{"id":169,"date":"2006-11-04T22:22:22","date_gmt":"2006-11-05T05:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/2006\/11\/04\/experiencing-space-differently\/"},"modified":"2012-12-08T11:37:23","modified_gmt":"2012-12-08T19:37:23","slug":"experiencing-space-differently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/?p=169","title":{"rendered":"Experiencing Space Differently"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hi All<\/p>\n<p>I appreciate the comments to my posting on Exercise 16. I am now beginning to feel the group presence, or a derivative of the Great Presence as Jack creatively puts it, of this TSK online community. There is nothing like a peer group, or &#8220;sangha in Buddhist circles,&#8221; to help sustain practice and reflection.<\/p>\n<p>I am not sure how to categorize my posting this time; I started out this evening with a sitting and with the intention of doing one of the exercises, but I did not have a clear sense of which &#8220;exercise&#8221; I was doing. I didn&#8217;t let that concern me too much, and had faith to allow some direction or inkling of an exercise to emerge. I did, however, have in the &#8220;back of my mind&#8221; that Space would be the focus, as we are on Unit 3.<\/p>\n<p>I have to first say that I spent about 30 minutes doing Qigong exercises before sitting down, so I felt alert, embodied and not too distracted when I started. I just focused more or less on the sensations and tried to enjoy and expand them. Pretty much what you do after doing a Kum Nye movement or exercise. That got things moving. As I settled, and deepened, Exercise 4 seemed to want to come forth, so I went with that. So when sensations arose, I opened them up. I kept doing this repeatedly, until there was a feeling of momentum or a circular ball spinning inside me that was erasing the boundaries that demarcated my inner experience and organs and skin. As that continued, I felt more pleasant, moving towards lightness feeling. I stayed with that for a while, and then a mental thought arose&#8211;&#8220;the only thing creating distance, separation and boundaries in space and time is your perspective&#8211;now open that up too&#8221; &#8212; as I worked with that, it seemed I may have jumped into Exercises 10 or 11 in TSK&#8211;but I didnt care too much&#8211;I was more intrigued with playing with this statement&#8211;I shifted more to the observer as a focus&#8211;and tried to look at how it was looking at the experience&#8211;but that opened up into an image of light beam&#8211;and all I can say is that the light beam seem to symbolize a de-centering of the observer so that it felt like the observer was just one possible position that was coming into being vis a vis the light beam&#8211;maybe it was not a light beam&#8211;but more of a subtle feeling of Space&#8211;and that my sense of being the observer became a little more transparent&#8211;certainly I felt a great sense of bouyancy and freedom&#8211;and then I got some sort of insight that what I take to be the boundaries of immediate perceptual experience&#8211;are arbitrary boundaries&#8211;but very persuasive and convincing to my thinking\/experience&#8211;and it dawned on me that this must be the meaning of what the &#8220;field communque&#8221; is all about&#8211;that my ordinary sense of limitation of my identity and existence&#8211;as being bounded by this moment, this experience, in the so-called present&#8211;defined my immediate thoughts and identity&#8211;is a product of being dominated by a strong signal from my own preconceptions&#8211;confirmed through collective consensus as the field communique&#8211;and the analogy seems to be like a radio that can only tune into one frequency or station. There are other stations\/frequencies available (for Being), but the bandwidth is too narrow\/limited. Other strange phenomena occurred also, and I dont know if it is worth sharing&#8211;but I felt a distinct presence of deceased friend who died about 2 months ago suddenly&#8211;and I had not really been thinking all that much about him&#8211;and when I felt it I was sort of shocked and jumped off the cushion&#8230;sorry for the over-dramatization&#8211;but it is all true.<\/p>\n<p>Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hi All I appreciate the comments to my posting on Exercise 16. I am now beginning to feel the group presence, or a derivative of the Great Presence as Jack creatively puts it, of this TSK online community. There is &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/?p=169\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-01_general","category-tsk-online-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}