Photo: ‘Middle of the Ripples’ by cocoparisienne – Pixabay
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RESTING IN RIPPLES…
In Full Presence Mindfulness classes, and TSK, we are often invited to explore in our immediate experience how the self operates at the center of our lived story… to observe the mostly unspoken, but felt story of ‘I am here’. It’s like a starting point of all stories we tell. We link all our stories about the world we know… ‘The how things are’… to this fundamental story that we hold at the center of our constellation of stories. The result is we shape our experience, our self-image, and our self-interest around this self-story. As our teacher says, “Committed to the self as subject, we live in a world of objects, a world that often feels dead or meaningless.†And Rinpoche suggests this… “‘lower knowledge’… [becomes] tediously repetitive and deadening. It is basically a functioning on the level of a recording machine…superficial responses laboriously and mechanically attributed to a knowing subject.â€
So over time we employ a kind of ‘shorthand’ way to confront the situations we encounter in daily life to avoid overload. As psychologist, Donnell B. Stern Ph. D suggests…
“CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVES are easy to adopt; we tend to slip into the simplest account of the events at hand… [After all, we] must have shorthand methods of negotiating life… or we would never do anything… the least important task would command endless fascination… Conventional narratives… are so seductively easy to slip into that we are seldom even aware of having chosen them. [Often we find ourselves] hovering around the cultural mean, around the predigested perceptions that probably would occur to a substantial portion of the populace.
ORIGINAL NARRATIVES are difficult to formulate, we have to think carefully, explicitly, and imaginatively, and feel deeply, to come up with a story that includes all the details and still ends up saying what we really mean.â€
…’Unformulated Experience’, by Donnel B. Stern, p. 139-40
It seems that stories give shape, form, and meaning to the space we inhabit, and they ripple out and provide a structure to our world. I see how often I get stuck in the structuring, caught in the undertow and flow of my ever-breaking waves of concern… However… as Stern points to ‘creating original narratives from deeper levels of ourselves‘, Rinpoche also further suggests…
“When we look at our present situation from the perspective of the whole, we discover a different dynamic within the subjective point of view. We realize that we do not have to accept or reject conventional structures, and also do not have to put in place some new version of reality… Whatever operates now is one face of the whole. ‘I am here’ does not confine us. How can it, when it is simply the front side of zero, the mask through whose mouth we first hear of the point of origin? …we can look for the knowledge within knowledge. There is the wave, but there is also the curve of the wave. And beyond that, there is the ocean.â€
…..’Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space,’ Tarthang Tulku, p. 171
AT THE LINC… A TSK student observes in his practice that almost every moment seems to ripple outward… in waves of ripples… there is depth in the midst of the ripples… and this is the source of original narratives, and that it is also possible to rest there, in the middle of the ripple…
