Photo courtesy of: ‘Premonition’ by Stephen H. Kawai – Flickr
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Re-reading ‘Revelations of Mind’, by Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, and once again looking into the feel of presence, and degrees of experiencing it. For me, it’s often seeing ‘how’ things are coming to my attention, not just the reasoning of cause and effect, (this happened because of that), but rather, FEELING the arising of whatever is happening. For instance a string of thoughts arise from somewhere, eventually dissipate and vanish somewhere… or when writing this, what to say now is arising from, as Rinpoche suggests, “Beneath the surface interactions of entities situated in a presupposed field, prior to the pre-established knowings…†DTS p64
I’m watching ‘how’ I gain access to that… at a certain level it seems to be a dark horizon for which my discursive mind, my world of language and stories has difficulty navigating. I can’t seem to describe it to myself, can’t get a handle on what I’m attempting to discriminate… like a baby in a crib fascinated by movement, and reaching for a spinning structure beyond its grasp. Time often feels like that, it cascades in a series of discrete events of perception, each of which successively overflows to the next… and sometimes suddenly stops, or seems to suspend… revealing what? The space ‘not-known’? In ‘Revelations of Mind’, Rinpoche suggests:
“…mind is far more than brain sealed inside a bony case…involved inwardly in our physical being; it also reflects outwardly, into the environing world and the universe beyond. Through mind inner and outer are closely related; they interact to reflect our manifestations and to support our well-being.
When we explore the interactions of mind, body, and universe, an understanding arises that is not merely intellectual, mind and time are transformed, and past, present, and future are all there together. p.210
Measured out time refers to our understanding of past, present, and future…a fabrication of mind, created to provide a context for reifying our experience. Taking our experience as a baseline, mind may have marked it up in ways that our senses find “reasonable†…But everything stands on how we view the present…if we cannot stand on the present, we cannot trust that anything we know is real. We need to go further and question what this ‘true present’ might be.â€
p. 214-5
So I attempt to watch the present, at the ever moving edge of now, getting glimpses of the space ‘not-known’ …the “prior to the pre-established knowings…†Where the depth-charged implosions of perception begin, and the process of knowing unfolds… ever a work in progress…
