POINTS OF CONCERN…

Photo: ‘Points of Concern’ by Gerd Altmann – Pixabay
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POINTS OF CONCERN…

In Full Presence Mindfulness class we were talking about the practice of being at the ‘edge of the future’… we go directly to the point of arising itself: the point in each experience where the future could be said to come into being… we touch an aliveness that can expand within our awareness. The possibility emerges for a dynamic knowing.

Rinpoche points to a ‘luminous vitality‘ available, ‘at the edge of the future’. Through practice I’ve had glimpses… tasted a specific flavor. For instance, when I am writing, and pause to consider what to say and how to express it… it’s a zero-point… where new perception begins… a welcoming pause at the edge of the future… waiting, you might say, for the zeroless to inform zero… for the unformulated to formulate, so that I may speak it through my voice. Right there dynamic knowing is revealed.

ZERO MAKES POSSIBLE THE ‘WHAT’ OF ‘WHERE’, THE FORM THAT HOLDS MEANING, THE MOVING FROM POINT TO POINT.”
…’Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space,’ Tarthang Tulku, p. 50-2

I thought of another instance of dynamic knowing at the edge of the future, when looking calmly into a REMEMBRANCE… you might discover gaps or discontinuities, areas that are fuzzy or incomplete… You may go directly in to each ‘gap’. They can open to reveal more of the remembrance. You may do this with any gap encountered. At some point the memory opened, I discovered a memory was not a frozen image or ‘thing’. It was a series of summaries of impressions focused upon in time… each ‘enfolded’ into summary after summary that I put together and held in time. Observing at the edge of the future, I saw HOW I put them together. I included patterns and excluded others that were there, I made micro-second judgments about what I liked and did not like, there was an ordering and managing of sensual aspects of ‘the memory’, only now available as I looked back… all the while having never left the edge of the future Now. I saw how by ‘unfolding’ now what I’d previously ‘enfolded’… Seeing this was dynamic knowing… a delicious taste of a ‘luminous vitality’ that Rinpoche points to at the edge.

It becomes clear when facing a ‘POINT OF CONCERN’, going into it opens it. Standing back to consider it creates a distance, and makes it an object. Rather, diving into… the gap, the discontinuity, the fuzzy confusion, the pain, the fear, the transitions between… the not-known… is where dynamic knowing often activates. Rinpoche suggests regarding the idea that the past is happening now…

“To attain this ‘knowingness’ we can begin with objects and experiences, using them to work back to the knowingness and clarity which they bear. Then, using that clarity, we can SEE ALL EXPERIENCES AS BEING PRESERVED IN A COMMON GROUND IN SUCH A WAY THAT THERE IS NOTHING SEPARATING THEM, one from the other. Our experience of last year and our experience of today both have the same clarity within them, and that clarity shows that they are even more fundamentally linked—THE IDEA THAT ONE IS ‘PREVIOUS’ TO THE OTHER IS INCORRECT. The previous is not previous, the distant is not distant.”
…’Dynamics of Time and Space,’ by Tarthang Tulku, p.282