Hi all,
We had a great pre-program phone call this past Sunday, which should be posted online soon. My notes here overlap considerably with what I had to say there.
The first lines of the DTS reading for this week offer a good summary of where we went in the first program:
“Space and the freedom it offers are at the center of present experience, just as it is.”
Usually we focus on identity. We label things, and by doing so we lose the freedom that space offers. But we can recover that freedom, not by going somewhere else, but right here, within experience.
So is this a conceptual shift, a new way of thinking about things? Perhaps to start, but more fundamentally, it’s an experiential shift. In the last program we tried to engage this experiential level very directly by looking at the part of our experience that was non-content, the part where experience is looser, more open (but also the part where the patterns of identification get set up.) We practiced with ordinary experience in a non-ordinary way. And that is precisely what TSK is about.
A little further down in the same paragraph, the text says: “To recover space ‘presence’, we must clarify the operation of the thinking mind . . .â€
That is basically where we start this program.
Style of Investigation (LOK reading)
The reading from LOK starts by speaking of ‘freedom of thought’, which of course reminds us of ‘space freedom’. One special quality of TSK: that it acknowledges the power of thinking and makes use of it in a very powerful way. We activate freedom through our inquiry, our questions. It’s a very radical approach.
Jack
Thank you, Jack. Your comments are clarifying and help to contextualize where we’ve “been” in this course, and where we’re heading.
Although no formal exercises have been recommended for the week, are there any you would suggest informally for those who are interested (me!)?
Best wishes,
Bruce