Tarthang Tulku's Encouragement to TSK Students

Reading on the web, I came across the following letter submitted by Tarthang Tulku to an email group of TSK students.  I thought it would be nice to share it here.

“Over the years, I have noticed that students of TSK have applied their understanding to a wide range of issues. Even though TSK itself may not speak directly to the concerns of morality, psychology, theology, or cosmology, those who work with it seem able to look at contemporary issues and problems with greater clarity. Simply facing up to unacknowledged problems invites the emergence of a knowledge beyond what we can currently imagine.  Following this path, it may well be possible to reduce the conflicts and confusions that cause pain to individuals and produce harm at every level.

Beyond such conceptual clarity, there is the possibility of deepening experience. Beyond all positioning, the nature of value, meaning, and being may appear in a new light.  As individuals embody TSK more fully, sharing their understanding, new forms of knowledge may emerge.  Even two or three people exchanging ideas and experience and insight may touch different ways of thinking and being that express the beauty of knowledge and have the power to influence others. Within the old traditions, it may be possible to apply the essence of knowledge to bring about truly revolutionary change.

In the TSK vision, appearance is flexible and open, in sharp contrast to standard physical processes and even psychological patterns of behavior. We can not only change; we can transform. Now is the right time for us as individuals to take on this challenge: We are on time and on target. Although society is deeply entrenched in patterns that are going nowhere, everything is also in flux. New fields of knowledge open; new possibilities emerge. The constantly accelerating pace of change is an invitation to invoke the fundamental flexibility of TSK and apply it to our present patterns.

TSK does not claim to give answers or solutions to our problems. Yet as knowledge deepens, answers may mysteriously appear. As students of time, we can explore how to cut through the accelerating momentum of chaos that undermines creativity, promotes violence and depression, and spins into endless ways of wasting time. A lighter, more enlightening way of being may allow us to channel time's energy, so that obstacles become transitions to transformed understanding.

Those of us who understand that TSK can come alive in our experience have a responsibility to develop knowledge and share it with others. Yet we can fulfill this responsibility in a natural, relaxed way. If you can individually deepen your own understanding of TSK, opening to different levels of knowledge, you will have something to share. If you participate actively together, supporting, encouraging, and challenging each other's contributions, you will be respecting the vision and encouraging it to grow. Through dialogue and questioning, you can open up a vast range of topics, drawing on your individual fields of knowledge and concerns to shape something of real value. I am including with this letter an article that may help start this process moving. If the response is genuine and if time permits, I would like to make another contribution in the future.

Sincerely,

Tar-thang sprul-sku Kun-dga'
(Tarthang Tulku) ”

Re: Tarthang Tulku's Encouragement to TSK Students

Hi Balder!

Thanks for posting this.  I really appreciated that Tarthang Tulku encouraged sharing:  ”As individuals embody TSK more fully, sharing their understanding, new forms of knowledge may emerge.  Even two or three people exchanging ideas and experience and insight may touch different ways of thinking and being that express the beauty of knowledge and have the power to influence others.”

I think that is what this Pod is about.  Not about accumulating interesting experiences, but about how to use time, space, and knowledge to embody and deepen it.  The TSK ”vision” involves the development of a certain kind of ”seeing,” an understanding of oneself and the world in accordance with a particular way of 'inquiring' into experience.  In this sense, it is more like the active incorporation of a 'change of focus' that allows the person engaged in this vision to understand, act and live in a more liberating way.  As Tarthang Tulku says:

When we place these three factors-space, time, and knowledge-at the center of our being, something quite remarkable happens. Knowledge comes into its own, informing experience and existence in a very powerful way.

The promise of the Time, Space, Knowledge vision-TSK-is this: If we understand our own space more fully, we can open all of space, we know our own time more intimately, we can transform our living experience, we investigate the operations of our own mind more deeply, we can see the roots of knowledge everywhere. Seeing the natural harmony within appearance, we will be able to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity time is steadily presenting.

The starting point for such transformation is to inves­tigate time, space, and knowledge in our own experience, challenging the restrictive ways that we have learned to think of them. Such an inquiry leads us to recast our prob­lems and obstacles as the outcome of how we understand and embody time and space and knowledge. And this rec­ognition in turn allows us to experience the benefits that flow from a different vision. SDTS p. xxvi

Space, time, and knowledge are universal, and at the same time they are intensely 'my own'. No one is a stranger to their manifestation, and no one holds the secret key to their working. Since that is so, dogma and beliefs, territory and exclusion have no role to play. Whoever develops knowledge, whatever form it takes, is par­ticipating in the time-space-knowledge that shape our being-contributing to the dynamic of the whole.

The TSK approach promotes an inquiry broad enough to explore our participation in space, and powerful enough to penetrate time's mysteries. It invites us to explore the sacred dimensions of time and space. And it reveals that knowledge itself, known and unknown, familiar and unimagined, is sacred in its power to shape our reality and make available unending benefits. May this discov­ery, which each of us is free to make, contribute to the well-being of the world.   SDTS pp. xvii - xviii