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Thread 0004: How is it useful to distinguish what happens from how things happen, or the ordinary/conventional from the way things are structured?
In the TSK books a distinction is sometimes made between (1) a "conventional" or "ordinary" designation that facilitates commonsense distinctions, labelling, and communication, which can apparently be useful at all levels of being, and (2) various structures or structuring of experience/reality, sometimes expressed as levels 1-3 in the books. This could be simplistically portrayed as a distinction between what happens within a level and how things happen or are structured as various levels. Questions for this topic then include: (1) Where is this distinction made in the text?, and (2) What is the purpose of the distinction? [Steve Randall, 8/24/98]
entry 0001:
KTS, p. xvii: When we shift our attention from what is given in experience to the way in which it is given, new facets of time, space, and knowledge are revealed.
KTS, p. 315: We can turn from the content of what is known to look at the interaction between what time presents, space exhibits, and knowledge knows. . . . Though old patterns and standard descriptions can be readily accounted for, they need not limit knowledge.
Here's another place where the distinction between concept and structure is made, although the context of this statement is first level: "Words and their binding structures both mirror and reinforce the prevailing space and time." p. 51, KTS
entry 0002:
KTS, p. 34: We can cut through the structures of the temporal order to a 'sense intensity' that expresses this 'aliveness' directly. Indeed, each act of experiencing the 'feel' of what is 'real'--even as restricted by the constructs of ordinary knowing--can lead us to the 'aliveness' that time presents.
entry 0003: The following seems to imply that the use of language and 'ordinary communication' can either reflect the temporal order or a deeper order. Thus the conventional would be independent in this sense from the various ways of ordering or structuring reality. [Steve Randall, 8/26/98] KTS, p. 52: With a different language, we could activate the potential of language as a resource for knowing that went deeper than the structures of the temporal order. . . . Language can 'measure out' or create; it can penetrate the assumptions of presupposed juxtapositions or give them form. Which course it takes--how it relates to the 'logos'--will depend on the intention and the dynamic it expresses.
entry 0004: We can use conventional language without being caught up in lower-level structuring and positioning [Steve Randall, 8/26/98]: KTS, p. 54: Not bound by language, knowledge can open to communication at a deeper level, exploring the 'logos' directly. It can maintain a subtle balance, absorbed in positions but free from positions, ready to use language in ways both new and old. Balanced in this manner, we can draw on language without being caught up in it; we can accept conventional patterns without accepting their claims. Then each thought, each presentation, each word, and each action can become a perfect gesture of balance.
entry 0005: TSK seems primarily concerned with the structuring of reality, not with conventional knowledge. Why? I believe that a focus on the structuring is what holds the key to our happiness and truly beneficial progress. Focusing on content is a dead end; exploring structure naturally and spontaneously opens it up to a deeper level. Perhaps a very direct doorway to our happiness is provided by seeing how first level might be restructured to second and third level. [Steve Randall, 8/27/98]
entry 0006: On the importance of focusing on how experience is structured: LOK, p. xxviii: The full implications of the Time, Space, and Knowledge vision will reveal themselves most clearly through a focus on experience that calls the framework of experience into question.
entry 0007: Following are twelve central dimensions of human experience for which paradoxical statements contrast (1) conventional communication and understanding with (2) the open 'structure' of an essential, possibly third level of experience. Expressing this contrast may clarify the distinction between content or description and structure, and thus facilitate recognition of deeper possibilities. We tend to ignore the latter, taking for granted the structures of here and there, past and present, cause and effect. But perhaps challenging the way in which things appear could bear unexpected fruit: "The full implications of the Time, Space, and Knowledge vision will reveal themselves most clearly through a focus on experience that calls the framework of experience into question." (LOK, p. xxviii) The paradoxes have two parts: the first part refers to a conventional, commonsense, or practical facet, and the second part refers to another facet that might be called "experiential," or "as felt or perceived." [Steve Randall, 9/23/98]
flow
There can be tension and resistance without effort by a self.
There can be coordination, order, and influence with complete spontaneity, and without control by a self.
There can be dancing without a sense of a dancer, or doer of the dancing.
There can be a particular person doing something while there is complete spontaneity, with no doer.
There can be attribution of causation without experiencing a causative entity or event separate from an effect.
creativity
Appearance and events can have identifiable causes and sources within the world, and yet things can feel as though they come out of nowhere, with no source or cause.
The same objects, people, and world can be recognized repeatedly over time, and yet be seen as fresh, original appearances each time.
People and things can be assigned a historical identity while felt to be discontinuous or to be recreated moment by moment.
accomplishment
While we can attribute production and service to a particular individual, that person can experience the work as an activity that flowed by itself, with no effort.
objective space
Familiar things, while separate and distributed over ordinary space, are nevertheless unseparated and even intimately connected within and as a higher-order, dimensionless space.
While the physical world may be a referent for any activity, no world order seems fixed outside and around us.
Objects may have an inside and outside, yet they need not have any perceived depth.
While there may be measurable lengths, there is no felt distance.
Although objects have volume, they aren't experienced as extending in space, or exclusively occupying space.
Geographical coordinates and points, and 'here' and 'there' can mark positions; however, there are no felt spatial divisions or extension--everything is the same space, 'here'.
mental space
I can have a mind without needing to feel that it's separate from others' minds.
I can have a mind without feeling that it's stable, continuously existing, or independent of 'the outside'.
I can have a personal space or position without having to feel separate from anything/anyone else.
identity
There can be people with names and histories who nevertheless have no feeling of substantiality or continuous existence.
There can be recognizable personality without an experience of personality-owner and without a feeling of repeated patterns.
locus of knowing
While an individual can know and perceive, knowing need not feel like it belongs to a person, takes time, or radiates or occurs from a center.
When a particular person knows an object, there may be no felt distinction between knower and known.
When a particular person knows a locatable object, knowing can be experienced as a nonlocated encompassing field.
content of knowing
While particular objects, events, or thoughts are known, still there can be a sense of comprehensive, unbounded knowing.
The perception of a particular object need not involve a sense of a perceiver nor any feeling of separate context for the object.
Thoughts can express distinctions without referring to experientially separate objects, people, or events.
Memories need not refer to a separate past position, and hopes, anticipations, and expectations need not refer to separate future positions.
Pain, suffering, and emotion can appear without a relatively positioned victim or owner.
well-being
There can be a person with a personality, reasoning, emotion, sensation, intuition, and different body parts without any sense of fragmentation or feeling of separate 'parts'.
need and fulfillment
A person can have desire and preference, or can pursue this or that course of action, without any sense of need or deficiency.
Whether a situation is labeled positive or negative, ugly or imperfect, fulfillment and complete appreciation are immediately available.
Within a finite duration of clock time infinite fulfillment is available.
Though most of the world is outside the individual, a person need not feel cut off from or lacking anything.
feeling of time
There can be distinguishable past, present, and future times without any felt separation between the times.
Events can 'occur' without any experienced movement or transition from one to another.
Clock time may be finite and limited, but the experienced duration of a period of clock time is not at all fixed.
feeling of reality
While objects and people exist and interact, they can seem dreamlike, transparent, and non-substantial.
When events occur, it can seem dreamlike, as though nothing at all is really happening.
The clearer our perception, the less we see reality as a compounded object.
Though knowledge may refer to physical and mental realities, certainty is diminished in proportion to how experientially separate the entities seem.
Experiential fragmentation of reality destroys certainty.
entry 0008:
Here is an example that distinguishes (1) "conventional" or "ordinary" communication or designation that facilitates commonsense distinctions, labelling, and communication, from (2) various structures or structuring of experience/reality [Steve Randall, 9/24/98]:
TSK, pp. 172-3: Only when--in some sense--we stop moving through ordinary spatial distances can we see a new type of 'space', a new way that situations are 'open'. This does not mean that we should keep a tight rein on ourselves and hold still, lest we venture through more ordinary space.
entry 0009:
The distinction between what happens within a level and how things happen or are structured or 'perceived' is typically ignored at level one [Steve Randall, 10/29/98]: "It is characteristic of a first-level understanding to ignore the significance of perspective; to insist that what is seen, as it is seen, is genuinely real." (p. 107, KTS)
entry 0010:
Conventional, or ordinary distinctions made 'within' the first level can be preserved on a second level without preserving separations [Steve Randall, 11/5/98]: "A second-level 'space' could accommodate first-level space together with matter; existence together with nonexistence; physical together with mental; interpretive structures together with what is interpreted. It would structure reality on a deeper level than the structures that we usually accept as basic, without undermining or rejecting those structures." (p. 150, KTS)
"Without abandoning the observed differences out of which the known world is built up, what had been known as distinct and independent is now also known as interdependent and co-referring." (pp. 168-9, KTS)
entry 0011:
Conventional distinctions can show up in diferent ways, depending on the way things are structured [Steve Randall, 12/8/98]: "If we choose to decline the ongoing invitation to confine knowing to the structured entities and processes 'given' by the 'field', and determine to investigate instead 'field dynamics and mechanics', conventional distinctions appear in a new light." (KTS, pp. 196-7)
entry 0012:
DTS, pp. 48-9: Within the zeroless, subject and object and the world that they inhabit can readily appear, and we can freely accept this appearance as 'real' in a way that gives adequate support to conventional understanding. Yet the order established in this way remains 'non-dimensionalized'. Concepts such as distance and separation function as before, but they no longer have their usual ordering power.
DTS, p. 110: The claims of the witness are by no means false on a conventional or 'local' level. They conform to the world as we experience it and make it possible for us to act in that world. The world that the witness claims to authenticate may not be 'true' or 'real', but it is also not false or illusory and does not have to be rejected.
The challenge to the witness and its world arise at a deeper level. The witness presupposes the structures of ownership and identity as central to reality. Dismissing the freedom of the zeroless, it makes the substance of the recorded the unvoiced theme of all its testimony.
This is the structure that is insupportable-not only as a
matter of logic, but for the consequences it brings. When we
accept the testimony of the witness, we can only find in favor
of frustration and not-knowing, repetition and pain. We can only
confirm the limits that linear time sets in place.
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