Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Interview of Tarthang Tulku by Steven Tainer
 

Interviewer: I understand that you have a new model of reality which takes space, time, and knowledge as the basic terms or components.

Tarthang Tulku: Yes, but what I'm offering is not exactly a theory or a reduction of everything to three determinate “things.” “Space, “time,” and “knowledge” have resonances that offer a comprehensive perspective on what we ordinarily call “reality,” but can also facilitate infinite personal growth, which includes going beyond particular theories, views, or experiences-you never get bogged down or tied to some view of how or what things are. 

I: How is that possible? If your-I don't know what to call it-paradigm has real content, it should have a specified range of application. It should say something definite that can be tested out as true or false.

T: That's a sound propositional view of the matter, but I'm thinking more in terms of a kind of poetry of reality, which can keep up with reality in all its presentations. I don't think reality is just “this way” or “that way,” and I want something that can reflect that. Also, I don't mean to say that the space, time, knowledge system isn't precise in a way that can be tested-it's very precise and testable, it just doesn't stop exhibiting new significations that can be experienced. 

I: Canyou explain how three such common notions as space, time, and knowledge have that kind of generality?

T: We might say, tentatively, that reality unfolds in many ways and levels, each being distinguished by its own space and time for experience or knowledge. If you take these foundation features for granted and just use them to run off a series of interactions depending on that particular configuration of space, time, and knowledge, then you are stuck in one realm. Other possibilities are ruled out; growth is limited to that sphere. But central information about reality, the centrality of space, time, and knowledge, cannot be lost.  Space, time, and knowledge may take different forms, and may be ignored, but they can't be left out. And if you attend to them in a certain way, they become a channel linking you to other levels of space, time, and knowledge. Space, time and knowledge comprise a poem that reality speaks and answers to on all levels-it can be very evocative. The fact that everything is space, time and knowledge is something that you do not merely observe but actually participate in. The poem, which you are part of, gains new significance and application as you go because all new experience contribues to its force. You acquire more energy and capacity to appreciate the aptness of this visionary system in new ways, which in turn invites still more experience, more capacity for appreciativity.  It's like a chain reaction that has no stopping point.  Limits and boundaries are not inherent in space, time and knowledge or in the human being. We can easily lose track of just what human “being” is and can be. Even the practice of “consciousness-raising” therapy, meditation, etc., can be done in such a way as to reinforce low-level perspectives.  These approaches just drag along the arbitrary limits constituting our realm. Even the conception of “higher consciousness” is often just an extrapolation from our low-level anxieties and achievement-orientation. 

I: What's wrong with such an orientation? People naturally want to improve their lot in life.

T: It impedes real understanding and progress. People are busy chasing ordinary things or esoteric things from a perspective that is self-limiting or frustrating.

I: Yes, but why is it frustrating?

T: Because infinite space, time and knowledge are here! Everything, however limited and unsatisfactory and confused, can be found to bear the infinite freedom and openness of space, infinite time, infinite clarity and fulfillment. If we take familiar things as desirable, undesirable, or in need of improvement, we are freezing a perspective which allows little capacity for real appreciation. 

I: Of course, this is the reason why people are practicing meditation, so they can overcome distinctions and really be “here. ”

T: I know that, but unfortunately, there is a dangerous misunderstanding involved in that approach. It tends to shut down human intelligence and locks onto the ordinary notion of “here” in a dull, trance-like way. There is nothing wrong with being able to think and discriminate. Certainly we should not give it up in favor of the conventional opposite. The point of my space, time, and knowledge approach is that it unlocks human intelligence by putting it back in touch with a truly creative path to follow and explore. You can use all your clarity and capacity for making accurate judgments to transcend ordinary small-mindedness and grasping. Theory, practice, all experiences, can become integrated on this path. In the process, the ordinary notion of “here,” which is too restrictive, and the egoistic achievement-orientation, which blinds [binds?] us to a different sense of “here,” can be gently melted. There is no need for a breakthrough or peak experience orientation, which is what people generally have. As I said, that involves too much anxiety. It also suggests that there is some “it” or “thing” that has to be gotten at all cost.  

I: What might be a general structure or a summary of the path you mention? Also, how do you avoid ending up with an ultimate view of experience?

T: Well, we start with our ordinary view of our realm. In that view, space, time and knowledge are three conventional entities among many. “Space” on that level tends to mean something rather dull, an absence of things, etc. “Time” is a very confusing notion that people don't seem to be able to account for at all, except for its sense as an index for distinguishing events and states of affairs. These are both examples of how the higher and more dynamic import of space and time have been ignored for the sake of setting up a nice, manageable little playground for the ego. “Knowledge” is very fragmented here, and very insensitive. Knowledge involves a two-term relation between people and things known. Knowledge is very outward oriented, and is about things. It is fact-oriented. The being of some thing and our knowing it are different.

Given such a starting point, we can learn to see our world in a different way by giving more prominence to the phenomenological and other associations we have for space, time, and knowledge. At the same time, certain kinds of analyses can be provided which suggest that the opacities which define the objects and boundaries of our realm and which both permit (and limit the scope of) our knowledge are due to a kind of local limitation on some higher space-dimension.

That is, all the surfaces and massiveness we see can be considered as a derivative distortion of “space.” Our whole realm is a kind of lower space, an arbitrary abbreviation of the openness of a higher space. The “time” that is operative in such a lower, constrictive space exhibits some of the characteristics associated with contained gases-the number of interactions increases with a decrease in volume. So our time is characteristically too short and too pressing. We always have to move on. Also, the constrictive force of lower space has given rise to a kind of flattening effect, so that time appears as a linear series of events related in a cause-effect chain. The origin of our world must then be sought at the beginning of this chain, a causeless cause or an infinite series-something rather obscure and unnatural in either case. Knowledge is structured in terms of bridging spatio-temporal distances and making correlations. There are overtones to this picture that, if you elaborate them sufficiently, trigger some inner capacities in people for seeing the arbitrariness of the so-called world, its status as a particular space, time and knowledge configuration. Exercises can also be prescribed which assist in the understanding of the world as-in its entirety-deriving from a restrictive read-out on a higher space, time, and knowledge, and as preserving a connection to such dimensions. The “derivative distortion” is a reversible condition. With such an orientation, the tendency is to want to get back to higher space, etc., so the second stage of the path is structured accordingly.  People can learn to open up small spaces and control an oppressive time-flow. In fact, the continuity and sequentiality which ground our realm can be transcended. In the short term, this involves startling discontinuities and miraculous occurrences, clairvoyance, and so forth.  What's happening is that more of the freedom and nonstandard options of space and time are shining through, but are still being forced into a correlation with the familiar features of our realm.  You're getting non-standard manifestations with something like a standard-realm content. Also the infinite energy of “time,” its power to express anything, is still in juxtaposition with a sense of personal continuity as the doer or controller. So, it may seem that “you” have attained something and can “do” new things. This stage is still characterized by a here-there higher-lower perspective. But fortunately, it is part of the nature of the space-time-knowledge vision that it serves to open up or undermine even these deep-level presuppositions. You can use whatever tendencies and motivations you find at a given stage to make progress without ever validating them in any ultimate sense. The same things that bind you are also doorways to freedom. 

I: Doyou mean that the higher-lower view, even as it applies to higher and lower spaces, is itself not ultimately valid and is due to a “defining opacity” which can be opened up? If so, there seems to be a contradiction there.

T: No, because the value of this approach is that everything takes on new significance as you “go,” including the idea of exposing a higher space or going. Your intelligence becomes very fluid and very perceptive, and is able to spot and transcend very fundamental presuppositions, including even “transcending.” Intelligence does not have to be so incapable of taking itself into account, so outward-oriented. That is what I want to emphasize about the space, time and knowledge vision. It puts you in touch with facets of reality that are truly central and wholesome, so that growth is guided by something genuine. You don't end up implementing an absolutization of your preliminary fantasies. Space, time and knowledge can ground you wherever you may find yourself, and can always point the way to new insight, because you are participating in something alive.  This gets back to the issue of “being.” I am hoping that this vision will help people to experience what “being” might involve. I know this is a longstanding problem in philosophy and other fields, and seems rather abstract to people, but I think it's important even for basic fulfillment in life. On the other hand, it certainly is not the passive  blankness that some people are now calling “being,” nor some ecstatic state built out of hysterical emotions, and again, anxiety.  

I: Is it a state?

T: It's not a state because there's no “it.” I feel that the significance of this term is of a different order than a referring expression, and can best be understood by following the kind of path I've just outlined. As I've said, what you get from that path is not a static goal, but an enhancement of appreciation that unfolds infinitely in all directions and embraces all ordinary states, all “its,” even those that preceded your embarking on the path. But there's no special state called “being.”

I: Aside from the notions of discovering the significance of “being”and learning to appreciate life more, what other specific advantages follow from this path?

T: That's really everything you need! But I can draw out more of what's involved. The issue is appreciating what is here. When I say that infinite space and time are “here,” I really mean that each finite point is actually infinite. In fact, at an advanced level one sees that there are no such points, and nothing to improve or manipulate. But until you have this more mature view, you can proceed by opening up the small and obstructing nature of each point to infinite space. Also, you can use the point as a point of entry into other realms. Finally, each standard-world point is, from a certain perspective, actually all other such points. This is why telepathy and clairvoyance are possible-it's a matter of seeing more of what is “here.” 

I: All experience shows that there are different spatio-temporal locations, “here,” “there,” “now,” “then,” '~this,” “that,”etc.

T: Yes, but there is another way of looking, using a higher appreciation of “time.” If you ignore most of time's dynamism, it then measures out distances, differences, discrete things defined by opaque boundaries. With more understanding, “time” can penetrate everything instantaneously. It's like a laser beam, it just punches right through, without weaving all around. To put this another way, this same thing that postpones, and separates, setting up intervening spatio-temporal distance, also accumulates everything in a non-dimensional fashion. This gives you instant access, to state it in achievement-oriented terms. “Progress” without this view of time is very slow, easily obstructed or distracted. Even meditation doesn't necessarily get anywhere. But if you understand time, you are not tied down by your personal egoist pattern or by “the way things go,” as people say. Also, you can work with time in the opposite way, by telescoping present time, or the lived time between two points of standard clock time. You can live within the smallest unit of time-speaking as though these units were intrinsic to time-for as long as you like. I might mention that this whole explanation treats space and time as though they were the familiar, standard components of the external world. That is not accurate, but a better account would be too complex for our present discussion. It is nevertheless true that all experiences and events are “space” and “time,” and since space and time offer these possibilities I've been mentioning, people can really enjoy life. Psychological problems due to the world's pressing in on you can be relieved. In fact, you can enjoy both solitude-infinite personal space-and intimate communication with your fellow beings simultaneously. You can be in touch without being strung out. And since all events, being space and time, contribute to the “knowledge” or appreciativeness that I said expands forever on this path, that includes the event of death. Death is an opaque boundary. It frightens people because it is the end. But such limits, as I said, are arbitrary. If you cling to an egoistic view, you become blind to what lies beyond a certain point, and that blindness constitutes your death. You are locked into one dynamic pattern, one narrow view of time, which must run its course. The poverty of your initial orientation shows up in this way. If you become more appreciative of space, time, and knowledge, you don't have this problem.     

What about more pervasive economic and social problems?

T: Well, presently people are suffering from lack of resources or from difficult environments. But there again, these are not absolute conditions-they only show up our bankrupt view. If you use higher knowledge to keep abreast of the infinity of space and time, your environment will reflect that. There is tremendous energy available for us if we use time properly. As for social issues, I might just list two points. Those people who learn that everything is “here” will not be able to duck responsibilities for the suffering of other human beings just because they are far away. We are all in this together. That has become a fashionable thing to say, but I'm trying to make this vision available so that people will see what it means, directly. My second point in this regard is that one's self-confidence will necessarily grow along with extended personal responsibilities. We don't need to feel inadequate. Inadequacies are also presentations of space and time-we can work with them any way we want, and instantaneously … this is the idea of self-healing, and even of alchemy, carried into a sphere where they can really work. Which way we want to use our lives is entirely up to us.   

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Bruce.thanks for this interview!

it breathes the same fresh air and imaginative space I felt when I first studied TSK 24 years ago.

Albert

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

You're welcome, Albert.  I'm glad you enjoyed it.  I do think TSK has something fresh to contribute to this whole conversation that Wilber has initiated, calling for a postmodern / post-metaphysical spirituality.

I have more interviews as well.  I may post one of them, or an excerpt, later.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Bruce, again and again I am deeply fascinated and convinced that TSK holds keyes to most diverse processes of creation, sports and arts. Blooged in 2007 World Chess Champion vs. Deep Fritz.

This passage about intreview between Kramnik and German artist Ugo Dossi came to my mind:

“21.12.2005 “For us chess players the language of artist is something natural,” says classical chess world champion Vladimir Kramnik in this indepth interview with German artist Ugo Dossi. Their indepth dialog probes the creative processes that take place in each field, and the intersection points between chess and art. Ugo Dossi is a well-known modern artist in Germany, whose works, according to Henry Martin, “deal with systems and images that open up spy-holes onto the intuition of the infinite, appealing to the part of us that would be capable of peeping through for a look, if only we were capable of finding it.”

R. Pontecorvo writes: “Ugo Dossi uses images and metaphors of endlessness to seduce and induce the viewer to immerse in a realization of the infinite. His tools seem of unlimited spectrum, ranging from tiny objects in small boxes, which he calls “Worldmodels”, to large sculptures in architectural space, to enormous “Art-Fields” in the landscape.”

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Thanks for the link to the interesting article, Albert.  (I also appreciated Stephen's reflections on topology… a particularly fruitful wedding of space and knowledge.)  I'd like to hear more on your thoughts about TSK's relation to the arts and creativity.  An essay came out awhile back looking at Gebser's work in a TSK light – but I think that is more on the level of correspondence of ideas, while I suspsect you are pointing perhaps more at process…

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Bruce..indeed I am exploring for a long time now the mysterious moment where consciosuness and something new emerges. Blogged here about it f.e.:

Instapundit, Pandit , Poets and Pioneer of Physics

Did you read

“The minds best work” written by D. N. Perkins?

A great experiment to grasp the essence of creation, creativity and process of finding, disvovery and exploration.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Plus a:

Talk with David Whyte about poetry

As Poetry in science, poltics, corporate culture and daily life is a completely underestimated asset.

Best,

Albert

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi, Albert, thank you for both of those entries.  I enjoyed both of your blogs and share your appreciation for this subject.  Are you familiar with Alfonso Montuori's writings on creativity in relation to TSK, among other things?  Here's one of his essays, if you're interested.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Bruce thank you for this info. I wasnt aware of the these writings.

Guess lots of great resources the CIIS has to offer:)

it ouches some of the essentials Rudolf Steiner did develop with anthroposophy.

A new generation of innovative and integrally inspired antrhoposophic visionaries is emerging in German speaking countries.

My friend Roland Benedikter is one of them. The whole TSK appproach can offer so many creative bridges.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Bruce,

Love this interview.  Hope it generates some discussion between those on this site.  

I thought the following quote and other things TT said are definitely germane to our current Blogs where we are exploring space and levels with TSK…

“…reality unfolds in many ways and levels, each being distinguished by its own space and time for experience or knowledge. If you take these foundation features for granted and just use them to run off a series of interactions depending on that particular configuration of space, time, and knowledge, then you are stuck in one realm. Other possibilities are ruled out; growth is limited to that sphere. But central information about reality, the centrality of space, time, and knowledge, cannot be lost.  Space, time, and knowledge may take different forms, and may be ignored, but they can't be left out. And if you attend to them in a certain way, they become a channel linking you to other levels of space, time, and knowledge.”

Best,

D

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hey,

Years ago I used to play chess with a legal intern who, like Kramnic, played against machines. He told me that computers were first programed to play chess as an exercise in logic. And they would never win…big surprise. Then they were programed to play as if chess was a topological problem to solve. (Like Go.) And they began to win. So when I read the above interview, chess and art, it reminded me to add topology to the mix…the knowledge of a surface in a constant state of deformation…and that led me to recall that Clement Greenburg, one of the most influential modern art critics, said that art was about surfaces and only surfaces. Being an artist these days, I think he was right. No one will ever know anything more than the surface. Any claim to have knowledge of more is a product of imagination, vanity and a kind of second or third person phenomenology. That is true of art or any other contour of space. Or time if such a thing actually exists outside of our imaginations and cultural conventions. Or mental states…the most practiced and profound meditation is only an encounter with a surface…the nature and identity of which one has trained themselves to deny.

I have no idea how that fits into TSK, because I have combed the stuff that Balder has posted about it…here and on his blog…and I can find nothing about TSK, no surface of it, that can show me anything more about itself than someone else's claim that it is there.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

That sounds very Foucaultian.  But what do you mean by surfaces, Nickeson?  Appearances and projections?  Does your description presuppose a depth that is inaccessible, or is it a denial of depth altogether?  If it presupposes depth, somehow you must have accessed it, or else you are projecting something (the idea of depth) that isn't there.  If you deny depth altogether, then everything is surface – but surface of what?  If there is nothing other than “surface,” then surface loses its meaning.  It becomes something else.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

AAAh..deep into the waters of post structuralism..):)Foucalt, Derrida..I like the way KW adresses them in his excerpts of Kosmos Trilogy 2.

In the 70`s and 80`s I had a kind of fascination with them. They really saw something others did and do not see.

However…Bruce you are adressing surface here in a good AQAL way.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,
This might be fun…

First. I am wary of this gambit: “That sounds very Foucaultian.” It could be a little diversionary set-up. Albert is already diverted to Foucault and Derrida and Wilber and this has exceptionally little, if nothing, to do with any of those three. I have probably never, ever, read more that two sentences by Foucault. Life is too short to read French philosophers. My post is a product of a little free association riff off of comments from a law intern and Clement Greenburg.

Likewise I am wary of the word depth. Depth belongs to a class of words regarding dimensions. Height, width, depth. Surface belongs to a location class and its antonym is core, or inside or interior. We will discuss surfaces and interiors since I am talking about location.

A close reading of this sentence: “No one will ever know anything more than the surface.” Should answer the rest of your questions.

So what am I talking about? An example from my particular media: I forge weld two, 2-inch-thick pieces of steel into one piece. If done well there will be no surface signs of that weld. But the interior of the steel will display a particular molecular, perhaps crystalline pattern indicating the location and nature of the joint. But I cannot know that. If I want to check the interior integrity of the weld I will have to take a metallurgical x-ray of the area. Will that allow me to know the interior of the piece? No. All I will know is the patterns on the surface of a monitor screen. And then I will extrapolate as to the interior…make an unconfirmable assumption. Or, if this is an experiment, I would cut a cross section, or a series of them, of the welded area. But that will tell me nothing of the interior because the cross sections are no longer interiors but surfaces, and deformed surfaces, of what used to be a formed interior that can never be re-formed in anyway resembling the original. So I will never know the interior of that piece of steel following the weld.

I believe, for the time being at least, that example can be generalized into practically any other object or subject of inquiry.

Maybe there can be a tie-in to Derrida. One cannot deconstruct anything one cannot know, so interiors are un-deconstructable and might constitute The Other.

Is it too soon in the discussion to speculate that any statement made about the nature of an interior…other than the proposition that it might or might not be there…is a metaphysical statement?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Life is too short to read French philosophers.

I haven't finished your post yet.  I just have to say that this sentence made me laugh louder than anything I've read here in awhile.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

That line from Steven got me laughing aloud as did his line in another thread about the cloud clown at midnight. Any more lines like that from Steven today and I might bust my stitches!

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Nickeson,

I'll play…..

You said: … I am wary of the word depth. Depth belongs to a class of words regarding dimensions. Height, width, depth. Surface belongs to a location class and its antonym is core, or inside or interior. We will discuss surfaces and interiors since I am talking about location.

Sure, I'll accept that qualification, if that's the way you were using the term.  I think “depth” is a viable antonym to surface if you're discussing something like the ocean; but core or inside seems better when you're dealing with other objects such as a tree or a piece of metal or whatever, where you can circumambulate the “surface” and observe it from multiple sides or “locations.”  Really, I see “perspective” as being key to the distinctions we're making here.  How we are “located” in relation to the object's surface seems to play a part in whether we speak of “depth” or “core.”

You said:  A close reading of this sentence: “No one will ever know anything more than the surface.” Should answer the rest of your questions.

Are surfaces real, or are they perspectives?  For instance, from the top of the ocean, the floor is its depth.  I can't know the depth from my position on the surface.  But if I drop to the bottom, if you argue that I will only encounter more surfaces there – and it is reasonable that you would – I am nevertheless accessing the “space” that I had labeled as “depth” from a different location, a different point of view.  So, from the perspective of someone on the ocean surface, you are accessing the depth; but if you analyze what you are accessing from that depth perspective, it is arguably more surfaces, more appearances.

Does this mean that we will only ever know surfaces?  Well, “surface” itself is a sliding category; there is no absolute surface any more than there is an absolute depth or core.  It is a shifting play of perspectives, no? 

If there is no “real” core, there is no “real” surface either.

You said:  So what am I talking about? An example from my particular media: I forge weld two, 2-inch-thick pieces of steel into one piece. If done well there will be no surface signs of that weld. But the interior of the steel will display a particular molecular, perhaps crystalline pattern indicating the location and nature of the joint. But I cannot know that. If I want to check the interior integrity of the weld I will have to take a metallurgical x-ray of the area. Will that allow me to know the interior of the piece? No. All I will know is the patterns on the surface of a monitor screen. And then I will extrapolate as to the interior…make an unconfirmable assumption. Or, if this is an experiment, I would cut a cross section, or a series of them, of the welded area. But that will tell me nothing of the interior because the cross sections are no longer interiors but surfaces, and deformed surfaces, of what used to be a formed interior that can never be re-formed in anyway resembling the original. So I will never know the interior of that piece of steel following the weld.

In other words, “interior” is a way of describing something beyond the limits or borders of a particular perspective-space - an aspect of a presupposed field which is not accessible from a particular location?  Is interiority real, or a function of a particular focal setting (to use a TSK term)?

You said:  Maybe there can be a tie-in to Derrida. One cannot deconstruct anything one cannot know, so interiors are un-deconstructable and might constitute The Other.

Yes, essentially what I was saying just above.  But it's a shifting or sliding “Other.”

You asked:  Is it too soon in the discussion to speculate that any statement made about the nature of an interior…other than the proposition that it might or might not be there…is a metaphysical statement?

I would say that the presupposition that underlies the claim that we can only know surfaces is already a metaphysical one.

Best wishes,

Balder

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

I'm glad I can provide a couple of good hoots.

You have to realize that I am pursuing this thing in order to get a free lesson in TSK: this whole line of thought is in that domain.

First, I like the fact that you brought perspectives into the mix. I look at perspectives as a screenwriter, or film director, would look at the point of view (POV) that the audience is afforded by camera positioning. POV is absolutely critical to the meaning of a scene. And we can all thank Nietzsche for that which we, sitting in the movie house, enthralled and void of disbelief, take for granted. Perspective (POV) is everything.

You wrote: Are surfaces real, or are they perspectives?  For instance, from the top of the ocean, the floor is its depth.

Not so fast. Remember that old gem they tried on you in Jr. High? (Q) “How far can you go into a forest?” (A) “Half way, after that you are going out.”  When you are sinking to the bottom of what you think is depth, you will meet at the half-way point the bottom (surface) feeding flounder who has been discussing the same problem and who is rising to find what flounders see as the depth.

What is the real depth of the ocean? That which is furthermost from a surface or, as you write, a border. This concept of border might be critical here. Additionally, you refer a couple of times in your post to perspective as a “space.” (i.e. “I am nevertheless accessing the “space” that I had labeled as “depth” from a different location, a different point of view.”) I think we need to back away from that. A Point Of View is a point,  something that has no space, likewise critical if we are really going to take this to the mat.

You wrote: “Does this mean that we will only ever know surfaces?  Well, “surface” itself is a sliding category…”

Indeed.

While writing my previous post I toyed with making this the example: Right now I am looking at a refrigerator, Samsung, standard hotel-suite issue, plastic surface, beige to egg white, smooth sides, minimalistic door decor. I see light refecting off of the door…the fact that light is reflecting is how I can see the door in the first place. And I can assume that I can hear the soft “thup, thup” of the ceiling fan behind me echoing off that door, though I cannot consciously perseive that fact. Further, I can assume there is food behind the plastic surface door. I put it there on the shelves. But I do not know if the cat I tossed in for good measure is dead or alive or both at the same time. And I do not know if the cat has eaten the food because I can only know the surface of the door and the other three sides and the top and the bottom. And so I open the door. The food is all there. And the cat was just a put-on. But there is no interior. The space assumed to be an interior before, has suddenly slid into being an exterior now that the surface has swung back.

We can all agree on that. No? But…

You write: ”there is no absolute surface any more than there is an absolute depth or core.  It is a shifting play of perspectives, no?”

 No! It does not follow from your previous statement.

From all six side of that refrigerator, observers can see, touch and hear a surface, a border between the observers' perceptions of light, sensation and audio. This is as close to absolute as one can get, and as close as I feel safe to venture.  But no observer still knows the interior. There is a difference, founded solidly on perspective and POV that the knowledge of the surface is far more probable than the knowledge of the interior…which no observer has ever seen or will ever see, touch, or hear.

You write: “If there is no “real” core, there is no “real” surface either.”

No. I do not know about “real” because “real” has not been defined here. But core cannot be compared to surface because surface is accesable to examination and core, as core, is not.

You write: “In other words, “interior” is a way of describing something beyond the limits or borders of a particular perspective-space - an aspect of a presupposed field which is not accessible from a particular location?”
 
Yes.

You write: “Is interiority real, or a function of a particular focal setting (to use a TSK term)?”

As far as I can see you have not laid a foundation as a basis for this question. You have yet to define “Real” or “Focal Setting” or make them relevant to the issue.

You write: “I would say that the presupposition that underlies the claim that we can only know surfaces is already a metaphysical one.”

Balder, you'll have to lead me through that one. What do I know from metaphysics? I weaned myself off that stuff when I was 19 and never looked back.

But…If one follows my position from the first sentence of my first post on this thread to this point here >.< one will have seen me sliding all over the board, but never in a place where I can't cover my ass. Balder and I have established above that the context is doing the same.

Sliding objects, sliding subjects. Kiss that structure goodby.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hey Nick, by “surface” do you include the different surfaces viewable via different light frequencies (x-rays and the sort)?  What of noise the fridge makes, does that relay any information about anything other than surface?  Is there a piece of glass in the fridge?  If so (and even if not), are you aware of the following phenomenon: light reflecting off glass reflects somewhere between 0-16% (my percentages might be a bit off) depending on the thickness of the glass.  If you continually increase the thickness of the glass from some small, nominal thickness, percentage of light reflected will increase to 16% then decrease to 0% then increase again to 16%, and on and on.  Does that reflected light give you only information about the surface?

This might interest you.  There's a cosmological theory that suggests matter is but 2D surface information.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Nickeson, here's a partial reply tonight (it's late).  More to follow later…

You wrote: Not so fast. Remember that old gem they tried on you in Jr. High? (Q) “How far can you go into a forest?” (A) “Half way, after that you are going out.”  When you are sinking to the bottom of what you think is depth, you will meet at the half-way point the bottom (surface) feeding flounder who has been discussing the same problem and who is rising to find what flounders see as the depth.

True.  “Surface” and “depth” are relative distinctions, tied to our points of view.  Depth from one perspective might be surface from another, and vice versa.

You wrote:  What is the real depth of the ocean? That which is furthermost from a surface or, as you write, a border. This concept of border might be critical here. Additionally, you refer a couple of times in your post to perspective as a “space.” (i.e. “I am nevertheless accessing the “space” that I had labeled as “depth” from a different location, a different point of view.”) I think we need to back away from that. A Point Of View is a point,  something that has no space, likewise critical if we are really going to take this to the mat.

I understand what you're saying.  TSK uses the notion of zero-point to convey this.  But you've been talking surfaces and location, and these notions presuppose space, so I don't think it was inappropriate to use it the way that I did.  A surface marks a boundary in space, as well as a limit on knowledge.  And perspective or point of view also seem to presuppose space as well - what TSK calls a from/to structure or dynamic.  A particular point of view or perspective appears to establish a particular space, the “boundary” or limit of which is a surface.  But arguably, ‘surface' itself is space. 

In marking a boundary, dividing ‘us' (our POV) from an inaccessible “core” (inferred interior space), the boundary itself is a function or expression of space.  If you draw very close to it, you might even notice the surface is porous…even roomy inside.  Look around your Aruban hotel room.  If you collapse the space out of all the walls and objects within it (including your body), the actual matter in your room, thus condensed, would be no bigger than a grain of sand.  All those surfaces…essentially just space.

In saying we only ever know surfaces, are you saying we only ever know space?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Continuing….

You wrote:  While writing my previous post I toyed with making this the example: Right now I am looking at a refrigerator, Samsung, standard hotel-suite issue, plastic surface, beige to egg white, smooth sides, minimalistic door decor. I see light refecting off of the door…the fact that light is reflecting is how I can see the door in the first place. And I can assume that I can hear the soft “thup, thup” of the ceiling fan behind me echoing off that door, though I cannot consciously perseive that fact. Further, I can assume there is food behind the plastic surface door. I put it there on the shelves. But I do not know if the cat I tossed in for good measure is dead or alive or both at the same time. And I do not know if the cat has eaten the food because I can only know the surface of the door and the other three sides and the top and the bottom. And so I open the door. The food is all there. And the cat was just a put-on. But there is no interior. The space assumed to be an interior before, has suddenly slid into being an exterior now that the surface has swung back.

I can imagine Greta van Susteren coming knocking on your hotel door in Aruba:  “I hear that's some refrigerator you've got.  Might we find Natalee Holloway in there too?”

“Only her surface.”

I wrote: “there is no absolute surface any more than there is an absolute depth or core.  It is a shifting play of perspectives, no?”

You replied:  No! It does not follow from your previous statement.  From all six side of that refrigerator, observers can see, touch and hear a surface, a border between the observers' perceptions of light, sensation and audio. This is as close to absolute as one can get, and as close as I feel safe to venture.  But no observer still knows the interior. There is a difference, founded solidly on perspective and POV that the knowledge of the surface is far more probable than the knowledge of the interior…which no observer has ever seen or will ever see, touch, or hear.

The “view” that we achieve upon opening the door is simultaneously “depth” and “surface.”  As the door opens, we see “in” to that mysterious (and dangerous) box, perceiving what was formerly hidden by the surfaces of the outer walls.  We have, for a fleeting moment at least, the experience of cracking the surface and seeing the depths.  But as we look at what had been lying hidden within (behind the six surfaces), we find other objects with more surfaces, hinting at more hidden cores.  If someone is standing behind the fridge, unable to look in, you are seeing an interior they cannot see; but the interior you see is also “surface.” 

Borders in space, where what constitutes “border” at any time depends upon point of view and focal setting.

You wrote:  I do not know about “real” because “real” has not been defined here. But core cannot be compared to surface because surface is accesable to examination and core, as core, is not.

If core is defined as “what is hidden by a surface,” then by definition, core must remain inaccessible.  But this is by definitional fiat.  When I used the word “real,” I meant to question whether we can consider anything to be “core in itself” or “surface in itself.”  Such distinctions are relative functions of perspective, not “real” qualities of particular objects, or independently existing things in themselves. 

I wrote: “I would say that the presupposition that underlies the claim that we can only know surfaces is already a metaphysical one.”

You replied:  Balder, you'll have to lead me through that one. What do I know from metaphysics? I weaned myself off that stuff when I was 19 and never looked back.

By that, I meant that, if we accept that there really is such a thing as a “core in itself,” hidden behind surfaces but forever inaccessible in its pristine form, then that is a metaphysical perspective – it takes “core” to be something that exists independently of perspective, in a state of purity, rather than being a function of perspective.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

I can imagine Greta van Susteren coming knocking on your hotel door in Aruba:  “I hear that's some refrigerator you've got.  Might we find Natalee Holloway in there too?”

“Only her surface.”

Balder–you ghoul!

I just got back to the side show and have to catch up on some other things before replying to your replies.

Hasta luego.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

Back to the game. I'll not go through your replies in chrono-order but jump around, as suits my purposes, and risk joining this thing with that thing that you might not wanted to have joined (like when I combined two of Tom's sentences into one at some point in the last few days) but that's all done as a matter of libertine rhetoric…you know its wrong, I know its wrong, but it will cause the readers to pause and think (god permitting) and isn't that why we are really here?

You wrote: “Look around your Aruban hotel room.  If you collapse the space out of all the walls and objects within it (including your body), the actual matter in your room, thus condensed, would be no bigger than a grain of sand.  All those surfaces…essentially just space.”

I could say yes, but I won't, because again I feel this is diversionary and I feel you might have an agenda ready at hand. I will say that we could callaps the entire ball game all we want up to a point and then there would be nothing more than quantum whatevers and then I would play the meriological nihilism card that says nothing is true or real or existant except quantum whatevers and those things are going to be a mystery for a long, long time. This, of course,  would render the whole exchange to this point moot and everyone would have to wander off, content and reconciled to their absolute ignorance. As a service to our 3.5 readers I don't think we should go that route, but stop at some sort of common sense, pragmatic if you want, point.

You wrote: “A particular point of view or perspective appears to establish a particular space, the “boundary” or limit of which is a surface.  But arguably, ‘surface' itself is space.”

Fine, I will provisionally agree that surface is an aspect of space.

But right now other pleasures call and at some soon point I will return with the second installation of your reply.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Thanks, Nickeson.  I actually was not intending to reduce everything to mysterious quantum stuff.  I think that would be diversionary and a waste of time as well.

I look forward to skimming the surface of your next reply (which may or may not involve deformations of the surfaces of mine…)

B.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

Sorry for the delay, but once again I'm back.

You wrote: As the door opens, we see “in” to that mysterious (and dangerous) box, perceiving what was formerly hidden by the surfaces of the outer walls.  We have, for a fleeting moment at least, the experience of cracking the surface and seeing the depths.

No, it doesnt work that way because the only thing that happened here was the re-shaping of the surface. The surface of an elongated cube was changed to the surface of a multifaceted concavity. The depth here is not the same as the depth of a similarly sized block of styrofoam for instance.

You wrote: If core is defined as “what is hidden by a surface,” then by definition, core must remain inaccessible.  But this is by definitional fiat.  When I used the word “real,” I meant to question whether we can consider anything to be “core in itself” or “surface in itself.”  Such distinctions are relative functions of perspective, not “real” qualities of particular objects, or independently existing things in themselves.

No, one cannot define core in such a manner. There is no such thing as cores or surfaces “in themselves” The two words  describe locations not qualities, i.e. the placement of qualities.

And then there was this exchange:

Balder wrote: “I would say that the presupposition that underlies the claim that we can only know surfaces is already a metaphysical one.”

Nickeson replied:  Balder, you'll have to lead me through that one. What do I know from metaphysics? I weaned myself off that stuff when I was 19 and never looked back.

Balder Wrote: By that, I meant that, if we accept that there really is such a thing as a “core in itself,” hidden behind surfaces but forever inaccessible in its pristine form, then that is a metaphysical perspective – it takes “core” to be something that exists independently of perspective, in a state of purity, rather than being a function of perspective.

No, “we” cannot accept that there is really such a thing as core in itself. As I said before we only know surface, anything else is an assumption or the memory of a knowing. To demonstrate why I say that is not a metaphysical statement, I give you…in keeping with the podly trend… The view from beyond my desk

It is all surface, it is all demonstrably physical: local geological and climatological features, reflected light, bio-electrical impulses coursing through neural networks. I look out on that scene and from that perspective I know it, but never again because that particular scene will never be again. I am saying (only in passing here) that knowing something is a one time event, after that it is a memory of the knowing.

Example: Little Johnny knows 2 + 2 = 4 when his kindergarten teacher hold up two flash cards picturing 2 kittens each and counts them out and he consigns those words and images to memory. (Or in the case of Indigo Children, Mother places two sets of two organic baby food containers on the highchair tray before six-month-old Josh or Zoe and counts them out: “One, two, three, four. Okay?” The interrogatory “Okay” at the end of every declaratory sentence from a parent is a sure sign one is in the presence of indigo. But that is all beside the point to Zoe who's thinking at this moment, “Bitch, have I ever got you by the short hairs. Okay?” And another young life is ruined.) I think our language on the other end of things confirms there is one knowing and the rest memory. “So, Josh, now that you are 40, you do know that 2 + 2 = 4?” “No, I don't know that, I can't remember a thing since my last orgasm.”

But, all this epistemological stuff is really boring and not entirely productive.  What I was getting at in my original post on this thread was that knowledge, as knowledge rather than memory, derives from our perceptions (conscious and unconscious) of a kind 360 degree, perpetually shifting, interlocking of surfaces, including the surface of the atmosphere, a spherical kaleidoscope of sights, sounds, textures, and consciousness…all of which we perceive as surface right down to the hypothetical perception of the sphere's focal point within us. Time is just the memory of a superficial configuration that no longer exists.  

To elaborate on the last point I'll replay three 'graphs that conclude one of my aging blog essays:

“Time, from the perspectives where the sense of process rules, is the flowing mirage created by joining the perception of movement to a supporting, secondary, open system process called memory. If one can imagine doing away with memory but keeping consciousness then coherence is totally lost, but then expand the span of memory from there at 0 to 0.5 seconds and coherence can be regained. (This is a meditation. Try it. It’s a kick) The sense of a moment is total and the perception of process is phenomenally acute. All is born, becomes integral to the perspective, the perception, the perceiver and passes into oblivion in 0.5 seconds. It is the integral moment: it is the omni-dimensional and all but dimensionless point where fuel integrates into fire, all the currently available and integrated potential degrades to waste, the universal razor thin rubber hits the universal, razor thin road, and the perceiver is riding on and integral to the absolute front edge of their life; nothing else is playing.

“Who can ask anything greater of integral? All other models soon have to start incorporating into their concepts of The Whole de-engergized, dissipated and disintegrated scraps, dregs and feces; litter, weight and inertia from the time that is no longer viable. Such a model might be entertaining to the mind but it isn’t actual or evolutionarily effective. It is a model built of dead ashes from a cold fire. It is only media, maybe even “Integral” media that can be trade marked and sold by the byte-size to expand the entropic moment into a marketable illusion of control.

“Living at large in the entropic moment is not for those who need much control over, or security from, the occasionally furious wash of ravaging integration around them. But if the perceiver knows that inner security and control are the only kind there are, who knows that the concepts of external coherence and structural integration are probably best seen as projections from within, then such a moment is the perspective of choice; one is reconciled to the ride, comfortable in the heat, set for any event, and could give a rat’s ass if anything different is taught in the schools or sold on the net.”

End of Essay.

It all gets down to the point, as I said before, that I have culled all these words about TSK on this thread and on your blog and on the net and I have gotten not one damn thing that can give the knowledge, “So, that's what its about.” I guess I should have asked from the outset: Does this Tulku fellow really “know” more about Time and Space and Knowledge than I can remember? Can he do me any good?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi, Nickeson,

Nickeson:  No, one cannot define core in such a manner. There is no such thing as cores or surfaces “in themselves” The two words  describe locations not qualities, i.e. the placement of qualities.

Right.  In other words, the distinction is a function of perspective.  Essentially, what this comes down to is “what is currently visible” and “what is not currently visible,” since you've agreed there is no qualitative difference between them.  If what constitutes “surface” is location, then anything can be either surface or core, depending on where the quality is located – e.g., depending on the perspective of the observer in relation to the given quality.  But in distinguishing surface from quality, and saying that “surface” refers to a particular placement of perceived qualities – which in theory could be placed anywhere – then aren't you essentially saying we only perceive qualities? 

Further, if qualities themselves do not have inherent existence, but in some sense are also co-enacted by the observer, then I prefer – if we are going to make an “only” statement – to say that we only ever see “appearances,” not surfaces.

Nickeson:  To demonstrate why I say that is not a metaphysical statement, I give you…in keeping with the podly trend… The view from beyond my desk

A stunning view.  Fantastic.  Give me those surfaces … um, appearances … anyday. 

Right now, my view is dull.  But here is what it used to be, before I moved to California.

Nickeson:  But, all this epistemological stuff is really boring and not entirely productive.  What I was getting at in my original post on this thread was that knowledge, as knowledge rather than memory, derives from our perceptions (conscious and unconscious) of a kind 360 degree, perpetually shifting, interlocking of surfaces, including the surface of the atmosphere, a spherical kaleidoscope of sights, sounds, textures, and consciousness…all of which we perceive as surface right down to the hypothetical perception of the sphere's focal point within us. Time is just the memory of a superficial configuration that no longer exists. 

Superficial seems to imply an underlying, unperceived, “more real” depth.  Do you intend this?

In Integral-speak, “depth” and “interior” are defined differently.  In our discussion so far, we've mostly been using third-person examples of visible objects; whereas Integral would argue that interior refers, not to currently obscured dimensions of physical objects (they're all potentially 3rd person perspectives) but to first-person dimensions of being, such as knowing, meaning, feeling.

TSK, on the other hand, would challenge the exterior/interior distinction altogether, whether in the surface/core sense you've been discussing, or in the objective/subjective sense Integral describes.

Nickeson:  “Time, from the perspectives where the sense of process rules, is the flowing mirage created by joining the perception of movement to a supporting, secondary, open system process called memory. If one can imagine doing away with memory but keeping consciousness then coherence is totally lost, but then expand the span of memory from there at 0 to 0.5 seconds and coherence can be regained. (This is a meditation. Try it. It's a kick) The sense of a moment is total and the perception of process is phenomenally acute. All is born, becomes integral to the perspective, the perception, the perceiver and passes into oblivion in 0.5 seconds. It is the integral moment: it is the omni-dimensional and all but dimensionless point where fuel integrates into fire, all the currently available and integrated potential degrades to waste, the universal razor thin rubber hits the universal, razor thin road, and the perceiver is riding on and integral to the absolute front edge of their life; nothing else is playing.

“Who can ask anything greater of integral? All other models soon have to start incorporating into their concepts of The Whole de-engergized, dissipated and disintegrated scraps, dregs and feces; litter, weight and inertia from the time that is no longer viable. Such a model might be entertaining to the mind but it isn't actual or evolutionarily effective. It is a model built of dead ashes from a cold fire. It is only media, maybe even “Integral” media that can be trade marked and sold by the byte-size to expand the entropic moment into a marketable illusion of control.

“Living at large in the entropic moment is not for those who need much control over, or security from, the occasionally furious wash of ravaging integration around them. But if the perceiver knows that inner security and control are the only kind there are, who knows that the concepts of external coherence and structural integration are probably best seen as projections from within, then such a moment is the perspective of choice; one is reconciled to the ride, comfortable in the heat, set for any event, and could give a rat's ass if anything different is taught in the schools or sold on the net.”

A lovely piece of writing.  I am not sure about your first sentence, where time is referred to as a “flowing mirage” created by a particular process, since “flowing,” “creation,” and “process” all seem to presuppose time.  I notice that you covered your arse by qualifying your statement as a particular “process perspective,” though.

With regards to the unfolding, razor-edge, integrative moment you describe, that in TSK would be referred to (provisionally, playfully) as “second-level time.”  TSK is an “integral vision” or approach, but it is integral more in the open, process-centered way you describe:  not as a map which situates and categorizes things in a particular order, but as an active mode of inquiry and engagement with experience.

Nickeson:  It all gets down to the point, as I said before, that I have culled all these words about TSK on this thread and on your blog and on the net and I have gotten not one damn thing that can give the knowledge, “So, that's what its about.” I guess I should have asked from the outset: Does this Tulku fellow really “know” more about Time and Space and Knowledge than I can remember? Can he do me any good?

I've learned better than to suggest there is anything you don't already know…. :-)

Seriously, I don't know if there's anything Tulku can “do” for you or give you that you haven't already considered yourself.  You might resonate with his approach, since it is open-ended and doesn't take any particular order as fundamental or metaphysically given.  It presents different ways of looking at things, and of course it appeals to time, space, and knowledge as useful ways to conceive of (and inquire into and engage with) the dimensions of our living experience, but it doesn't attempt to present a uniform vision or theory of existence, other than perhaps to suggest that there are more fulfilling ways to relate to time, space, and knowledge (e.g., Being or experience) than we habitually engage in. 

When asked how TSK could be classified, Tarthang Tulku denied that it was a philosophy, psychology, or religion; he says he considers it to be more akin to an adventure of the mind, a course of inquiry which brings knowledge (as a responsive, active knowledgeability, not a fixed set of beliefs or ideas) to the fore, and which suggests that there are alternative, more fulfilling modes of experience available to us.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Yes, I agree that that's a potential problem, Tom.  I would be more comfortable saying that I prefer to use the word “appearance” or “perspective” in place of “surface,” in the context of this epistemological discussion, without trying to reduce everything ultimately to a particular “thing” or “process.” 

Integral says everything is a perspective, but qualifies this by adding, “whatever else it is, it is (for us) first a perspective.”

TSK says that we can look at everything in our experience as the interplay of time-space-knowledge, but doesn't insist that everything is “really” this, only that this is a powerful way of looking at, and inquiring into, our experience.

Do you see either of these strategies as problematic?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Bruce, this language thing I'm harping on concerns more than epistemology—how we know—because knowledge is intimately tied to that about which we know, the world at large.  This link between language and reality, IMO, allows the structure of language to teach one about the structure of reality (language arises from reality; it is a microcosm replica of the macro).

As to the integral position that everything is a perspective, well, the qualification you then add then says perspective isn't everything.  I'm comfortable with the latter because it's open, not closed like an “everthing is” statement.  Note that saying “everything is perspective” begs the question whether that saying is a perspective, again revealing the everything-is contradiction.

Re TSK, I haven't read enough about Tulku's views, but I like what he says.  Feels very integral to me.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” –Hassan i Sabbah

As elaborated by William Burroughs.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

The only given that is not a myth, or, nothing is true except this…

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

'Nothing is true except this' kinda redefines nothing, IMO.  Apart from that small wiggle, to even say “nothing is true” implies an idea of the true.  If that idea has any content or reality at all, where did it come from? (Answer: something true, therefore nothing is true is false.)  If the idea has no content or reality at all, what is the meaning of the statement nothing is true? (Answer: it has no meaning.)

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Tom,

The statement is not about Truth at all. It is art, art that might not be true, but is nonetheless REAL.

The statement is not about Truth at all. It is about the art of rhetoric, of creating an impression, staging a scene, being outrageous, making a statement that says “fuck the truth, fuck the idea and illusion of truth…liberate yourself from that miserable demeaning, priest/guru-ridden trap called truth…

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

From Apocalypse by William Burroughs:

Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-believe…illusion…dream…art. When art leaves the frame and the written word leaves the page, not merely the physical frame and page, but the frames and pages that assign the categories….A basic disruption of reality itself occurs. The literal realization of art.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

I think William is in Reality saying “nothing is true … except the truth that nothing is true.”  In my wee world of language and meaning, nothing plus one (one being that one true thing called “nothing is true”) = not nothing.  Numerically:

0 + 1 = 1

with the assumption

1 ≠ 0

and therefore

0 + 1 ≠ 0

The same applies to Bill's “all” statement: all is make-believe, uh, except that this statement about all-makebelieveness.”

Ok ok, slightly down from all, and slightly up from nothing, there's alotta stuff that's not true!  Doesn't quite have the same effect.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Perhaps Willy is thinking outside the “frames and pages” of formal operations?  And the latter cannot grok the former?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Steven, I'm not meaning to be pedantic.  I like rhetoric and impression, don't like priests and gurus, don't tend to capitalize big words like Truth etc (Adi Daism), and love the sense of the real.  But as rhetoric, “nothing is true,” to me, is cheap, like bad art.

Now, what you were saying about “illusion of truth,” doesn't that imply some truth behind …….

: 0

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Tom,

You wrote (twice): This discussion looks to me to still circle the “everything is” problem.

And I am finally getting back to your to say, I believe if you go back and examine all the everythings written of in this discussion you will find that we are talking everything within a class of stuff, and since the discussion revolves around several different classes, our everythings are limited and not universal. There was no mention of “all or everything is surface,” but all (meaning only) we can know is of the surface, or as Balder wrote above, appearence. Unless it was a typo or similar grammatical error, I don't think we wrote that all knowledge is memory: there is the moment of knowing and then the memory of the significance of that moment. And yes, the knowledge of memory includes memory about memory.

You ask: Is the knowledge that all is appearance appearance?

First, we did not say all is appearance, but there was all those words about the core and the inside etc. hidden by surface or appearance. Second, yes, that knowledge would have to appear or become present in some manner, otherwise the lack of presence would manifest as, “Damn, I just can remember…uhhh…you know…uhhhh….”

And: Is consciousness surface (ie, location)?  Where is it located?

I'm going out on a limb and say yes. It is a presencing (Don't you just hate it when you are forced to use a noun as a verb?) It is located on the surface of the subconscious. (Tom, you have to realize that I am as much Sensory as you are Intuitive and that answer is as present in my psyche as the screen is present in front of my face.)

And finally: Re “all degrades to waste” (= “all is …”), does information so degrade?  The speed of light?

The “(= “all is …”)” does me a disservice because what I wrote was, “all the currently available and integrated potential degrades to waste,” again that is a class. You might find it interesting to brush up a little on Open System Thermodynamics. As long as energy is information or in formation or in a form, it has not degraded, but when it dissipates out of formation (degrades) then it cannot inform anything at all. The speed of light is a quality, not the energy, of light itself. If someone ten miles from you on a very dark night lights a match, chances are you will not see that light because the energy pushing it out from the source degrades before reaching your senses.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Steven, I was being a little loose in my posts above.  Here is a list of big-breadth statements.  They capture quite a large territory, the broadest of which seems to be “all knowledge of anything whatever is surface knowledge” (or something).  See the second translation below.

Some everything/all/never/nothing/ever statements:

Clement Greenburg … said that art was about surfaces and only surfaces. Being an artist these days, I think he was right.  No one will ever know anything more than the surface.

          Translations:

          All art is entirely about surfaces.

          All knowledge is (surface-knowing).

All I will know is the patterns on the surface of a monitor screen.

I will never know the interior of that piece of steel following the weld.

          The above was followed with this:

I believe, for the time being at least, that example can be generalized into practically any other object or subject of inquiry.

          Translation:

          All knowledge of anything is …

One cannot deconstruct anything one cannot know, so interiors are un-deconstructable and might constitute The Other.

[Regarding a fridge,] I can only know the surface of the door and the other three sides and the top and the bottom … there is no interior.

As I said before we only know surface, anything else is an assumption or the memory of a knowing.

And as to the link between knowledge and memory:

Time is just the memory of a superficial configuration that no longer exists.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Tom,
 
Your Post is as follows, with my comments in bold:

Hi Steven, I was being a little loose in my posts above.  Here is a list of big-breadth statements. Lets get concise here. Is a “big breadth statement” an “everything” statement? If it is then why did you write 'big breadth” instead of “everything.” If it isn't an “everything” then you have no logical argument against the mere “big breadth.”  They capture quite a large territory, A “large territory” isn't the universe that is covered by “everything.” the broadest of which seems to be “all knowledge of anything whatever is surface knowledge” (or something).  See the second translation below.

Some everything/all/never/nothing/ever statements:

Clement Greenburg … said that art was about surfaces and only surfaces. Being an artist these days, I think he was right.  No one will ever know anything more than the surface.

          Translations: Translations were the whole point of what Greenburg was talking about. The surface of a Jackson Pollack painting was only that and that was all the viewer could perceive, all they would “know” as a result of that perception.  If a viewer was to “translate,” then the translation originated in the mind of the viewer not the painting or some assumed intention of the artist. I suspect your translations are much the same.

          All art is entirely about surfaces.

We are talking about classes of things. Greenburg's opinions are classes of things, a class of things, I agree with.

          All knowledge is (surface-knowing).

Can you tell me anything you know that did not originate from anything other than a surface or an appearance or a presence?

All I will know is the patterns on the surface of a monitor screen.

Again this is a class consisting of an core of the steel and the monitor screen of a metalurgical x-ray.

I will never know the interior of that piece of steel following the weld.

God, Tom, I'd be ashamed of myself if I took that kind of a cheap shot through a misquotation: The entire riff read “But that will tell me nothing of the interior because the cross sections are no longer interiors but surfaces, and deformed surfaces, of what used to be a formed interior that can never be re-formed in anyway resembling the original. So I will never know the interior of that piece of steel following the weld.” It is a qualified statement and is significant of something entirely different than what you are trying to impute.

          The above was followed with this:

I believe, for the time being at least, that example can be generalized into practically any other object or subject of inquiry.

          Translation:

          All knowledge of anything is …

Again a class…my belief. If you do an etymological study of the word “believe” it means something fervently wished for. It does not mean this is THE TRUTH.

One cannot deconstruct anything one cannot know, so interiors are un-deconstructable and might constitute The Other.

If one is to deconstruct something a la Derrida, one has to know as much or more about that something than whoever it was who proposed it as the truth. Tell me, please, how to deconstruct, a la Derrida, something of which one is ignorant.

[Regarding a fridge,] I can only know the surface of the door and the other three sides and the top and the bottom … there is no interior.

Please give me the quote where I said there was no interior, I can't find it. Is this another misquotation? Or is it just a translation? Further it should be obvious that when the door is closed all I know is the exterior surface. Remember the story of Schrodinger's Cat? Why do you think I had a cat in that refrigerator except as a reference to Schrodinger's?

As I said before we only know surface, anything else is an assumption or the memory of a knowing.

Can you tell me anything you know that does not originate from anything other than a surface or an appearance or a presence?

And as to the link between knowledge and memory:

Time is just the memory of a superficial configuration that no longer exists.

As Balder pointed out I covered my arse here by stipulating this had to do with a “process perspective.” From some other perspective time would look entirely different. So again we are speaking of a class of stuff…process perspectives of time.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Steven, I appreciate your full reply, but I think I will sidestep and equally full reply as I have but a limited 'convincing' aptitude.  But I will say this from my view of language and how language links with the world. 

If one has, say, five objects before oneself and says “all” of those objects, the use of “all” in that example is quantitatively limiting, and clear.  “All” means all five.  No contradiction arises.

That is one sense of “all.”  The same example of quantitative limiting could be applied to the words “every,” “none,” etc.

Something very different, IMO, happens when one uses any such words to express qualitative limitation, such as when one says “all knowledge is …” The use of 'all' in such example can be replaced by the word 'only,' hence “knowledge is only …”, and by the word never, hence “knowledge is never …”, etc.  What is being expressed in each such use is an all-encompassing qualitative limitation.

The problem, IMO, that arises when one says about any thing that “it is only X” regards the relational nature of X, reflected in language itself.  X is never just X and X only, as we know X in essential part by what it is not.  Each word X, being a distinction—a relational distinction—thus implies not-X, is defined by, is in intimate relation with, and I would say actually is not-X.

Thus to say “all knowledge is only about surfaces” runs contrary to this deep relational aspect of language, which I say reflects the deep relational aspect of being itself.  No thing can just be X without entering a discussion of not-X and how it is also that.

Let's take an example, say, movement.  I often hear, “everything is movement” (another all/every/only statement).  Let's take a closer look at this statement to bring out its contradiction.  I'll bring out only one contradictory sense in the statement; there are many I will not touch.

Movement, for its part, implies time.  Hence, when we say “move” we are describing a process where some “thing” moves from here to there (time as represented by movement measureable in space), or in other words moves in some time-stream where the thing's present becomes past into the future, or where the future streams through the present into the past, or some such. 

Ok, so movement necessarily implies present, past and future.  Let's look at the present, the very isness of things.  Is the present moving?  IMO, it evidently in at least one irreducible sense is not.  Just take a picture of anything.  As the camera shutter speed increases, blur reduces and movement transforms into stand-still.  Of course, by the very logic and operation of the term “present,” this 'stillness' has to be the case.  This is something I think you noted above in slightly different terms: any “present” that is >0 seconds long is divisible, ie, is not pure present, but present+past+future in one (confused) bundle.  The present must therefore be 0 seconds long.  How far can any thing move in 0 seconds?  It cannot move at all.  And so the photograph says.

So to say “everything is movement” necessarily engenders contradiction, because movement implies stillness: the two are part of one description and cannot be teased apart such as to say “any thing is all X, zero not-X.”  Sorry, Yin is only known in necessary part by what it is not, Yang.  The Taoists knew this clearly.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

You wrote: Further, if qualities themselves do not have inherent existence, but in some sense are also co-enacted by the observer, then I prefer – if we are going to make an “only” statement – to say that we only ever see “appearances,” not surfaces.

I'll go along with that. Of course someone might come along and say appearance is a quality, but they can be ignored. I don't want to get into the qualia stuff. We on this pod can go on to better things while the lesser minds can decide whether to qualia or not qualia.

You wrote: here is what it used to be…

But I was “forbidden” that view. I assume from the URL you were picturing Boynton Canyon. Good stuff indeed.

You asked: Superficial seems to imply an underlying, unperceived, “more real” depth.  Do you intend this?

No. I meant “superficial” in the technical sense–on the surface; just as real as depth.

You wrote: In our discussion so far, we've mostly been using third-person examples of visible objects; whereas Integral would argue that interior refers, not to currently obscured dimensions of physical objects (they're all potentially 3rd person perspectives) but to first-person dimensions of being, such as knowing, meaning, feeling.

TSK, on the other hand, would challenge the exterior/interior distinction altogether, whether in the surface/core sense you've been discussing, or in the objective/subjective sense Integral describes.

I experience things more along the line of TSK. There may be some medically technical aspects of my being that distinguish between inside and outside, but in the overall scope of my existence they are of minimal importance, everything else goes to the entirety of me.

You wrote: I am not sure about your first sentence, where time is referred to as a “flowing mirage” created by a particular process, since “flowing,” “creation,” and “process” all seem to presuppose time.

What I was trying to say in that sentence was that time flowed only as memory of constantly shifting scenes and composit perceptions. And yes, it is totally perspective; a perception of close-up life constantly in my face, my perspective of choice. But I do not perceive that star-watching on a dark night with a focus on the Andromada Galaxy…almost all things can be perceived as standing still, though I remember that people have told me they are not. (It all gets a little phenomonological, no?)

Could you explain a little more about “second level time.”

And so to this point, thanks Balder, for the free lesson in TSK. I understand a great deal more now than I did five days ago.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

I'm with Bruce.  As soon as one says “everything is” in any form whatever, a closer analysis will show internal contradictions in the language used, or a detachment of 'word' from 'thing' that stops language dead in its tracks.  Hence “everything is surface” robs the term surface of meaning, as surface necessarily implies depth.

I like what TT says here:

When I say that infinite space and time are “here,” I really mean that each finite point is actually infinite. In fact, at an advanced level one sees that there are no such points, and nothing to improve or manipulate. But until you have this more mature view, you can proceed by opening up the small and obstructing nature of each point to infinite space.

If one asks “where is the unlimited,” the answer has to be “everywhere,” such that the finite must be seen to be infinite, else the place called finite is a place where the infinite is not, rendering the infinite not the infinite as it excludes that place.  This perspective bears on the statement “everything is” which, if followed by a word and left unqualified—“everything is movement,” “everything is flux,” everything is spirit” … —limits the unlimited and thus finds itself in contradiction.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Tom,

You wrote:  I'm with Bruce.  As soon as one says “everything is” in any form whatever, a closer analysis will show internal contradictions in the language used, or a detachment of 'word' from 'thing' that stops language dead in its tracks.

This is an example of one of the failures of this pod. A failue to closely read what is there on the screen. You, Tom, are with Balder on a tangent of his making not mine. The phase “everything is” appeared no where in my post and will never show up in anything I write because I didn't just get off the bus.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

“No one will ever know anything more than the surface. Any claim to have knowledge of more is a product of imagination, vanity and a kind of second or third person phenomenology. That is true of art or any other contour of space.”

The above implies knowledge about other than surfaces.  Your expression involves the kind of contradiction involved in saying “everything is,” except in your case, per the sentence above, you're saying “all knowledge is.”  It's the 'all' that doesn't work.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

N, further to this notion of “surface,” you imply that a surface, as surface, has no depth.  Having no depth, it has no extension whatever in space.  That is, if the surface had any depth whatever, that “surface” could be divided into top/bottom, outside/inside, whatever.  A surface with zero extension looks alot like nothingness, to me.  Thingness, on the other hand, implies outside/inside, surface/depth, where these dualities necessarily imply each other, and where talk (or knowledge) of one is talk (or knowledge) of the other.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Surfaces. Deformation… infinite deformation. I'm reminded of Mandelbrot's work. I think he said that contours can have a kind of “third dimension” in this deformation.

Hopkins talked about the ”inscape” of things. Jacob Boehme too talked of the “signature” of things as their “inner essence.” As Steven says, though, this is all just the imagination at work.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Steven is confusing “visible” with “knowledge.”

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Tom,
I am not ignoring you, but my poor old mind can only handle one conversation at a time. I'll be back.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Fine, Steven, I don't mind waiting.  I think you do have an interesting point in directing attention to the 'visible' aspect of our representations of the so-called external world.  I've been reading Neils Bohr of late, including materials relating to his debates with other physicists, the most important of whom was Einstein, regarding what we can say about the material world.

Bohr was of course the progenitor of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.  According to Bohr, because matter evidences both wave (non-localized) and particle (localized) characteristics, which characteristics are in significant measure mutually exclusive, and because those characteristics cannot be simultaneously measured (ie, in one experimental setup), our theoretical language regarding the sub-macro world is constrained to describing relations between experimental results.  Those relations of course have direct bearing on our ability to manipulate the external world (I need only reference nuclear power plants), but they fall short of giving us any real description, ie, picture, of the sub-macro world.

Bohr's language for describing this interpretation is quite interesting, and approximates, I think, what you're saying in referring to “surface” etc.  To Bohr, normal “pictorial” descriptions do not apply to the quantum world.  His phrasing, for example, refers to “renouncing pictorial description.”

Thinking this through, Bohr must be right that descriptive terminology cannot simply take macro-world derivatives and apply them to other than the macro world.  For instance, the notion of “picture” arises from the experience of vision and light, etc.  But below the level of the photon, the idea of “vision” entirely breaks down.  We will never see, for instance, a quark …. never.  Then follows the question, in what real sense can we say a quark exists?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Kela wrote: Hopkins talked about the ”inscape” of things and linked to the fellow who wrote:

“In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, “inscape” and “instress,” which can cause some confusion. By “inscape” he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by “instress” he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder:”

Kela further wrote: “…this is all just the imagination at work.”

Yes, indeed!

But… The “inscape” and the “instress” might not be factual. But Hopkins played the Carnival and the rules of the Carnival say it doesn't have to be factual to be true. Anyone who is insistant on truth should know they are joining the ranks of the sore beset Buick dealer in Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins: a man who, daily, can feel his rectum turning progressively–more and more–as straight and as hard as a lead pipe.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

But… The “inscape” and the “instress” might not be factual.

Yes, indeed, that's what I'm getting at.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

An interesting thing happens in the history of Vedanta. It goes from saying that the real is that which is hidden to saying that the real is that which is present.

Merleau Ponty wrote on the visible and the invisible, if one has time for the French philosophes.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Kela, that's a very interesting shift.  To say the real is hidden implies—this gets subtle so bear with me—implies the person saying such has a definable idea or image of the not hidden real.  This difficult implication sets the mind to wondering how the real can at once be hidden and not “and what do I mean by real?”  Saying “hidden” thus involves a contradiction.

??

A natural development from this conundrum is to say the real is not hidden but present (but you can't define it).  Ha!

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Or paradoxical.  The “hidden” moment belongs to the mystical phase of Vedanta; the moment of “presence” belongs to the metaphysical phase.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Big Sky Country.  Glacial Valley.  Prairie Sunset.  My home.

This TSK stuff actually makes sense to me.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

A lot of it makes sense to me. (I practiced Tarthang Tulku's approach to meditation in the early 80's when I was living in the Bay Area and I appreciated what at the time struck me as his simple, down-to-earth approach, in contrast with more “transcendental” approaches as taught back then by Franklin Jones and many others.)

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Yes, Tarthang Tulku is making a claim which, while I think he believes it and (I am fairly certain) sees it as grounded in his own experience, is nevertheless one that, given its controversial nature, should probably be more tentatively framed.

For what it's worth – and this is a different point than the issue of “right speech” you are addressing – I think Tarthang Tulku is fairly well-known, among those who know him, for exhibiting clairvoyant or “psychic” abilities.  For instance, a friend of mine was helping Tarthang Tulku work on something in a small room, was present when a group of monks from overseas suddenly showed up and wanted to visit.  They knocked on the door and Tarthang Tulku received them, but then told them he didn't have time now and to come back tomorrow.  The monks left, shutting the door behind them.  A little while later, Tarthang Tulku said to my friend, “Several of the monks didn't leave.  Three of them are sitting now in the library.  Please go ask them to leave.”  My friend was startled, because there was no way to see or hear anything in the library, which was on the other side of the large compound and the room they were in also didn't have any windows to the outside.  But he went over to the library and found three monks sitting in there and told them they had to leave.  This anecdote is one among many in which TT appears to know something clairvoyantly.

But, of course, such stories abound around “masters,” so while I trust my friend and believe he isn't prone to fawning or exaggeration, I recognize that these stories can't serve as proof of anything or demonstrate anything.  But, for me, given the people involved, I do receive them as suggestive of “more of what (may be) here.”

These things aside, things such as “psychic powers” get comparatively little attention in TSK literature. 

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Thanks Jim for further clarification!

“A kind of poetry of reality”

This description is resonating very much with me. I am thinking of David Bohms implicate and explicate order. However, TSK is layered in  infinite ways.

Best,

Albert

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Albert, Bohm's understanding is similarly layered in that Bohm takes the ground of all to be the infinite.  The latter plays a strong role in Bohm's understanding.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Gorgeous photos, Kela.  How lucky you are, if these are daily vistas for you.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Kela, you from Saskatchewan?  I was born in Regina, raised in Estevan.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

I was born in Regina…

Me too. I went to the U of “V.” No, not Victoria. ;-) 

In my tutoring office in the Ad Hum building I had this amazing view of the prairie horizon.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Here are some comments from another interview that appear to relate to some of the things we've been discussing on this board recently…

Interviewer:  TSK seems to offer an approach to knowledge that depends on questions just as much as on answers. Does this way of knowing have the potential to go beyond our ordinary conceptual categories? Does it have anything to do with mystical experience or insight? 

Tarthang Tulku:  TSK questions the distinction you are making between ordinary knowledge and mystical experience. Suppose I look at a plant with my naked eye and then under a microscope. I see two different realities, and I order those two realities in terms of scale. In the same way, if I have a mystical experience, I link it to ordinary experience by insisting on its special quality. I set up a hierarchy and assign values. Someone is fortunate enough to have a certain kind of experience, someone else is not. This person is gifted or chosen; that person is not.    

Now what about the hierarchy itself? What guarantees its validity or accuracy? TSK suggests that the standards I use to compare one experience to another are not independent of the experience.  That means I cannot really assign values. The level of my experience turns out to depend more on attitude than aptitude, and whether I experience one way or another is just accidental.   

The purpose of saying this is not to reject the validity of mystical experience. If my judgments do not stand apart from knowledge, they express knowledge. Now we can investigate knowledge (and experience) at a more fundamental level, before the distinction between “mystical” and “ordinary” gets made. All knowledge becomes equally interesting – and equally mysterious…   

Interviewer:  Are you suggesting we should give up searching for mystical knowledge? 

TT:  I don't say that one form of knowledge is better than another. It is natural to look for nonstandard forms of knowledge, because ordinary forms of understanding – thoughts and perceptions and so on – present themselves as intrinsically limited. But the idea of going beyond ordinary knowledge perpetuates the present hierarchy. Who goes beyond? Who remains after the going is completed? Is “beyond” a place? How is that place related to other places we know about? We can ask these questions within ordinary experience and also within extraordinary experience.   

Some people are deeply attracted to speculation about what lies beyond. They like to make myths, to present “beyond” as a kind of paradise, a glorious retirement home open to everyone.  When we have had a hard day and come home feeling exhausted and discouraged, this can sound very attractive. We may wonder how to sign up.   

Ultimately, though, the idea of “beyond” can only limit us, because it is somewhere else.  Living in time, knowing knowledge, being part of space, there is no separation and no need to go beyond or seek out something special. In TSK terms, higher levels of time-space-knowledge are not separate states or conditions or experiences, even though it may look that way from a certain perspective…

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

This fellow is very interesting.  I like what he says.  Time to order a few of his books.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Some of what is said here reminds me a bit of what Herbert Guenther sometimes refers to. Specifically, what I have in mind is the aesthetic component, or what Guenther calls the “aesthetic appreciative.” I think he has a specific Tibetan term in mind here, but I don't know what it is. Maybe Marigpa knows.

In any case, does Tarthang Tulku ever bring this “aesthetic appreciative…” up; does it come up in TSK?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Guenther worked closely with Tarthang Tulku and also wrote the introduction to the first TSK book, so I expect there is some mutual influence here.  I have not come across the phrase “aesthetic appreciative” in the TSK books, but appreciation is one of its core terms, and this is often linked to the aesthetic.  Here's an example:

“Although recognizing the interplay between lack of knowledge and human discontent can help inspire aspiration, it may be more fruitful to cultivate appreciation for what manifests in space and time. Acknowledging the whole as the embodiment of Knowledge is one form that such appreciation can take.

Aesthetic enjoyment of the rich displays that time and space present is another. Through such enjoyment and appreciation, the concerns that lead to positioning tend to loosen.

The more that knowledge opens, the more fully appreciation can deepen into a wordless wonderment, rich in joy, profound respect, and even awe. Respect and awe can also change into devotion, which under appropriate circumstances may take such religious forms as prayer and worship.

Together with appreciation comes compassion. Compassion is based on a knowing that sees the [prevailing] ‘order' as a whole and sees the pain that arises within it. Compassion arises for the self and for others, for everyone who is needlessly trapped within the structure that the ‘order' imposes.

A great benefit of compassion is that it naturally turns attention away from the concerns of the self and the limited knowledge that those concerns engender. Aware of suffering, compassion looks toward the possibility of action that could bring transformation, and thus works toward the growth of ‘knowledgeability'.

It might seem that compassion insists on the substantiality of the one that suffers. But this is true only in lower-level terms. From a higher-level perspective, compassion is a form of ‘knowingness': a clearsighted vision of the prevailing knowledge in operation. It sustains the Body of Knowledge as active force, working to bring benefit where benefit is needed.

Finally, there is inspiration through love. This is not the love that is actually attachment, which only tightens the bonds of the conventional order by reinforcing the concerns of a needy, wanting self. It is a love indifferent to ownership or security. Akin to deep appreciation, it has a unique flavor of its own.”

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

I like this. I sometimes refer to these kind of teachings as teaching a kind of  “radical immanence.” Deleuze goes on about “the plane of immanence.” I wonder if teachings like Ati can be made to jibe with Delueze's basic notion.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

I think that's a fruitful and interesting connection to explore.  Some TSK scholars have written a bit about possible links between TSK's “Giant Body” practices and Deleuze's “Body Without Organs.”

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Balder, Assuming that's you in the pic, you look like the genuinely kind, caring, open dude that you come across as in your writing, despite the evil markings on your face! Happy Halloween! ;-)

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Thank you, Jim!  (I've wiped off all the gore now…)

Happy Halloween to you as well…  My son is candied up and wiped out, sprawled on my lap at the moment…

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Kela,

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Jim,

Those are beautiful photos.

I guess the term “radical immanence” is just a fancy word for a kind of this-worldliness, or orientation toward “everydayness.”

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Kela,

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi Jim,

I'm thinking about Hegel. I'll get back to you on this, and your message. Maybe I'll start up a thread.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

So glad you started this thread, Bruce.
Happy Halloween! 

Best,
D

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,
I took a little break from this thread in order to do other work and to get away from what seemed to be a semantical trivialization of its intent. But I am back with a quote, it seems a fairly long and slightly edited quote, from the fourth part of a five-part dialogical series called “Postmodern Spirituality” that Roland Benedikter put up on Integral World some months ago. The quote is from the conclusion of the part that examines the need of the postmodern “subject” to continually “deconstruct” the process of her/his  own mind while the mind is deconstructing whatever object is the subject's mind's desire. Ya know whaddimean?

Apparently it boils completely down to “inspiration” and Benedikter harkens all the way back to Rudolph Steiner to muster support for his point. Whatever. My question is: Does this mind-play that Benedikter describes and that resonates (as they say) with me, match in anyway with TSK and the observation of the observations that you have written about it your blog? Does it fall short of the TSKgoals? Does it seem to have some other motivation or do you think it is similar in intent? As a TSKer, what do you think? (I copied and pasted the most relevant part but the whole read might be worthwhile for context.)

“RB: Ok. Now, the important thing is that postmodern philosophy made of this feeling (or altered, synchronic sensitivity) a whole cultural paradigm, a whole socio-political program and the core goal of the enlightend emancipation of the subject in general. It is very important to take that aspect in consideration, in order to avoid falling into the prejudice that postmodern thinking is about critizising reason. Yes, it is, to a certain extend. But the main focus is on the “doubling” or “making synchronistic” of the self-aware mind.

“Question: How should we call this kind of altered state of mind? How to put it in one word, which could resume the whole idea in one unique concept?

“RB: I think you can call such a synchronically heightened attention, which feels like a “permanent origin out of itself” (Jean Gebser) - an inspiration. Inspiration: That is the true name for that state of mind. Inspiration, from my point of view, is the congenial state of mind of postmodernity.

“Question: Yes. Sounds very interesting. Could you give me some more indications about this, please?

“RB: As especially Rudolf Steiner showed us in his “essential ontology” of modern individuality and its core potentials of rational evolution of consciousness, the state of mind of inspiration is characterized by the following facts:

“1. That consciousness discovers itself as pre-conceptual and pre-formal “beingness”. Steiner describes this “pre-egoistic” “beingness” in very similar words as Jean Francois Lyotard described the “altered aesthetic” state of “intensity, sublimity and occurrence” which can have a kathartic effect on the subject.

“2. Inspiration is characterized by the absence of an object, at which the still pre-conceptual, “living attention” of consciousness usually is immediately directed, with which it usually identifies pre-critically, and from which it is literally “absorbed” in daily life - so that pre-conceptual and pre-objective consciousness forgets about itself.

“3. Instead of an object of attention, in the state of inspiration there is a strenghtend awareness of the own creative attention process which constructs every object and every content of thought in every instant here and now.

“Because of these core characteristics, the state of mind of inspiration, according to Steiner, seems to have some “parental” relationships with two central cognitive proceedings of the postmodern subject (even if those proceedings, as I said, remain, so far, in most cases pre- or subconscious, and are not fully reflected, but only instinctively done by postmodern philosophy and its core method of deconstruction):

”- Inspiration coincides with the proceeding of “the self-awareness of the idea in the very moment it is being born”, which is the core presumption for a “free subject”. Because “the (postmodern) subject must simultaneously contrapose itself to the idea which is raising in its mind and thus observe it in the very moment it occurs; if not, the subject falls under the reign of the idea and becomes unfree” (cf. the “bible of postmodern anarchism”: Rudolf Steiner: The Philosophy Of Freedom. Principles Of A Modern World View).

”- Inspiration coincides with observing the permanent emergence of the “living sphere” of the “individual moral intuition” as core experience of a “higher self” or “witness” parallel to my ego - with “this inner voice that the subject has to identify with free conscience”.

“So summing up, you could say that, if we try to put the whole core proceeding and methodology, but also the problem and goal of postmodern englightenment into one single concept, into one signal word, than we should choose “Inspiration”. Postmodernity is about the state of mind of “Inspiration”, because “Inspiration” is congenial to “deconstruction”. Inspiration is the result of deconstruction – a pure flux and flow of a mind which became conscious of its own pre-conceptual life-stream and concept-building “happening”. That exactly is, what postmodern philosophy, at least in its late period, was (and is) about, with its whole heart and soul - but still without knowing fully what it is doing and what it is searching for.

“Question: Yes.

“RB: Inspiration is a “different” (or différend, as Jean Francois Lyotard said) kind of aesthetic, a different kind of feeling, a different kind of approach to reality – and, first of all, it is a different approach towards your normal ego, towards yourself. That approach is not anti-rational or irrational, not at all. Instead, it is another form, in my opinion, a more evolved form of rationality. At least in its goals, in what it wants. And at least in those crucial dimensions of “borderline rationality” which some of the main postmodern thinkers, in their late works, tried to evoke and to understand. This kind of “sensitive” or “perceiving” rationality seems to lead almost necessarily to a certain point beyond modern rationality, but always hoping that it could include the best of it and enlarge it into a broader horizon. It seems to lead from the “splitted” rationality of modernity to a kind of “double-I”- (or ego/witness-) rationality of postmodernity. It seems to lead to a certain dimension of “witness” rationality in the form of Inspiration, so to say. And exactly this may be one possibility of a sustainable bridge between the European-Western concepts of “the productive void” of Postmodernity on the one hand and the Eastern concepts of “nothingness” at the other hand.”

End of Quote.

And while you are so contemplating, how do you think it lines up with the Enactivism of Franciso Varela who had to have done 'shrooms in the jungle, at least once, for an inspiration such as come across in his theory?

I hope this isn't asking too much.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Nickeson, I've also been taking a break – from Gaia in general – because of a heavy workload elsewhere.  I have been intending to answer your question about 2nd level time, and now you've given me this very interesting passage by Benedikter.  Looking forward to getting into it.  I'll post something by tomorrow, Tuesday at the latest.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

great discussion…really enjoyed reading about tsk, and also loved the piece on inspiration awareness…

N…i sent you a pm…but thought i would go ahead and ask the question i have here…although i do get what you are saying, i still question that awareness, and even this inspiration aspect, is not at some level, depth?  i also understand that it may be just another surface, and i understand about how you qualified about the ocean depth and floor being another surface…and that bruce and the fish had different perceptions…LOL…anyways…it seems to me that the actual experience would not just be a perception of penetrating multiple surfaces, but may also be a measure of the depth…between them…by one's own personal awareness…and in that sense, depth can be known or experienced…of course, once you begin trying to put that into words…it becomes a perspective…always, star…

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi, Steven,

I'm sorry I'm so late in responding.  I've had a busy week and haven't been able to keep up with Gaian goings-on.  But I'm also glad I waited to respond, because today at last I had time to read the whole article you referenced (Part 4 in Benedikter's series), and that helped me get a better understanding of the passages you've excerpted.

In short, yes, I do think there is a resonance between what he is describing and what TSK is up to.  TSK's second-level time seems to echo, in some ways, Gebser's “time freedom,” where time is not experienced quantitatively (the “mental” understanding) but more in terms of intensity and quality.  TSK explicitly ties this shift in time sense to inspiration, heightened creativity, and so on.  Through deconstructing “time” as it is understood in first-level terms, and in this deconsolidation and deconstruction arriving at a more open, dynamic, lived or vital sense of time (as timing), TSK suggests we can become cognizant of the “active constructing” of self and object configurations, as Benedikter also discusses above (as “creative attention”).

TSK does not use “inspiration” as a central term, but there are a number of places where “inspiration” is described in connection to second-level time, space, and knowledge – the creative flux of an intimate and yet open or indeterminate knowledgeability.

In response to your question(s), I'd like to provide several passages from some of the TSK books that I think are relevant.  This first passage relates to second-level time and subject-object distinctions (which Benedikter also discusses in the essay).  As I mentioned earlier in the thread, Tarthang Tulku regards what he is up to as presenting a sort of poetic or aesthetic vision, a way of playing, rather than making any definitive pronouncements about the “actual” order of things.  The passage below is a bit long, so I'll include the additional passages I wanted to share in a separate post.

~*~

“A focus on momentum lets us consider subject and object alike as projections of the underlying energy of second-level time. ‘Time' in this second-level sense distributes experience through past and present and future, presenting the ‘logos' that informs the first-level temporal order. Its dynamic allows knowing to ‘build up' and interpret a world. As active vitality, ‘time' is the essence of our being and our becoming, on which we feed and draw our sustenance.

Through the focus on momentum, ‘outsiders' disappear. In the interaction of subject and object, there is just the interaction itself: a pure happening. Of course, the reference to the interaction ‘itself' tends to turn the interaction into another ‘outsider', a consequence of the linguistic structures we employ and their relation to the ‘logos'. But if we can look past this bias, a new vision emerges. We no longer see primarily substances and things, which must then be made to interact in ways that undermine creativity and freedom. Instead, we can explore a new possibility: that the character of existence is built up out of and through the momentum of ‘time'.

Second-level ‘time' transforms the relation between time and events in the same way as second-level ‘space' transforms the relation between first-level space and objects. The three times reveal an underlying unity: Each becomes a gateway to the energy of time, a flow within which the restrictive structures of the conventional ‘order' are inoperative.

Creation, for example, is no longer a unique event that takes place at the beginning of time, or else through the inspiration of a mysterious force. Instead, as the momentum of ‘time' it is freely accessible in each interaction. When the presentations of time are seen as inseparable from ‘time', time becomes boundless in its energy. Artificial (and logically indefensible) barriers and borders (such as ‘creation at the beginning of time') give way to a more integrated view. Second-level time is time brought to life, inseparable from life itself.

To see this adds a fantastic new dimension to what the self experiences. Embraced by time, all experience becomes a totality – not in the sense of being many things wrapped into one bundle, but in being unbounded and without limits.

Time on the second level can be deeply playful. Not tied to the specific identities projected within the temporal order, we too can play ‘in' time, like swimmers in the ocean. When we enter into intimacy with time, given together with what ‘is', the play unfolds ever more dimensions, expanding ceaselessly into new realms.

Prior to any specific ‘realities', the momentum of ‘time' permits such ‘realities' – including but not limited to the existence of a temporal universe distributed across past, present, and future – to be ‘built up'. In this ‘building up', 'existence' and ‘existents' are specified, first as qualities, actions, and meaningful structures, then as substance and identity. Once it has been fully specified, momentum transmits only the sequential ‘order' established by the ‘logos'. The energy and dynamic of time is converted into the closed-off and mechanical structure of ‘reality experienced by a self', unfolding ‘across' time.

Yet this rigid structure can never be regarded as final. As the product of a ‘specified' momentum, existence ‘has' that momentum as its nature. The momentum that existence ‘embodies' – whether as things or as qualities and meanings – is still available within the ‘order' of what is. All that is necessary is to thaw the frozen structures that the first level takes as given” (Knowledge of Time and Space, pp. 77-79),

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

(Continuing)

Benedikter's discussion of the “making synchronistic of the self-aware mind” or the “doubling of the I” (and their relationship to the “productive void” or emptiness) reminds me of TSK's notion of eknosis (inward-outward knowing).  You may or may not see any similarities, so rather than argue the case, I'll let Tarthang Tulku speak for himself…

~*~

“In eknosis, the superficial ‘knowing outward' that starts from the perspective and narrow focal setting of the subject gives way to a knowing outward that emerges from the ‘inwardness' of space. External object and physical space, subjective knowledge and mind all come together like partners in a dance, merging in mutual recognition and agreement. What appears can equally be understood as a projection of mind into space or as a ‘being-reflected-back' from space into mind…”

“Knowledge as eknosis, radiating outward from the inward heart of space, understands limits differently. Not caught up in separation, it discovers within and beyond each limit an aura of knowledgeability…”

“As long as we cultivate our own limited knowledge, we are like mushrooms on the forest floor that strain to grow to their full height in ignorance of the sheltering trees above. Eknosis offers a different possibility. Knowing inwardly and outwardly in a single movement, eknosis moves without departing from its space origin. It allows us to know with a knowledge that is not ours… We can be guided by a vision of the whole inseparable from the perfect immediacy of the emerging instant.”

“Knowledge of the whole – the inward knowledge of a rainbow eknosis – is available in the obsolescence and inadequacy of our current not-knowing. We must look with care to the ‘not' of this not knowing. Here is where knowledge enacts the founding field communiqué*.”

“If we truly set about conducting such an investigation, we may find that knowledge first erupts into consciousness in the form of disturbing thoughts. Facing the limits of dimensionalized space and measured-out time and the consequences of our preoccupation, we may respond with doubt and discomfort. Nobody thinks in this way; we must be mistaken. At this critical juncture, we must rely on the discipline of focused imagination, for otherwise we will fail to hold to the vision of what is possible. Perhaps we realize that we do not care enough about our questions; perhaps we simply give up with a nervous laugh, collapsing back into the presupposed.

Yet if we persist, we find ourselves embarked on a great adventure. Before we acted out our own dramas, raptly watching the play unfold beneath the glaring spotlights of our own restricted knowledge. Now universal knowledge engages in a more fulfilling drama. A universal audience watches and the universe itself performs, engaging all appearance in the images presented by knowledge, the Great Magician. There is no longer any question of stopping short.

It is no ordinary magic show that knowledge presents.  The magic of knowledge is the magic of our own being. It is the cosmic show of space: the changes of the seasons, the dance of the cosmos, the times of our lives. As a part of the presentation, we can engage with knowledge intimately – engage as lovers are engaged.

We have learned to think of knowledge as linked to distance: to standing back and judging coolly. Now we know that knowledge is something quite different. It is the love we feel for all appearance, the love that unites all appearance. It is knowledgeability without separation and without ownership. It is the performing of the play for the sheer joy of it.”

“The more space opens, the more readily knowledge can know the transforming wonder of engaging experience in time. Mind and senses and awareness unite with the fullness of presence, and all of time – past and present and future – become available. The provisional immediacy of here and now is transformed into a realm of aesthetic beauty and splendor.

At home in this depth of being, knowledge comes to realize that interpretations do not depart from direct knowledge, but rather express its power. Thought as thought is free to involve itself intimately with the senses and perception. What psychology examines as consciousness, what philosophy interprets as mind or awareness, what poetry understands as giving voice, art as inspiration, and religion as the divine that speaks within – all this becomes available within experience and form, as experience and form.”

(All quotes from Dynamics of Time and Space.)

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,
Thanks for the thorough and interesting reply, and you do not have to apologize for the length of time it took…I too am short on time for these things as will be seen in the interval between right now and my next past.

I'll have to re and re-read the material you posted especially in regard to the perspective on time. Tulku and I might have a basic difference in view point there.

Later,

Steven

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Wow, I love those quotes!  What a sweet intelligence this man has.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

This is going to be a partial reply to the first of your two latest posts, plus a further question. I'll get back to the quotes from Dynamics of Time and Space later.

Tulku: “as projections of the underlying energy of second-level time.” (Emphasis added.)

Here lies the problem: I can envision (phenomenologically) the scenario in which time has a dynamic energy of its own and I imagine that it is not all that different than T.T.'s point of view. But…I can also envision four times that number of scenarios in which time is totally an inert conception. They are as follows: (Note to Tom–Remember that these are sub-categorical perspectives; therefore partial in their own sub-categorical totality. They are not absolute everythings, but devices…expedients of a kind…to help show that the single universal absolute is “there are no other absolutes except there are no other absolutes…” at least for us who like to use the English language as a commonly understood plaything and, each time we sit down to the keyboard, thank the second incarnation of L. Wittgenstein for thinking out the space for us to do so.)

1. If time is conceptualized along with the speed of light, then it can be separated out as a flexible, yet inert, yardstick of sorts carried on the energy of the light source.

2. From the perspective of a Universally Omniscient and Omnipotent God time is the boundless, yet inert, atmosphere in which all things happen, always all at once, energized by the indefatigable potency of OUR GLORIOUS AND REDEEMING NON-HUMAN PERSON.

3. From the perspective of a numerical synasthete, such as I, numbers are envisioned, conceptualized, as a plane and when envisioning the numbers from 1944 to 2009 (or beyond) which are the years of my life as currently numbered, I can change “my time” into the inert stage over which I have played my little part. (This is a foreshortened and superficial version of #2 and not nearly as satisfying to morph into, but handy as a memory enhancing device.)

4. From the perspective of the radical processionist (such as I) time is seen as an inert and totally conceptual residue, like make-believe ashes, from the anabolic/catabolic metabolizing consumption of that energy (perfectly dense to unbelievably diffused) which is issuing from the BANG! and which is itself powering the mindfulness that hypothesizes through memory the existence of time as a thing that will cease being a thing when catalysis leads the dance finally into universal stasis in which even the greatest gods turn impotent or sterile or both.

5. (Which doesn't count in my total plurality.) From the perspective of a bowl-bound gold fish, which I have been told has no memory, time doesn't exist at all.

Now (“now,” a time-related word…odd that I should just drop it in here at this point in…) when thinking about time, focusing on time as T.T. suggests I do, I also process these four (if not sometimes five) concepts simultaneously and thus you have a really solid reason why I don't do that very much at all. But I have thought about it enough to see that from at least five perspectives time exists only conceptually and that puts it squarely into the field of metaphysics.

Question: If we are to have a real postmetaphysical spirituality will it not have to be a spirituality without time?

I find that idea a little difficult on which to get a solid grasp. I think it will remain, as all things Gaia-esque remain, standard s.o.s. spirituality that is tweaked here and there by such Latter Day Prophets as Wilber and Derrida and no doubt countless others…Standard Spirituality in a Time of Postmetaphysics. (Note to Tom: The last three words of the last sentence were meant to be ironic and playful and a demonstration of how a cute, faux-literary turn of phrase can annihilate the meaning of the previous nine paragraphs if a certain rigidity of mind happens to be projected onto that of their author.)

Later,
Steven

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Time exists only conceptually, hey Steven?  Mind you, that statement is of those “previous” (ie, past-not-present) turn-of-phrase-annihiliated (Derriderian self-effacing) paragraphs, thus: Time exists only conceptually, hey Steven?  ; )

A partial answer to your question:

6. Adopting Einstein's perspective, being and time are one thing—time is not a backdrop and cannot be understood as independent of anything that is, but is something like blood—such that what might be said of being will reflect, in some sense, time.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Tom,

You wrote: A partial answer to your question:

6. Adopting Einstein's perspective, being and time are one thing—time is not a backdrop and cannot be understood as independent of anything that is, but is something like blood—such that what might be said of being will reflect, in some sense, time.

And I agree, but only in as much as the temporal elements is the mentally constructed (linguistically linear) momentary emergence and dissipatiion of passing energy that also energizes the memory of the first word of the “what might be said,” so that at the moment the last word thatmight be said, the sentence, the paragraph, the discourse remains hopefully a coherent concept.

Ay?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

I will get back here later today for a fuller response, Steven, but I notice that, in TSK terms, your qualification to Tom's comment is essentially, “Don't forget about knowledge.”  Your response, in other words, playfully entangles knowledge (conceptuality) with being-time.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Knowledge, of course, would be included in—a part of—what I refer to as anything that is.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Steven, yes, any talk of time, or any talk whatever, must exhibit a mental conceptual element, underlay, frame, structure, skeleton, essence, aspect.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

A few notes re: the quotes you posted from T.T.'s Dynamics of Time and Space–

–Generally this is good stuff despite the impression that both T.T.'s and Benedickter's approach to an almost inapproachable subject–whether it is called eknosis or inspiration–is a little over-intellectualized for my tastes. But for a third person account I thought T.T. did a remarkably good job especially in the last four or five paragraphs of your post. As a teacher T.T. has little choice but to use a third person p.o.v.–thankfully. The world is already too full of really lame poetry that tries to reach the same point and destroys the effort by being impenetrably subjective and too often overwrought. Some of T.T.'s phrasing reminded me of Lu Dongbin's “Hundred Character Tablet,” that was written perhaps 1,000 years ago and describes the same phenomenon though The Tablet places a little more emphasis in a focus on a tantric rise of kundalini energy. Three or four hundred years after Lu, Zhang Sanfeng wrote a commentary on The Tablet that includes a sentence that reads, “Sense (coherence or lucidity) comes back to the essence of consciousness, like husband and wife joining in blissful rapture,” which I thought was distinctly parallel to T.T.'s “As a part of the presentation, we can engage with knowledge intimately – engage as lovers are engaged.” (I can find no good sites that feature either The Tablet or the Zhang Sanfeng commentary to which I can link y'all. but both are found in Vitality, Energy, Spirit, translated and edited by Thomas Cleary, pub. Shambala.)

–I especially liked this: ”We can be guided by a vision of the whole inseparable from the perfect immediacy of the emerging instant.” …the whole inseparable from the perfect immediacy of the emerging instant…a little redundant, but for me that is the only reality that can be called time and the only whole that can legitimately be called whole. Everything else that poses under the name of time is a subjectively constructed memory or a politically constructed history pill that a culture would have us swallow, both are concepts and to me concepts are just smoke from the fire.  So many people blowing smoke…

–But what about this: In one place T.T. writes; ”It allows us to know with a knowledge that is not ours…” And then in another this shows up; ”The magic of knowledge is the magic of our own being.” They seem in the context of your quote self-contradictory, though if placed back into their respective contexts within the book the two sentences might be quite coherent. Whatever is the case I agree with the latter and disagree vehemently with the former that seems to posit a form of panpsychism or some kind of spiritually other proprietor of knowledge. From what you posted this is the only sentence that seems to raise the possibility of an associated spirituality. Is this a given in the TSK system? Of all my experiences that I could say fall into the category of eknosis I can only think of one that might, marginally, faintly, be related to anything resembling a spiritual context …of course that might just be because what others call a spiritual experience I would call a biological/instinctual one. (My bumpersticker of choice: “Honk if You Love Endocrines.”)

Maybe more later.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Steven,

In TSK, the description I offered of time is also not considered to be the “last word” on the nature of time.  TSK entertains a number of different perspectives on time and explores many of them in depth.  In later sections of the book from which I took my quote, TT will undermine the second-level definition of time, just as he attempted to question and undermine the first-level definition. 

At the third level, the description of time sounds like the description of a metaphysical ultimate, but TT points out that we shouldn't take him, or such descriptions, too seriously.  At other places in his books, he will undermine this too.  He says that in TSK he has been careful not to create a fixed system of definitions or a fixed metaphysical order.  The “aim” of TSK, rather, is to encourage a sort of open, non-settling engagement with life.

Here are some of his descriptions of third-level time or Great Time:

“Great Time is the universal bearer, but does not do, bear, or express 'things'. Great Time is not a thing or process….Great Time is neither law-like nor random. It is not a happening or a 'taking place' at all… . We might say that it is the inseparable partner of Great Space, the other member of the primordial marriage and love affair” (p. 159, TSK).

“Different times do not violate the nondistributive nature of Great Time. They are not linked, in a way that irrevocably separates them, by their respective positions in a temporal series. The 'series' is a fiction” (p. 106, TSK).

“The vitality of Great Time is the direct expression or evidence of the openness of Great Space. Great Time plumbs the depths and breadth of Great Space. Just as ordinary sound needs space in which to occur, and in turn gives evidence of the extent of that space, so Great Time resounds in, speaks of, and sounds out the infinity of Great Space. All appearance is Great Space. Elaborating on this, we can see that although all form and partitions are Great Space, the givenness of form and the partitioning or drawing up of form into particular configurations is Great Time. Great Time shows or conveys (in both the common evocative and vehicular senses) Great Space by exhibiting infinite variety” (p. 99, TSK).

“When fully appreciated, Great Time is seen to be a kind of perfectly liquid, lubricious dimension–it is quintessentially 'slippery'. For this reason–although there seems to be movement and separate places to move to on the first level, and still more open, fluid possibilities of movement on the second level–on the third level there is no 'going' and no separate places. It is as though all the friction in the world were removed–nothing can then walk away from anything else. So, from a third level view, an eternity of `straying' still leaves us very much `at home', intimately united” (p. 162, TSK).

To respond to your alternative views of time:

1. If time is conceptualized along with the speed of light, then it can be separated out as a flexible, yet inert, yardstick of sorts carried on the energy of the light source.

In the TSK vision, time as an inert (conceptual, abstract) matrix or yardstick is presented as the conventional view which is being critiqued – the first view which is to be called into question.

2. From the perspective of a Universally Omniscient and Omnipotent God time is the boundless, yet inert, atmosphere in which all things happen, always all at once, energized by the indefatigable potency of OUR GLORIOUS AND REDEEMING NON-HUMAN PERSON.

You may notice in the descriptions of Great Time above a kinship to the “time” of Our Glorious Father.  But TSK wouldn't separate it out from the “indefatigable potency” of Being, as “something else” sustained by that potency.  “Great Time, through the intermediary experience of 'time', is the source of inspiration and spontaneity. It is the muse that all artists seek, the feature which allows us to perceive and celebrate the otherwise hidden dimensions of all the presentations that constitute life.”

3. From the perspective of a numerical synasthete, such as I, numbers are envisioned, conceptualized, as a plane and when envisioning the numbers from 1944 to 2009 (or beyond) which are the years of my life as currently numbered, I can change “my time” into the inert stage over which I have played my little part. (This is a foreshortened and superficial version of #2 and not nearly as satisfying to morph into, but handy as a memory enhancing device.)

You can also approach this by considering what constitutes a “moment” for sentient beings, and then imaginatively stretching that out.  From the perspective of a given sentient being, what constitutes a “moment” appears to depend both on the system of measurement adopted but also on the limits of its ability to apprehend and process information.  A moment depends on the “processing” speed of its own form of consciousness; for that being, a moment functions as an indivisible unit or a whole.  Hypothetically, we can imagine a being for whom an “aeon” could be apprehended as a single, indivisible moment.  TT uses the example of imagining all of human history as being encompassed in this single moment.  All events, while distinguishable from one another, would also be inseparable from each other in this immediate “now” moment.  If you follow this out, there are a number of potential implications:  “here and now,” as a perspective, may refer more to variations in an atemporal isness than any “real” moment in a series; “the 'genius' of time in presenting the vitality of experience cannot be confined to the [conventional] present”; change cannot be considered the essence of time.  As TT says, perhaps “the creative presentational quality of time is bound neither by this moment nor by that moment, nor by the transition between moments.”  The question opens whether, experientially, we limit ourselves unnecessarily by identifying ourselves as “active in the present.”

4. From the perspective of the radical processionist (such as I) time is seen as an inert and totally conceptual residue, like make-believe ashes, from the anabolic/catabolic metabolizing consumption of that energy (perfectly dense to unbelievably diffused) which is issuing from the BANG! and which is itself powering the mindfulness that hypothesizes through memory the existence of time as a thing that will cease being a thing when catalysis leads the dance finally into universal stasis in which even the greatest gods turn impotent or sterile or both.

In this example, you appear to be describing processes and events which presuppose time rather than “producing” it (producing being another “temporal” way of thinking).  Issuing, leading, consuming, turning impotent.  This “giving rise” explanation, even if giving rise to an illusion, seems quite entangled with time: taking time to create the impression of time.  At the least, it trades in temporal currency, appealing to “beginnings” and “ends” and “ever afters.”

5. (Which doesn't count in my total plurality.) From the perspective of a bowl-bound gold fish, which I have been told has no memory, time doesn't exist at all.

Does the bowl-bound goldfish have any experience at all?  Can it make differentiations in its environment?  Is it sensitive and responsive?

You wrote:  Now (“now,” a time-related word…odd that I should just drop it in here at this point in…) when thinking about time, focusing on time as T.T. suggests I do, I also process these four (if not sometimes five) concepts simultaneously and thus you have a really solid reason why I don't do that very much at all. But I have thought about it enough to see that from at least five perspectives time exists only conceptually and that puts it squarely into the field of metaphysics.

How do you view 'conceptuality' in relation to time?  Does conceptuality impose time on experience, or does it also appear to exhibit it or depend on it in some way?  I find it problematic to explain time away or reduce it simply to a conceptual artifact, if only because most such explanations seem to smuggle time in the back door in the very explanation of how it “arises” or gets generated and imposed on experience.  Time may not be a thing “in itself” (I question whether it is any such metaphysical thing); as Kant points out, perhaps it is better understood as a subjective precondition for experience.  But when you explain it away with a model which appears to presuppose certain physical processes as actual or “more real” (such as entropy, metabolizing, even the functioning of memory), you end up with a lopsided (and, in some ways, incoherent) view, in my opinion.

You wrote (in your second post):  But what about this: In one place T.T. writes; “It allows us to know with a knowledge that is not ours…” And then in another this shows up; “The magic of knowledge is the magic of our own being.” They seem in the context of your quote self-contradictory, though if placed back into their respective contexts within the book the two sentences might be quite coherent. Whatever is the case I agree with the latter and disagree vehemently with the former that seems to posit a form of panpsychism or some kind of spiritually other proprietor of knowledge. From what you posted this is the only sentence that seems to raise the possibility of an associated spirituality. Is this a given in the TSK system?

TSK doesn't posit any other spiritual proprietor of knowledge, outside of the interplay of time-space-knowledge.  In the first quote, when he says that knowledge isn't ours, TT is challenging what he calls the “bystander self,” the notion of an agent independent of time, space, and knowledge – an agent which inhabits space, is pressured, supported, or transformed by time, and which “collects” or otherwise comes into possession of knowledge.  TT argues that such a self is not other than time-space-knowledge, and the claim to such independence, while functional in some ways, is limiting and problematic in others.

With regard to panpsychism, TT distinguishes the TSK vision from that perspective – although the vision he presents still may not be acceptable to you.  Essentially, he argues there is only time-space-knowledge.  This leaves the world exactly as it is, endocrines and all, but radically different as well.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder: TT argues that … a self is not other than time-space-knowledge …

IMO, Einsteinian, Bohmian, integrated.

The idea of time, conceived as *just* an idea, yet remains one part of the stage on which our dance is performed.  We are that stage. 

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Yes, well said.

As an aside, Bohm was actually interested in TSK and corresponded with Tarthang Tulku several times.  To my knowledge, though, those letters have never been made public.  However, one of the main editors of Bohm's work on dialogue, Lee Nichol, is also a TSK student and teacher.  He finds in it a practical application and achievement of much that Bohm was trying to realize.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Well, isn't that interesting, I had no idea Bohm corresponded with Tarthang.  Have you any idea where those letters would reside?  In Bohm's archives?  Perhaps Lee knows?

I've read Bohm for many years and consider him perhaps my main teacher.  Much of what I've said in that series of posts regarding language and particularly “everything is” or “X is only” comes directly from Bohm.  Bohm's sensitivity to language seems in that manner very friendly to TT's approach.  I did sense strong parallels there, so it's interesting to hear Bohm corresponded with TT.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Tom, I'm not sure where those letters reside, but I will ask some people who are in communication with TT.  Tarthang has corresponded with a number of physicists who are interested in his work, including George Weissman (who works with Chew, Stapp, and others) and Piet Hut.  You might be interested in some of Hut's work, which is inspired in part by TSK.

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Hi, Bruce, I appreciate it.  I'll probably travel to London within a year to (again) raid Bohm's archives.  I'll pick up the TT correspondence if it's there.

Thanks for the Hut tip.  I'll check him out.

TC

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,
Just a note to express my thanks for the effort you have put into these explications, something substantial to mull over.

I appreciate this especially: The “aim” of TSK, rather, is to encourage a sort of open, non-settling engagement with life.

Steven

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Steven,

You're welcome.  I've enjoyed this meandering conversation.  I run a TSK forum, but we haven't had many conversations like this over there yet.  Most members have remained lurkers…

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

B, ou est le forum?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Voila.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Merci.

TC

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

I am trying to keep this brief.

You asked: How do you view 'conceptuality' in relation to time?

I'll try to lead you through the process. I start with allegorical notions: (A) If T.T.'s Great Time is to the strictly temporal what astrophysics is to the strictly physical universe, then the view I wrote of, the one you considered lopsided and possibly incoherent, is the equivalent of quantum mechanics. Or, (B) If T.T.'s Great Time can be compared to a Levi-Strauss-like, structuralist social theory, the view I wrote of could be a deconstructionist procedure. Or (C) if T.T.'s Great Time could be compared to a Platonic metaphysical p.o.v., the view I wrote of could be a Dawkinsonian materialism. These are all just generalizing orientations and the allegories will fall apart, as will all allegories, if looked at from anywhere below 50,000 ft.

I go next to The Random House Unabridged definition of  concept as “(2) an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct.” And then I emphasize that part of the mental process that culls out well over 99 % of the incoming sense data one is constantly collecting in order to clear a little superficial neural networking space in which a relatively few established currents of bio-chemical energy can deliver to one a more or less coherent framework of reality generally commensurate with the ability to cope that is developed within one's feeble and vastly overrated consciousness.

Then I go back to an examination of the smallest quanta of what people call time as effected (like are all things are effected) by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and arrive at something like a Plank's Constant,  called The Metabolizing Moment that is bracketed by the concept of potential and the notion of entropy. Close examination of The M Moment will reveal that it's nature is totally dependent on the methods of observation and to some extent on the subjective interference of the observer. The smaller the M Moment the more subjective interference from the observer until the realization sets in that The M Moment is a point, a dimensionless hypothetical that defies measurement. All that can be measured is the change that exists (in itself M Momentarily) between the entropy on one side of the point and the potential on the other; both of which are conceptual according to Random House.

If one then steps back and examines not the M Moment but the subjective experience of that examination then it is clear that this new examination is, again M Momentarily, a processing and reprocessing of the mental construct called “The M Moment Experience” delimited by a false serialized, yardstick conception of time. What one is processing is the largely pre-programed, memory based mental activity that culls and creates coherence (memories of experience and anticipation of coalescing potential) from an overabundance of sensory stimuli. And although almost all of this activity is unconscious, it is nonetheless, conceptual, a construct. (And what makes this Quantum Perspective even juicier is the fact that the potential of our senses encounters The M Moment and degrades to entropy at a different point than the point at which our consciousness receives the news of it.)

I would like to mention that all of this conceptualizing can be credited mostly to literary sources, primarily those grouped around the Autherian Legend. I first encountered  my perception of Great Time when reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court at age 12 because the book is about time travel and time travel is most possible (conceptually) in the Great Time kind of framework and only by developing such a view could I make Twain's piece coherent. Four or five years later I encountered in this mythology the version that grounded Merlyn's visionary capabilities in the notion that this sorcerer was born in the future and lived backwards. This was a puzzle that finally resulted in the idea of the dimensionless point of the M Moment through a thought experiment that put Merlyn's potential and entropy on the opposite sides of the M Moment from my own and thus while we would continually be encountering the same M Moment we would never encounter each other.

I'm with Edward: “I love the smell of postmetaphysics (as entertaining nonsense) in the morning!”

Later,

Steven

P.S. I would have really loved to have written this without any words that signify any kind of serialized temporality, but I don't have a year or five to play through and I'm not quite up to inventing a Joyce-ian language that could do the trict.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Edward,
I'll see your Pink Floyd and raise one TS…
This is Burnt Norton and I think it fits here, but what are we and T.T. to do with it?

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                        Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
                      ~~~~~~

Human kind cannot bear very much reality. Is this why they are satisfied with someone else's maps instead?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Edward,

Just because it has a little swag on the deep doesn't mean an over-wrought messianic pipe dream can beat an understated turn around a temporal concept that is so everyday that it verges on cliche…

“The past is a bucket of ashes.”

            1

THE WOMAN named To-morrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

T.T. tells a little story:

“Rationality likes a starting point, so that a good story can be told. That way, details can be aligned along the edges of a single cone, which thinking and minding can track as history. Each point, however, is not one, but 16* in all directions. Space and time are not limited by rules and guidelines established by fiat in the kingdom of logic. Space and time are prior to logic, who is just the great-great-grandson of an ancient union. Even ‘prior to' and ‘ancient' are concessions to Young Rational, son of Ratio, who wants to know who his parents are and where they came from. From the perspective of the rational, the questions come: “How could I be here now if I have no ‘then' and ‘there'? How could I exist without ‘to' and ‘from'?” How! Who! Hey! Ho!

Imagine identifying the ancient parental point ‘back there' somewhere. “Here it comes! Here comes the whole universe!” exclaims Young Rational in great ex-citement. But ‘here' and ‘there' are space-perspectives, as ‘now' and ‘then' are time-perspectives. They are results of ratios in operation.

Each starting point is ‘to' and ‘from'. If it were otherwise, time and space would not unfold. ‘Here' can be ‘to'. ‘There' can be ‘from', ‘from' can be ‘to', and ‘here' can be ‘there'. Which is where? It all depends on where we are.

Holding onto our position as the audience, we find ourselves kicked out onto the mean streets of lower- level time and space. We beg for knowledge, but we can receive only the knowledge that fits in our bowl! Sliding down the long linear slope of ordinary time-space-knowledge, we let the point slip away. Secretly, we proclaim: “Time has run out. There are no more starting points to be found.”

If time is truly the magnificent time of zero, 16, and ratios, none of this holds up. How could we establish a boundary demarcating the ancient starting-point of the universe from the present moment? What cone extends ‘from' that one ‘then' ‘to' this one ‘now' that cannot be unwound into the boundless dynamics of time? What points line up from ‘here' to ‘there' that cannot be opened up to zero? What position is there that cannot be comprehended as a distinction-making of time itself, a transitioning created by time, the result of a being-time ratio? As positions come unglued, as cones unfurl and baselines telescope to points, we need not fear going over the edge, for we cannot depart from time. We are bonded with time and space, united with all existence in a precise unboundedness.

Following time as a one-way stream, we see only one possible cone of development, and we operate with only a few dimensions of space, time, and knowledge. But if knowledge knows how to operate the ratios, every transition is a new chance. Every change in history, every fleeting moment is testimony to the grand flexibility and transforming power of time. We are point and baseline. We are connected to all zeros and all 16s.”  ~ T.T., Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space

~*~

* '16' is a playful convention T.T. adopts in one of his books (Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space) to refer to the 'unfolding fullness' of the moment.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,
Doesn't Borges sound a little bit like Blake…Tiger, Tiger…it is, I am.

I heard the other day from a good source (though it might be common knowledge now) that the Sanskrit word for Tiger is “Viagra.”

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder, yes, I am time, I am space, I am knowledge.  Those three reflect (ie, move) inside me with movements as from outside.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Drops in the River by the Fleet Foxes

Crown of leaves, high in the window on a gold morning 
Young today, old as a railroad tomorrow 
Days are just drops in the river to be lost always 
Only you  







Years ago, birds of a feather would arrive nightly 
Gone you know, held to another like clutched ivy 
On the shore, speak to the ocean and receive silence 
Only you  
Here as the caves of my memory fade, I'll hold to the first one 
I wouldn't turn to another you say, on the long night we've made 
Let it go  
Speak to me slow my dear, no ghost of course in here, 
pleased to be lonesome quiet and clear, all is alone in here. 

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

(This was cross posted at Balder's latest blog entry, which needs to be read first in order for the following to make sense. I thought we might want to play with the proposition here.)

You have done a great job here in bringing together three different perspectives on time. You put more imagination into the synthesis than any of the other authors put into their creations. I read what was available from all three and was fairly disappointed. All of the material was oriented around restricted first person phenomenological experiences and perceptions of time which seems to be the standard operational procedure. I think there are more interesting ways of dealing with these experiments. (Re: experiments, I thought the Triple-Loop article was quite lame–I found I hadn't changed my mind on it from my first reading a year or so ago– and did not deliver what was advertised in the abstract. It served best as additional proof to the studies that indicate a significantly higher than average intelligence is a liability rather than an asset in seeking business success. The article struck me as being minimally about time perception, and maximally about the development or recognition of manipulative social skills that will provide The Head Sodomite in Charge with more profits at less expense without losing the affections of the subordinates.)

A little over a hundred years ago Einstein worked out part of the Theory of Special Relativity by engaging in a thought experiment in which he envisioned himself as somehow a part of a beam or a pulse of light traveling through space. He did not examine his experience of light but, hopefully, light's experience of itself. Some months ago I started a thread on Integral Visioning's Heartmind forum that simply asked people to pretend they were time instead of themselves. I did not ask what time would do, but what it experienced of itself, its own self definition apart from all other things; in other words time's own inner phenomenological, maybe even solipsistic, sense of itself. The thread got wiped out in a crash, but there were a few interesting responses though most seemed to be a description of the respondent's primary sense of time. I think this experiment is the only way to get from what are obviously mental or cultural constructions of time in order to have an intersubjective relationship with the real existent (if there is such a thing) rather than a circular inner experience with a projected concept.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Steven, thanks for your feedback.  Tarthang Tulku offers a similar exercise to the one you suggest:  experimenting with “being” time, “being” space, and “being” knowledge/knowingness in turn – putting time, space, knowledge at the center, as he puts it, instead of imagining ourselves as inhabiting or possessing them.

Without thinking of my past experiences with that exercise, though, I've just been trying to follow your suggestion and see what comes up, imaginatively, for me.  For instance, I've been feeling into something that I associate with Bergson's duree – and finding the boundaries of the feeling of duration to necessarily involve something else, something “outside.”  So, then thinking that those “others” were also “showing up,” I tried to hold these different intensities, these different durations, altogether, to feel them simultaneously.  That felt to me something like “aliveness.”  At another point (earlier this morning) “being time” showed up for me as a sense I've associated with being on the edge of birthing a creative project, a sense I've called “burgeoning” or “inner burgeoning.”  Kind of a pregnant force, with a sense of motion that is not actually motion.

I'm still playing with this, though, and will tell you what else comes up.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Balder,

You wrote: At another point (earlier this morning) “being time” showed up for me as a sense I've associated with being on the edge of birthing a creative project, a sense I've called “burgeoning” or “inner burgeoning.”  Kind of a pregnant force, with a sense of motion that is not actually motion.

I have found there is an exquisite, almost samadhi-like inner tension in the sense you write of here. I have heard it described as being the pivot between the sail in one hand and the tiller in the other on a tiny sail boat running very fast before the wind. I've never been so lucky, but then there is a similar trick in keeping the highest velocity possible in a power drift through a C-class, stock car dirt track. It is staying in a very narrow space between optimum motion and disaster,  i.e. crash or stall.

So I have to ask: How thin is that edge, and what is on either side?

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

What a wonder-filled treasure to find!  

Hey Steven,  the edge is infinitely thin, and eknosis is on either side and inbetween…lol*

I love what you said here Steven…


“being time” showed up for me as a sense I've associated with being on the edge of birthing a creative project, a sense I've called “burgeoning” or “inner burgeoning.”  Kind of a pregnant force, with a sense of motion that is not actually motion.


would love to hear more about your burgeoing…*

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Star,

I was just quoting Balder there. He was the burgeoner so you might have to ask him.

And yes that was a great thread.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

pffftttt!  my bad; maybe next time I will read with more awareness…then again…lol

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

This thread applies in detail what I posted today in a few words at
at Global Peace Pod/The Department of Peace/ Galactic Consciousness.   I state in simple terms why I'm so lucky.

Re: Tarthang Tulku and the TSK vision

Bruce and fellow-participants, Would I be correct in saying Tarthang Tulku is talking about a “vertical mind” aspect of apperception? The part of the mind, visionary, which can ride the elevator of consciousness to higher floors, rather than merely see things from the point of view of the current floor (as metaphor of stage/level of consciousness) we live on day to day, day in and day out? Wouldn't that ride up the (vertical) mind's elevator be like Wilber's “state” initially? Unless the perspective is applied and nurtured into new codifications, at which point the seer becomes a doer and be-er at a higher (or different) “floor” - takes up new residence, in terms of stage of consciousness.     I can see how, in our lust for assention (a kind of lust for heaven - the ideal), we could, as Tulku suggests, have fake glimses which are contaminated partially, or wholy, by the way we see things from the familiar lower (or different) floor we inhabit. We may mistake a mere extrapalation as having been an elevator ride (vertical mind), when, in fact, it was fantasy or an educated guess, rather than a true vision of higher (or other) floor realities in which time, space, and knowledge may play out differently (not unlike how musical notes play out a bit differently in different musical keys). 
    Would the idea of a vertical mind function fit with the poetic vision logic Tulku is talking about?  

      Darrell