Photo courtesy of: ‘Making Space’ by Engin_Akyurt – Pixabay
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A TSK student describes… MAKING SPACE…
TSK Exercise 18: Past and Future Projections – Pay close attention to your thoughts and images. Note how frequently you have thoughts about the future – plans, expectations, assumptions about likely trends, and so on. Do the same with regard to memories…
I was preparing to do this exercise, calming myself by initially focusing on my breathing, and the ‘feel’ of my entire body…the percolating energy-tingle… I felt present to the edge of the arriving moment… whatever might present. Then, I waited for thoughts to appear… … but no thoughts seemed to pop up. I half wondered, where are the thoughts that usually stream or flow through consciousness like a steady hum? I knew that was a thought-string, but it was a tiny one, in what felt like an open and allowing horizon.
Later in class, other students noticed it too, when they did the exercise, thoughts just seemed to stop. I thought what an interesting observation. I asked myself, ‘WHAT WAS THAT?’
I noticed a couple of things… ‘looking back in time’, the memory of that experience, that open instant seemed like a space, an opening with mostly no thoughts (WITHIN THE FEEL OF MYSELF), but room for any number of them. I realized the memory made thoughts out of the ‘past experience’, mental objects. And making objects of thoughts, it picked up whatever memory of that open no-thought moment, and made a ‘thing’ or object out of it. It made space an object… which was NOT the original open experience. That was interesting!
I kept working with the exercise and noticed that being present, in the moment of that mostly ‘thought-absent’ experience… that felt like open space, but might just be what it feels like to open a ‘focal setting’… it felt like making space for time to present whatever was going to arise. Allowing new experience, or new knowing to present itself. And of course, thoughts eventually kind of back-filled whatever openness was there. I remembered Rinpoche saying something like… “In knowing, Time unfolds what Space allows.â€
