TSK Vision – A View From Everywhere

One of the most concise explanations that I’ve found of just what the TSK vision is came from the Introduction to the book, ‘Inside Knowledge’,** abbreviated below:

“The TSK vision invites us to replace our usual focus on individual identities, objects, and situations—on this present moment, that specific thing, or some particular claim to significance and meaning—with an appreciation for the whole. We might call this ‘the view from everywhere’. Such a view vibrates with new possibilities. When we stop framing our concerns in terms of the specific positions we occupy and open instead to the space of the whole we expand the range of possible experiences and possible relationships. When we turn from highly structured sequences of cause an effect we use to explain our commitment to the way things are, time becomes the living dynamic of our lives. When we give up our loyalty to the prevailing order, we grant both the possible and the impossible the power to shape what is so.

* Space is not simply the ‘physical space’ occupied by stars and planets or the space inside each atom…For example, just as a planet appears in physical space, a thought appears in the space of the mind…

* Time is not simply the linear unfolding of one moment after another. Instead, this sequencing expresses…the more fundamental dynamic of time, the aliveness within all experience…

* Knowledge is not simply what the knower knows. Instead…is a specific manifestation of a more fundamental capacity for knowing…

…[Usually] inquiry into the nature of knowledge itself, and into the preconditions for knowledge, operates within a limited range of possibilities. We start from largely unexamined assumptions: the ‘cause and effect’ structure at work in the linear sequencing of time, the identity of objects in space, the steady stream of thoughts and perceptions in the mind, and the central significance of the self as the one who knows.

The TSK vision invites us to question these structures, as well as countless others…In the TSK vision, nothing is asserted; everything is open for investigation.” pp. 7-10

** ‘Inside Knowledge: How to Activate the Radical New Vision of Reality of Tibetan Lama Tarthang Tulku’, Edited by Jack Petranker, (2015, Dharma)