Photo courtesy of: dandelion-by InspiredImages – Pixabay
From the perspective of ratio…16 has an inner structure, a sequencing from one to 15. Before 16, all is undecided… Along the axes that establish the point, a dynamic hovers between positive and negative, between taking form and going unrealized. At 15 the whole is available, but the clarity that will lead to the final determination is still lacking… At 16 all this changes. The ‘right’ ratio forms, the pool of possibilities takes hold as a precise form and specific design. A definitive kind of wholeness coheres.
…’Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space,’ Tarthang Tulku, p. 43
I’m in a discussion now with long-time TSK students, and this quote by Rinpoche haunts my thinking, as well as a question my younger brother asked me years ago… “If not for my ideas, who am I?â€
TSK invites us to become aware that more fundamental than the ideas, is our ‘capacity’ to have them. It’s the experience of this ‘capacity’ that we habitually overlook. It’s like there’s ALMOST something. We ‘overlook‘ because there’s no ‘thing’ to focus upon. For instance, when we sometimes get the sense we’re missing something about ourselves, perhaps a deeper connection to other people, even the planet…
Looking back on my life, and the lives of my bright, and energetic family of academic teachers, authors, scientists, and artists…we have grown up being fascinated by ideas and the world. At a certain time in our lives we think we get a handle on how to navigate ourselves through our days. We can develop a certain degree of confidence that often slips into arrogance about ourselves and our ‘ideas’ about how the world is. We tend to become so myopic about the ideas that we can’t even recognize our knowing capacity, or even what’s involved with actually knowing and experiencing it. I have seen the great value of the TSK vision and open inquiry – it has shown me how to actually experience that ‘capacity’ to know… to participate fully IN the ‘capacity’…. At least momentarily. 🤠But Oh…those ‘humble moments’!
What does it mean to experience our capacity to know…to ‘know our knowing’? I’ll give a couple of examples from my experience in a moment. But first, a word about Rinpoche’s quote… He uses 16 (that number of compass directions in space emanating outward from ‘0’, like an asterisk – or a dandelion seed-head) as a metaphor for… “A definitive kind of wholeness.†My way of thinking about this involves imagining the bits or dots in space from 1 to 15 that have not yet cohered, like bits and fragments of feelings and incoherent and indistinct inclinations or dyspathy. (Like in the photo… background blobs of light have not yet defined visually.) Like pre-ideas that are not yet ‘definitive’ things teeming, “Beneath the surface interactions of entities situated in a presupposed field, prior to the pre-established knowings…†DTS p64
So, here are some examples of when feeling in-touch with more than my ideas, but rather, my ‘capacity’ to have them…to know…not a thing, not an ‘I’ or ‘me’… but a response to the question… “If not for my ideas, who am I?†Envision dandelion seeds dispersed in the winds of time, some coalesce in a definitive kind of whole, while others continue to disperse in the flow…feeling the allowing openness of the moment knows the capacity for knowing…
Another Humble Moment…
Pine Needles…
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The Humble Moment…
Morning Ripple…
