Photo: ‘Everywhere Pool’ by joakant – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/y4ncswvf
SPACE BETWEEN THOUGHTS…
It’s been said we are like fish who swim constantly unaware of the water … by comparison perhaps, we who continuously live in a world focused on interacting objects, and mostly ignore the space in which they arise, and out of which they are composed… Rinpoche says…
“The usual subject-object polarization of experience includes a fascination with a kind of ‘from-to’ distribution. The subject is always looking ahead and cannot, in the same act, take itself and the limitations of its ways of knowing into account. One of these limitations is that the self must always obtrude upon something and interject its ‘thinking thoughts’ in order to appreciate that thing… By taking exception to this orientation, [it is possible] to locate an alternative ‘seeing’ alongside the occurrence of mental events. This alternative is a break in the flow of self-saying thoughts, a profound silence, an openness. Nevertheless, it is accessible, something that can be participated in, but without a ‘self’ who participates.“
….‘Time, Space, Knowledge’, by Tarthang Tulku, p. 59
TSK instructor Ken divulges a very personal poem, I cannot express the ‘depths’ of what he speaks, but for me, it hints at what Rinpoche is pointing to…
AROUND HERE
by Ken McKeon
I feel as easy as a newt,
A wavering light form
Sustained by the warm waters
Of a small pool,
But it’s still a pool much larger than I could ever be,
I see it as an atmosphere,
An open spacious holding
That is my everywhere,
I know this as I know the roundness of my limbs,
Know this from the inside,
Even as I look down at my mottled hands
With their crimped fingers,
Their evident uselessness,
Within them blood still flows
In completely unformulated
Swimming wholes
That fill me with my heart’s own life,
That calls forth a smile,
A nearly shining textured perfection quality
Of a brimming fullness path,
I am wholly effortless today,
And yet words still show up,
Words and the rounding breaths
I find even in the blinkings
Of my globular eyes,
They are the slow lifts and fades of light,
I am my own calendar,
Illustrated, motionless, ever here.
