarity that joins them.