Subject-Object Reversal

I have been working with this exercise throughout the past few days, doing it as I take my walks, but also as I’m sitting quietly, or as I’m doing other daily activities.  Each time I’ve worked with this exercise has been different (I’ve worked with it before this class as well), but this week I’ve noticed two different ways it has unfolded.  In one, where I concentrate primarily on moving the sense of being a positioned observer ‘out’ into the environment, I have a definite sense of being held intimately ‘within’ a sentient field — like I’m re-entering an animistic worldspace, surrounded by many different intelligences or knowing presences.  I start with prominent objects like trees and plants and various inanimate objects, and then move on to more ‘background’ elements like the air or the ground, allowing the sense of ‘knowing’ to emerge from them towards me.  I feel immersed in a sensuous field of relationship, an object held by innumerable subjects.  Sometimes these “subjects” were prominent, and the “body” was an object under these teeming gazes; and sometimes there was more of a sense of I-and-Thou, where I was also a small but knowing presence in this field.  This is most certainly an imaginative exercise, but it is revealing — because it highlights the conceptual or imaginal dimensions of the conventional order as well.  It reveals, by contrast, the psychological contours of particular communicated meaning spaces: whether I am ‘suspended’ as a ‘receiver’ and ‘responder’ in a living, knowing field (with the senses of intimacy and reciprocity that involves), or whether I am an active knower apprehending and relating to various distant objects (with the senses of power and alienation that entails).

On subtler levels, which did not involve imaginatively transforming the world into an ‘animistic’ landscape of knowing subjects, I simply dropped the sense of being the “knower” and explored what it would mean for experience to be experience-knowing-me.  Here, my focus was not on objectified knowers ‘out’ in the world, but on the unfolding of experience (as impinging knowing events).  It is hard to describe what this subtle shift was like, but in general terms, I felt it first (somewhat conceptually) as “being sounded” or “being plumbed” by the world.  It was like my body was a particular “space of potential,” and experience was the knowing sounding of that potential: the moist, cool wind on skin, the play of light and color and shadow, the rich play of vibration and sound, were knowings of me (in the intimate Biblical sense) — an intercourse, an intimate exploration of me (as a fecund space of possibility), a ravishing.  Emerging experience was the light arising of bliss.  At different points, I would find aspects of my experience which were unconscious and more solidified – anchors for the knower – and I would reverse them, too, so there was an ongoing, multi-dimensional sense of “being known,” “being thought,” “being felt.” 

Even now, as I write this while listening to the music of Arvo Part, I find myself oscillating between normal modes of subject-object experience, and this “reversed” sense of experience-knowing-me, though at the time there is not a strong sense of “me.”  Just this receiving of richly layered knowings, like liquids flowing and curling into stillness.

I plan to continue with this practice over the week, and may write more in the comments section below.  This is a powerful practice, in my experience, particularly as it aims so directly at the heart of our habitual modes of organization.  For instance, this afternoon, an unexpected but apparent outcome of the practice occurred as I was concluding my walk.  I had been exploring the “no distance” insight of another TSK practice (where subject is seen as the inseparable glow of objects), applying it to the Subject-Object Reversal practice as Rinpoche suggests, when suddenly I felt a rush of energy run up my spine and out the top of my head.  This blissful current flowed upwards a moment, and I paused just to allow it to flow, then resumed walking.  At that moment, I felt a strong pressure on the top of my head and I paused again, feeling a bit overwhelmed and dizzy.  I took a few slow breaths, allowing the experience to unfold and pass, and then returned to work. 

Bruce