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I'm going to do a little “commentary” on part of Tarthang Tulku's text (which is available in full in the thread linked in my previous post), trying to comb through it from an AQAL, postmetaphysical perspective. I'd like to hear your feedback, particularly if you disagree with my reading… but also if you don't!
Tarthang Tulku: “If we begin at a level that is too abstract, we may come under the influence of theoretical constructs that lack transforming power. But if we look at our own experience to see how the patterns we rely on are established, insight is directly available. Language, behavior, living conditions, human evolution, the rise of consciousness, our own personal development, and the circumstances in which we act and live - these are the subject of our inquiry. Without restricting knowledge to 'psychology' or 'anthropology', such an inquiry recognizes that the subject and substance for investigation can be found in immediate, present experience, within and around in all directions.”
Tarthang Tulku suggests an AQAL range of experience and knowledge as the subject of an inquiry which aims at a “more comprehensive knowledge.” (I highlighted the words which I think comprise an AQAL range of concern.) As a contemplative, he is interested primarily in the transformative potential of knowledge, and thus stresses that starting from too abstract a perspective will not have transformative power; the knowledge yielded by abstract reflection or research must be wedded to personal experience, which of course is also an integral concern. I do not believe he is commenting specifically on how individual anthropologists, psychologists, or linguists should proceed - though a number of them have drawn on the TSK vision for inspiration in their disciplines - but rather is suggesting that knowledge from these and other disciplines can be used in the service of deepening TSK inquiry.
Tarthang Tulku: “We might start by looking at beginnings. The known world is built up on the basis of communication. How did human beings learn to speak? Scientific speculations on this point, together with the evidence that supports them, can serve to focus an inquiry that looks at how language functions within our own minds, shaping our intelligence, our perception, our understanding, and our interactions with others.”
Here again, he is suggesting using LL or UR disciplines (I believe linguistics and related studies would fall in these areas) in the service of UL inquiry and transformation.
Tarthang Tulku: “Another focus might be the process by which human consciousness changes over time. Different cultures have accepted as fundamental realities and ways of thinking that are completely different from our own. Appreciation for such differences can suggest how the changing dimensions of consciousness have given rise to our own ways of thinking, and can loosen the hold that our styles of thought and imagination have over us. Reflections based on our own experience and observation of the culture around us, together with study of findings by historians and cross-cultural investigators can provide a fruitful basis for such inquiry. Literature and the root meaning of the words and symbols we use in daily discourse can also offer valuable clues to the workings of the mind.”
In my view, Tarthang Tulku is not only exhibiting awareness of Zone 2, 3, and 4 disciplines, he is encouraging use of the knowledge of these fields in transformative spiritual inquiry. He does not appear to be encouraging actual memetic development in the service of relative emancipation, and that would be a short-coming from a fully Integral perspective, but he is acknowledging that structures of consciousness develop in time and history, and is pointing to the “loosening” and opening that can take place when we are able to take our own structure as “object.”
Tarthang Tulku: “Within the social, cultural, historical, and mental patterns that shape the 'known world', a structure operates that is far less solid than we usually imagine. Objects enter our lives in the course of an unfolding series of events, like actors who appear on stage, play a role for a time, and then depart. Despite appearances, the roles that the actors occupy - the patterns into which 'things' fall and the stories about them - are a matter of interpretation, not substance.”
His comments here (and throughout his writings) reflect, to me, at least a postmodern grasp of the fundamental role of interpretation in the establishment of our “worlds,” and a perspective which is consonant with the groundlessness of AQAL space posited by Integral Postmetaphysics.
Tarthang Tulku: “An inquiry into the inner structure of this world we take for granted begins with our own being and history, and with the 'things' and patterns with which we interact. Perhaps we focus on a table on which are resting some books or papers. The table is located quite specifically in space and time. It has a history that can be traced back physically (UR), socially (LR), culturally (LL), and economically (LR); it has meaning (UL/LL) in our lives that depends on the linguistic structures that let us identify it, the ways in which we have put it to use, and the associations we bring to it.
In the same way, whatever is now in existence has a history and reflects dimensions of structure, meaning, and value. Because these dimensions relate as well to 'our' being as 'narrator' and 'owner', an inquiry that embraces them can teach us where we come 'from' and where we are 'going'. We can ask how the past led to the present, how we make models and structure experience, and how we project the past toward the future. We can educate ourselves so that patterns open up, stimulating an active, creative intelligence. Through such inquiry we discover that knowledge is available here and now, freeing us from the need to freeze accumulated understanding into a position for fear of losing it.”
An article by Mark Edwards, I believe, describes developing an “AQAL sensibility” - an aliveness to the multidimensionality of lived experience as it unfolds and evolves in history. Tarthang Tulku seems to be evoking a very similar sensibility here, describing the fluid responsiveness and sensitivity that emerges when we inquire into and awaken to all of these dimensions of Being, this creative interplay of time, space, and knowledge.
Again, because he is writing from the perspective of a particular contemplative/transformative vehicle, his emphasis is primarily on how exploration of these things may affect us personally, awakening a creative and responsive intelligence and deepening our understanding and relationship to time, space, and knowledge (a transformation which I believe Wilber would describe in terms of state access and stabilization).
The rest of the excerpt, in fact, deals primarily with the “effects” of engaging in a free and open inquiry into all of these dimensions of embodied human existence in time and space. Deepening insight into these dynamics - which are multidimensional, mutually enacting, shaped by interpretation, temporally bound in particular structures (which may be opened and transcended) - introduces us directly to the main subjects of concern in TSK, the dynamic, creative, open ground of Being as expressed through the interplay of time, space, and knowledge.
In my conversation with Ken, while he encouraged exploring and further developing TSK from an Integral perspective, he warned me not to read too much into TSK - because otherwise such an exercise would likely encourage Buddhists to remain complacent about their current perspectives, failing to fully acknowledge or value relative structural development and the trajectory of relative emancipation that entails. In my view, while TSK, as a vehicle, does exhibit awareness of AQAL space and the postmodern critique of ontology and metaphysics - as I've tried to demonstrate in this thread - its focus is not really on encouraging relative development per se. An Integral TSK would place more emphasis in this area - and some writers in the TSK tradition have begun to do this* - but I believe the shift would be a relatively small one, since these dimensions are already explicitly acknowledged within the primary TSK texts themselves.
With that said, I also think that TSK provides one living example of how an “Integrally informed” transformative path of inquiry can wed investigation of multiple fields of knowledge to depth-oriented, “absolute” emancipatory practices in the service of personal transformation.
Best wishes,
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