I enjoyed working with this complementary but challenging suite of “variations” this week: LOK 14, LOK 22, and the three additional variations Jack suggested in his overview.\u00c2\u00a0 LOK 14 was challenging for me because I really do not know what a moment is.\u00c2\u00a0 I can isolate a particular duration here or there, an event or experience here or there, but this always feels “after the fact” and somewhat arbitrary.\u00c2\u00a0 But noticing this arbitrariness allowed me to more easily declare the whole teeming flux of my experience “one moment,” and to have that feel as “real” (and constructed!) as any other smaller division I might make.\u00c2\u00a0 When searching for moments “between” moments, the “between” seemed to arise at the same time as whatever other “slice” I decided upon (a breath, a second- or micro-second-long pulse, a thought, a momentarily passing experience, etc).<\/p>\n
The teeming quality of my experiential field challenged the dualistic habit of thinking in terms of “this moment” followed by “this moment.”\u00c2\u00a0 It was just as easy to say that moments were between, under, around, alongside, and within other moments, as to say that they were “between” — lots of parallel happenings and “times,” which brought up the metaphor of rhythm for me (discussed in TSK, but also by Raimon Panikkar in The Rhythm of Being<\/em>).\u00c2\u00a0 Like others here, at some points in my explorations this week, I found music was a very helpful support.\u00c2\u00a0 One song in particular — “Games Without End” by Adelaide — brought participatory fullness for me of the sense of multiple bubbling “moments” circulating around each other, percolating and seething in many directions at once, like one of Rinpoche’s pictures of the unfolding cones in Sacred Dimensions<\/em>.<\/p>\n Games Without End<\/a><\/p>\n This experience carried with it a mixture of joy and relaxation, an openness and spacious (polycentric) abiding — and was akin to one of the other variations this week, of “hearing” and “seeing” at once.\u00c2\u00a0 For the “doing” mind, the agentic mind, it seems you have to oscillate back and forth, but there were also glimpses of the always-already simultaneity and polyphony of these sensory rhythms, a rhythm in which self has a hard time getting a foothold and instead must simply let go.<\/p>\n Yesterday, I went to a park to experiment with these variations more.\u00c2\u00a0 I sat down on the shore of a pond, near a fountain which provided a nice continuous sound to work with.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes the fountain was a confusing rush of many “moments” at once, and sometimes it shifted and became a single dancing moment or boundless duration.\u00c2\u00a0 Practicing seeing along with hearing complemented this: the fountain provided a continuous column which nevertheless was frothy and “dancing” all around the edges.\u00c2\u00a0 I sat for a long time watching this, and folded other sounds — children, cars, another distant waterfall-like fountain — into the dancing spray: an abiding dynamism, still and in motion at once.<\/p>\n Looking for moments on an ever smaller scale, I tried just to open up my sensitivity (by “not trying”! or relaxing), so I could sense ever-finer fluctations or “occasions.”\u00c2\u00a0 After a time, I reached a limit — I couldn’t seem to sense anything “briefer.”\u00c2\u00a0 But then as I waited, something relaxed more deeply and the fine moments became incredibly smooth and continuous seeming — reminding me of the super-slippery sense of time Rinpoche describes.<\/p>\n Looking for transitions, rather than moments, I could see what seemed like “prompts” for a change, little associative links from one moment to the next, although the moments themselves seemed discontinuous.\u00c2\u00a0 But when I looked closely at those links, they also seemed just to pop up, to be discontinuous.\u00c2\u00a0 Perhaps I could describe this sense as dis\/continuity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I enjoyed working with this complementary but challenging suite of “variations” this week: LOK 14, LOK 22, and the three additional variations Jack suggested in his overview.\u00c2\u00a0 LOK 14 was challenging for me because I really do not know what … Continue reading