The Center of the Pool

Photo: ‘Space Structuring’ by FelixMittermeier – Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/photos/sky-clouds-weather-cumulus-storm-3499982/

In class we’ve been exploring what’s at the center of experience…a controlling self? A knowing space presence…? It is a fascinating probe, a view into the depths of the pool of perception. It seems that stories give shape, form, and meaning to the space we inhabit, and they structure the whole of our world. I see how often I get stuck in the structure, caught in the undertow and flow of waves of concerns…an ever widening billowing sway… a floating-kelp of debris… but we are told…

“Space and the freedom it offers are available at the center of present experience, just as it is. If we do not discover space in our experience, it is because this space availability has been covered over. To recover space ‘presence’, we must clarify the operation of the thinking mind, whose active naming and identifying structure a world in which space has disappeared.”
Dynamics of Time and Space, Tarthang Tulku, p.51

“It seems we are at the center of experience as either the subject or the object. “I and me” become reference points for a very narrow view on the world of perceived circumstance. Much attention and focus is placed on what “I” think about “that” and how “that” is effecting “me”. It seems perception and meaning are intrinsically self-centered and thereby represent a narrow way of knowing.

The TSK vision takes the self out of the center of knowing. With knowledge as primary, instead of believing that the self is having various experiences, we can begin to consider the possibility that there are various experiences of a self. Experience becomes primary and self (as both subject and object) becomes content. There is nothing to defend, maintain and perpetuate as self becomes content of mind.” Hayward M. Fox, Ph.D.

Excerpt from: I Fell Within…
By Ken McKeon

‘I fell into fields of stars last night’,
This as I sat waiting for a bell to ring,
A bell I held in my own two hands…

… And above all the silent swirls of stars,
Patternings of light, the spray
Of a rising wave, it crests above
The cupped and rolling face it is,
The spray lifting apart from the steep crash,
The deep pouring roar of a falling weight
That spills forever, it quakes the continents,
It shakes the moon from its brief hold
On the surface of a small stilled pond,
It is the sad gift of a single tear falling
From a waking child’s eyes, this as he
Leaves a dream of loss to find the sun,
And later outside, standing alone or with others,
And the evening fades, and the first stars, then many,
Roll into his eyes, the turns of heaven,
The slow spin of our dear earth…

… savors in his own small way vast space
And the stars that birth within,
And he waves goodbye to his passing friends,
And turns at last on his own two feet towards home.