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The sky inside a stone, Part 2. Spaciousness
- 1. Introduction: "A visionary medium"
- 2. Lyrical mysticism: Andrew Harvey
- a. a sea
- b. oneness
- c. love
- d. prenatal mother
- e. pragmatics of contact
- 3. The TSK vision
- a. what it is
- i. background
- ii. metaphysics plus meditation
disciplines
- iii. the human intention
- b. TSK aspects
- i. space in TSK: openness
- ii. time: "expressive
creativity"
- iii. knowledge
- c. rich embodiment
- i. being space: what a
body is
- ii. 'ego': being tight/solid/locked
- iii. being space contacting
space
- iv. "being is nourishing"
- v. 'being' or 'experiencing'
rather than I and it: a unified state
- vi. feeling the quality
of a time as such
- vii. focal setting: 'a
space' and Great Space
- viii. no outside-standers
- ix. presence
- d. practices
- i. nonverbal attention
- ii. giant body exercise
Part 2: Spaciousness: the brimming is of here and now
This workshop turned out to be discussion-based. These
were talking points:
1. "A visionary medium"
I saw the possibility of a visionary
medium through which a common ground could be found in the pursuits of
knowledge carried out by the various sciences and religions. Tarthang Tulku
The common background of microphysics
and depth psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither,
but rather a third thing, a neutral nature . Jung Mysteriam coniunctionis Collected Works para 768
Questions in Part 2:
- Assuming a Wave Structure of Matter vision of physical
reality, can we experience the ocean of dynamic space as such? Should we
want to?
- If we were to understand ourselves as patterns immersed
in the fabric of space, rather than objects with space between us, would
that change the way we think of ourselves in daily life?
Below are two kinds of reply, one devotional and ecstatic,
the other more sober in tone.
2. Lyrical mysticism: Andrew
Harvey
each thing was made of the same substance,
was moving and breathing and shining and emerging in and from the same
vast, quiet Body.
Andrew Harvey b.1952, proudly gay, childhood in India and
England, poet, youngest ever fellow of an Oxford college where he taught
Shakespeare and French poetry. Going back to India in his twenties led him
to experiences he described in two exceptional books, A journey in Ladakh
in 1983 and the one quoted below, Hidden journey from 1991.
The passages excerpted below are intended as a bridge between
the space wave physics described in part 1 and this workshop offering a
more psychological and philosophical version of what seems to me to be a
similar vision.
These excerpts are taken from passages in which Harvey
is describing intense experiences he had when he was being taken around
the bend by devotional practices in relation to a young woman guru.
a. a sea
a clear, crystalline sea of soft fire
I watched the sea rearing and falling
and listened to that great deep sound of creation and destruction
looking at the sea from within it seeing
myself breaking and glittering in a thousand waves before me. All morning
this breaking and glittering had gone on in me.
The waves and the wind and the whole
moonlit creation singing om a thousand thousand intermingled oms, loud,
soft, high, low
pouring light into us different lights
for different needs
b. oneness
that sea, and a wave of it, and all
the other waves too
The whole world is white light.
intricate and exquisite interrelatedness
of all events
All this is me. You looking at it are
looking at it within me. These eyes you are seeing my face with are my
eyes. You are looking at yourself within me with your real eyes.
c. love
In Telegu we have a song: "Love
can melt the stone, can turn the mountain to water."
I felt the whale feeling my terror
and sending toward me those great warm healing waves of energy sending
me through the sunlit water wave after wave of what I can only call love,
a silent, strong, immense, impersonal love.
soft, fiery tenderness has broken all
over my being, a fire-water of love
d. prenatal mother
the child is a dolphin in the sea of
light
I am in her body, I said to myself.
I am inside her vast body
as if a quiet wave of light has broken
out from her and foamed up over everything
She is completely crystalline, every
outline clear, sharp, crisp
> Envisioning what's thought
of as cosmic reality as a mother evokes our youngness, and that can be a
way to evoke a state in which our own structure is more integral.
e. pragmatics of contact
The only way to keep her energy is
by continual inward prayer makes the being flexible enough to take the
power poured into it and to make the subtle adjustments necessary to keep
it active. Everything at first is experimental.
the duty of the present moment the
present moment is always overflowing with immeasurable riches your faith
will measure it out to you; as you believe so you will receive.
3. The TSK vision
Tarthang Tulku 1977 Time, space and knowledge: a new
vision of reality Darma Publishing
a. what it is
Being = Time, Space and Knowledge
Being as knowledge, space, and time
there, but never as a thing
The openness of space, the lively,
expressive quality of time, the clarity of knowledge, are being
i. background
Tarthang Tulku b.1938. eastern Tibet. Refugee, America
since 1969. Established the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley and Odiyan in
northern California, Dharma Publishing.
Secular Buddhist metaphysics from a Tibetan Tantric tradition.
Nyingma-pa the oldest tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, emerging
from the older shamanic tradition of Bon.
ii. metaphysics plus meditation disciplines
As I became more familiar with Western
concepts, particularly those found in the sciences, I saw the possibility
of a visionary medium through which a common ground could be found in the
pursuits of knowledge carried out by the various sciences and religions.
Such a ground could serve to increase
each group's appreciation for the other, and thus even facilitate the search
for knowledge itself. This presentation, then, is not intended to be a
presentation of traditional Tibetan thought; it does not belong under the
heading of any specific philosophy or religion. It may, however, help to
clarify some of the issues of traditional meditative disciplines.
More psychological, phenomenological than the Wave Structure
of Matter vision in its metaphysics.
> Notice that the physics retains a flavor of
materiality because of its origins, and the Tibetan vision retains a flavor
of "consciousness" because of its different origins, although
both visions explicitly declare they don't hold with material-immaterial
duality.
iii. the human intention
as a unified view of existence, this
vision can perhaps make possible the lived-out experience of the full spectrum
of human values - of what it means to be a human being.
'opening' to an appreciation of the
vastness of Being within and as each thing
Distinction between lower time space and knowledge, and
what he calls Great Time, Great Space and Great Knowledge
If we can read Great Space, Time and
Knowledge, we will no longer have to rely exclusively on technological
hardware, psychology, hardware, medicine or religion. We can learn to use
the three principle factors of our existence, Space, Time and Knowledge,
knowingly rather than haphazardly.
confidence, strength, and sufficiency
fresh, sharp and spontaneous
an integrated natural intelligence,
unfragmented into reason, emotions, sensations, and intuition . Exploring
our realm of experience with such an intelligence . integrating a theoretical
approach with one which is more experiential
natural tendencies of our energies
to flow toward the exploration of understanding and beauty
recognize that we are part of a brilliant
and vigorous reality
We can decide and act with complete
propriety and utter spontaneity acts naturally fulfilling both to ourselves
and others.
b. TSK aspects
I can see two essential similarities between TSK and WSM
visions.
- Both are tending to get away from mind/body, physical/nonphysical,
objective/subjective, sacred/profane dualities.
- Both are trying to get away from the prevalent solid-object-in-empty-space
structural metaphor.
further understanding shows all situations
to be given as 'time' in such a way that time and space are the central
facts
i. space in TSK: openness
How this vision is like WSM: space is not a container but
a ground, not passive but active.
a providing without provider
Space, which is primordially peaceful,
open an open-ended accommodating of various views, all welling up, floating,
gathering within space a serene explosion of expanding creativity each
dancer leaps up, draws apart, and retires, while remaining inseparable
from the nourishing expansiveness of space.
Your discovery that "everything
is space" is itself space.
ii. time: "expressive
creativity"
Time is often imagined as space: something we travel through,
from the past to the future. In both WSM and TSK, though, time is the activity
of space - its inherent, self-generating dynamism.
Change is OF space rather than IN space.
difficult to see reality in a time-flow
rather than rather than in an 'object-as-potent-agent' manner
Even the physical fabric of our world
ultimately derives from the energy of 'time' There are no separate 'things'
or observers of things. Time itself reveals all objects, observers, characteristics,
and meanings.
There may be a way for these regularities
to be viewed as simply an
expression of the structure of time.
it then becomes possible to work directly
with this 'time' (which is neither subjective nor objective) and to enjoy
more 'power,' more options, and the capacity to implement them, in every
conventional sense.
Great Time is not a set-up or a mysterious
force. We might say it is the inseparable partner of Great Space, the other
member of the primordial marriage and love affair.
iii. knowledge
We can do much more than rent some
tiny room in Space - Space provides the opportunity to open up everything.
All the activity and characteristics of this opening are Time. When we
understand Space and Time a little better, then we can see that whatever
we perceive, whatever there 'is,' is Knowledge.
Great Knowledge is the immediate and
knowing dimension of all reality and experience. It is the interplay between
the openness of Space and the expressive creativity of Time.
Any conscious experience is usually
considered to be a function of systems that are not (and cannot) themselves
be part of the content of that experience. As an alternative to this picture,
it is possible that some kind of 'knowing' is the primary fact of embodiment.
In cultivating a new type of 'knowing'
faculty we need to counteract the usual emphasis on stable and opaque 'things'.
We can do this by encouraging an interest in interactions and also an appreciation
of translucence.
c. rich embodiment
What a body is, what the potentials of a body are, what
well-being is:
Our way of relating to our bodies is
often very rigid and tends to restrict our potential as embodied beings.
Our attitudes and investigations of the body often perpetuate either a
mechanical or a 'ghost in the machine' perspective. The 'self' is the only
thing that is allowed to 'know' in such a picture. Everything that supposedly
surrounds and interacts with it must be seen as objects which are merely
'known.' However, this rather frozen picture can be thawed. It is possible
to allow a greater measure of liveliness, clarity, and intimacy with our
surroundings to replace the isolated appearances of 'body,' 'mind,' and
'world'.
Our bodies are a central focus for
our experiences as human beings. Therefore it is important to carefully
examine what typically makes up our conception of a 'body'
emergence of a 'knowingness' which
places us in touch with the total phenomenon of human embodiment
possibilities of experience given by
the fact that we are bodies in a universe
i. being space: what a body is
begin to reveal this embodiment as
a presence within 'space,' 'presenced' by 'time'
The body as a subarea of space - an intensely active felt
texture
ii. 'ego': being tight/solid/locked
ordinary awareness and its clumsy conceptual
structures
releasing limitations that are made
by "insistence on indexing knowingness to a tiny 'knowing self' or
'mind'
consolidation and defense of the ego
ordinary awareness and its clumsy conceptual
structures
'Ego' seems to mean something like self imagined a certain
way -
iii. being space contacting space
Claim that something like the WSM vision can be directly
experienced:
contemplating space we can reach a
kind of space that is, in more than a symbolic way, the ground of everything.
where ordinary awareness and its clumsy conceptual structures are inoperative
iv. "being is nourishing"
appreciation of the natural presence
and flow of communion - appreciative capacity built on the broadest possible
base
fulfilling character of experience
being taken as a flowing gift rather
than achieved possession
v. 'being' or 'experiencing'
rather than I and it: a unified state
Can we drop the objective-subjective distinction?
From Guenther's introduction
of absolute objectivity ( reductive
naturalism) or of absolute subjectivity ( deductive idealism). common to
both is the bogus dichotomy of subject and object. But 'experience' antedates
the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, between interior
and exterior, because it is neither a subject nor an object and has neither
an interior nor an exterior. As a matter of fact, experience is not a thing,
and the interiority of a constituting subject or transcendental ego, as
well as the exteriority of a constituted object, are 'latecomers'. The
distinguishing qualities of 'the presence of a subject' and 'the presence
of an object' are results of later (thematic) construction. xxiv-xxv
Meditation's attitude of watching the whole of experiencing
as foreground, all together, like on acid, not thought of as either outside
or inside.
Experiencing it as creating itself in the moment, what
had been thought of as 'me' and 'it,' but neither, just brimming is
vi. feeling the quality
of a time as such
vii. focal setting: 'a
space' and Great Space
indefinitely many spaces resulting
from focal settings
appearance of objects only by means
of focal set
encounter a very deep and expansive
space
a more subtle and inclusive sort of
space
viii. no outside-standers
ix. presence
the tendency to look elsewhere, outside
or behind has died away and has been replaced by an utterly complete and
positive presence.
newly born within space and time, second
by second
Suggesting experiencing being as creating itself in the
moment, what had been thought of as 'me' and 'it' now taken as just brimming
is.
d. Practices
i. nonverbal attention
ii. The giant body exercise
[pp.21-46]
We may begin the exercises by 'imagining',
but may progress beyond that to learn to 'know' in new and quite incontrovertible
ways. Our 'knowing' is usually a simple conjuring up of conventional elements;
but we may now learn, instead, more about how the conventional world of
appearance merges and unfolds in terms of bodies, knowers, and things known.
This new type of knowledge may be concerned more with an open field or
dimension - which makes it possible to take up various points of view -
than with the observed objects deriving from such particular points of
view. Perhaps there is a balance possible between these two concerns.
Entertain in your mind's eye the image
of a giant human body . Visualize it as being very alive and real, and
try to see the physical form in as much detail as possible. Concentrate
very sensitively and take your time in building up a clear image.
Once your awareness has stabilized somewhat, imagine yourself
moving closer to the giant and entering it so you can see its internal organs.
Examine the internal details of each of these structures.
Neither the body nor any of its structures,
systems and subsystems are solid 'things'. They are not regions demarcated
by opaque surfaces that are filled inside with dense, inert 'stuff.' A
change in our usual focus shows each discrete structure or region to be
largely space.
Move through the 'walls' or surfaces
demarcating particular cells and molecules. Investigate the microworld
of atoms and subatomic particles.
Notice that all structures interact
with other structures, and that each particular 'structure' is itself only
a region marked out by (smaller) interacting structures. Use this type
of investigation to open up or enter all opacities and surfaces which delineate
a 'structure' or 'thing.' Continue moving through these defining surfaces
until all of them become completely open . Allow the particularity and
precision of the surfaces to remain, but as shining outlines, translucent
boundaries and interfaces. Move freely through these interfaces.
Assume a position outside the body,
and view it in this translucent aspect, a nesting of outlines within outlines.
Try to encompass all of the body's organization simultaneously within this
vision.
Consider the possibility of entertaining
this vision without its being limited to a single angle or point of view;
try to see the body from all directions and levels simultaneously.
And so on ...
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