Following is "Exercise 16, DTS," an article from the June, 1995 issue of Reports From the Field. But first, here's the description of the exercise discussed in the article:
A. Continue with the exploration of pain in all its secret and surface forms. Cultivate the intention of healing the pain, without identifying with its character as pain or adopting its history. Let pain into awareness, allowing its staccato throbbing to expand and occupy the whole of consciousness. As long as you do not identify, there will be no getting stuck. Activating time's inwardness, you can create room for experience that is not so insistent and turn the energy of pain toward release.
If you can embrace pain's energy in a balanced way, you can bring awareness into painness. Your experience is no longer 'this one pain', 'this one thought', 'this one imagination'. It is not even 'this one awareness'. Cutting inward through pain to painness, you are looking to what arises in experience as experience. This shift-from content to the communication of content-points experience toward the silent time of time's communiqué. Dwell in this silence, enjoying its deep peace.
B. Just as we can turn the forward conducting of pain inward toward painness, so we can turn thought communication toward the silence of the communiqué.
Starting with the ordinary flow of thoughts, let awareness turn inward. You can do this by directing your attention toward the flow of thoughts rather than the content of specific thoughts, as suggested in Exercise 2. Instead of focusing on the 'of ' or the 'about' of thinking, look to the energy that thoughts manifest. As you leam to refine the way that this energy appears in your awareness, you will discover a present experience of lightness that can lead you toward silence and toward a healing 'wellness knowledge'.
To make contact with this knowledge, direct awareness away from what would ordinarily be considered the center of the thought, away from mind or consciousness The knowledge you seek is above thought, beneath thought, around thought, and about thought. It is a feature of thought, the identity of thought, the future of thought, the feel of thought. It is above mind, beneath mind, around mind, about mind; a feature of mind, the identity of mind, the future of mind, the feel of mind. It is above consciousness, beneath consciousness, around consciousness, about consciousness; a feature of consciousness, the identity of consciousness, the future of consciousness, the feel of consciousness.
Three months ago a correspondent on the TSK email forum suggested that some of us TSK fans practice one exercise in a concerted way for a given period. A number of us decided to practice exercise 16 from Dynamics of Time and Space. Following are reports of three individuals' experience with the exercise:
Paradoxically, looking for the sharpness dimension, the pain dimension of experience, this seems to lead me into a sense of peace and quiet and rest and well-being, once again. Is that related to the fact that our usual existence is totally based on a cramped and painful stance, so that even pointing this out may already have a soothing and relaxing effect?
. . . Such a lively impression I received from looking at the trees in front of my window! Waving in the wind, the trees alive, the wind alive, the world alive, me alive. From content to texture of thought-that itself is a thought. Focusing on texture itself, rather than the thought of texture-again a thought. How to escape from this vicious circle? Start with calmly looking and jumping and sinking, deeper and deeper. A joyful, open sense of potential, of freedom. It helped, to get into the exercise, to let my mind wander for a brief time, and then to repeat the same thoughts, more or less, while focusing the second time on texture rather than content. One main question: can I do this switch content->texture while still remaining functional in my thinking? At first sight, it would seem that I can only repeat thoughts, sinking in them, rather than thinking new thoughts. Would it be possible to combine sinking and thinking?
Here is a simple recipe, one that I can try out while waiting in line, in the subway, wherever. Think a few thoughts. Then repeat them, while focusing on texture rather than content. Then try to overshoot, past the end of the repitition, to see whether fresh thoughts lend themselves to this texture-based approach to thinking.
In the train back, while watching the landscape drift by, I tried to let my thoughts speak for themselves. An unusual sense of rich experience, more calm, more sensual, more peaceful. Still, also the feeling that I have a long way to go, to reach a touching of the texture of thought.
Brief, but yet a sense of depth in appearance, a lightness and glow and inviting dimension.
Another brief attempt to engage in watching thoughts in a texture-oriented way. Another case of lack of concentration. How about trying for another minute? The result: a sense of purity, of floating above/below/away from, yet in. Strange, this easy access to such a different realm, and yet my reluctance to go there. Can I trick myself, fool myself, give myself a passport and a stamp, and let myself in? Should I try to make it harder in order to make it easier for myself?
. . . Subject-object reversal on the most inner aspects: thoughts. Self-referentiality. What a mysterious concept. Thought thinking itself, watching itself, reflecting and turning in around itself. If I can just find the switch to short circuit this whole game, then what? Freedom? Embracing thoughts, embracing the process of thinking, embracing the landscape of thinking; falling into thought, falling into the process of thinking, falling through the landscape of thinking.
It does not need a very careful observation to notice how much my eyes and thought and body are all strained, pointed, directed narrowly. Softening the eyes, relaxing the body, letting thoughts flow more. Simple antidotes!
Alas, around ten last night, a feeling of little energy, little attention, wanting to go to sleep, wanting to drop it all. How to embrace time with such a feeling of letting time slip? How to catch thoughts when I feel like letting thoughts slip safely away through the holes? Ah, this mystery of attention. While resting for a while, I focused on thoughts and consciousness as such, trying to steer away from their contents. How to steer away? What to focus on? If we look at a vessel, we can steer away from the content by focusing on the container. But that does not seem to be a good image for thought. Consciousness and thought are more like a horizon than a container. A container is a middle area, a region that separates an inner and an outer, and as such partakes in the continuum that allows all three to be defined: inner, edge, and outer. In contrast, a content of thought is not 'in' a thought in the same way.
To confront thought or to try to sneak around it? Both approaches are equally valid, it seems, as long as I can hold onto this wild horse of straying tendencies. Those moments that I did not stray in my attention, those had the promise of depth, of focus, of width, of embrace.
At some point it occurred to me that all this that I live in, my whole lived and considered world, is a gigantic ball of thought. All given in thought, what will happen if I penetrate it? Will the bubble burst, the bubble in the stream that DTS talks about? Yes, when I try to challenge thought, I don't have any dry place to stand on, no foothold outside the stream of thought, it seems. Like sawing off the branch I sit on, what will happen when I really penetrate thoughts? Well, I don't know, and I don't particularly care. This whole process of sawing still seems so elusive that I will try to focus on it, trying to go into it deeper, do it better. What will happen then, that I do not worry about.
A sense of penetrating deeper into the mystery of thought. A sense of beginning to see how I am enclosed in the cocoon of thought, with every new thought seeming to add a few extra threads, wrapping me up more and more.
Repeating the last few thoughts in order to look at them more carefully, in a more detached way; counting thoughts; letting thoughts flow by, watching their energy and movements rather than focusing on their contents-all these are viable ways to get started. But all these methods seem so easily to slip off, to slip away from their target.
What is needed is nothing short of a revolution, a complete turning upside down of what I normally associate with the bearings and cornerstones of my life. Yes, this is the first day of the rest of my life.
A world of smoke, a world of unreality. A dream, a movie, a wave on a pond. How deep, how light, how surprising and yet, how matter-of-fact-like. An oasis everywhere, in thought, in perception, in any form of appearance. The beggar living on top of buried riches, only they are not buried, they are plainly visible.
I found it difficult to do; an almost opaque partition blocked movement of the experience. Then last week, pain emerged as a slight headache. "I" somehow took the "fixed observer" position and "simply observed it" and the pain transformed to pressure to vibration or moving sensations and then, subtly, the distance between the observer and the "pain which was no longer pain" dissolved, and, the only way to describe it, "inner light appeared." The light "opened" as "I was the pain" or closed as "I distanced myself from the pain or sensation." I next tried to open the "light" experience to "knowing" (which Tarthang Tulku describes in his commentary) but have gotten nowhere.
I resonated with much of what you wrote! The sense of threat, of effort, of struggling with tiredness, of avoidance. I wrote another message [immediately above] about my practice but reading yours brought back other dimensions. Here goes:
Earlier I wrote about the "I" position. I had totally forgotten an additional unfoldment. I struggled to understand Tarthang Tulku's words in part B. "The knowledge you seek is above thought, beneath thougtht, around throught and about thought. It is a feature of thought, the identity of thought, the future of thought, the feel of thought. It is above mind, beneath mind, around mind, about mind . . . ." (pp. 308-9) These words seemed to shift my focus from the thought to its surround. Attention is not to the thought-as-thought but to other characteristics of thought. Initially, and even now, I'm not sure I "know" what these words mean.
In any case, when I have an "I-position" which also entails effort and focus it inevitably brings up "concrete thoughts-as-content." There came some moments in which the "I" was not operating and "awareness" or "consciousness" allowed/followed the emergence and disappearance of thought. These were like bubbles spontaneously forming in a fluid, changing and then disappearing only to have another and then another . . . although more slowly until, for brief periods, just openness.
Doing part A this morning, I focused on sensations in my neck. Painful sensations that have been around in one form or another for years. I did head rotations. There were painful sensations throughout the major part of each rotation. There was a strong tendency to get away from sensations, with the observing self discussing what was going on, reluctantly owning the sensations, locating sensations here and there, then deciding to get into the exercise more deeply. Eventually some of the sensation turned toward what is called painness in the exercise. There was a kind of settling into the exercise, a relaxation during certain portions of the movement. I read about "the silent time of time's communiqué." Continuing, occasionally I'd come out of the experience of head rotations to comment on the peace and quiet that was 'occurring'. It seemed remarkable that this peace seemed to be available whenever such a shift in focal setting occurred.