The TSK Email Forum
Thread 0025: On death
entry 0001:
TSK, p. xiv-xv: Once all temporal partitions are down, and 'time' is at the disposal of 'knowingness', we can be released from all fear, anxiety, and strain. Even the fear of death can be transcended, since in this more comprehensive view of 'time', there is no death. An infinity of directions are open to us--even the direction which leads to our personal death is seen as leading to no real death or 'ending' of anything intrinsic to our 'being'. Space, Time, and Knowledge have none of these arbitrary and egocentric boundaries; and we, through 'knowledge', have access to the unqualifiedly positive and all-inclusive character of Space and Time.
We ordinarily relate to life as a stream of transactions and are always 'on the move'. As a result, we are confronted with a realm pervaded by transitoriness, continual shifting and collapse. Death serves as an overall summary of our limited approach to life as involving a restless leaping from thought to thought, moment to moment. By opening each thought and presentation to Space-Time-Knowledge, the linear cause-effect and transaction view gives way to an appreciation of the vastness of Being within and as each thing. The transitory is then itself not transitory. The moment of death does not involve a real 'passing away'.
This message of 'infinite Being' and of 'no death' might seem to be proposing a condition of 'eternal life', life as quantitatively infinite duration. But this interpretation is not at all in accord with the significance of 'infinite Being or 'no death', for these are injunctions meant to open us beyond all self-orientation. The message of 'no death' is a message of openness and balance which relieves us of the fundamental sorrow of human existence.
TSK, pp. 127-8: Existence itself depends on 'time', and necessarily partakes of the derivative past-present-future structure and also of transitoriness. 'Things' are here, in the present, only to pass out of reach. 'Things' are desired (due perhaps to previous such losses to the past) but are 'not yet'. We have become so conditioned by this trend that all our hopes and aspirations amount to filling up little slots in a sort of personalized past-present-future grid. We are literally timing ourselves away.
This is a shockingly limited approach to life. It consigns us to a predictable overall pattern that ends up in only one way--death. Death is a totally opaque partition. We cannot see beyond it, nor can we see it clearly enough to discover other options or ways around it. Our attempts to live all involve using lower time, which necessarily proceeds by separating things and by breaking things down.
Death is the ultimate lesson presented by 'time', exposing the bankruptcy of our view. We do not see enough to keep up with the play of Space and Time, and at a certain point, the view (or 'knowing') which 'we' embody runs its course. In the meantime, we just reinforce this trend, always restlessly looking forward to our personal future. Time--we chart it and it channels us.
TSK, p. 242: For ordinary purposes we define regions which
are empty, neutral, or unknowing. But for our new model, there
is no 'not-knowing'--there is always knowledge. True, we--our
selves--cannot handle some knowledge. And such knowledge thus
seems like confused sensations or even vacant (i.e. uninteresting)
world regions--like 'dead spots', or even like death itself.
However, higher knowledge or 'knowingness' can handle all
knowledge, continually finding more of itself and ever-greater
life and fullness.
entry 0002:
KTS, p. 33: Although mind moves through time with great freedom, slipping from present into past or future and back in a matter of seconds, mind is also the victim of these structures. Bound to the physical body, it moves inexorably toward aging and death. Bound to its emotions, it lives in accord with hopes and fears that play themselves out in the past, present, and future. Acted on by time, the mind can determine time's effects but cannot affect its operation.
KTS, p. 39: Rather than being a power available to draw upon, the dynamic of time appears within the temporal order as a hostile force bearing down on the self--a constant, threatening reminder that the stories and interpretations of the self have no power to affect the objective 'order'. The self participates unwillingly in a 'frozen momentum' that sweeps it inexorably toward death.
KTS, p. 42: The relationship between self and time is more intimate than we habitually acknowledge. The self is born into a certain situation in time, develops in accord with rhythms that operate within that situation, and leaves the altered situation behind it at death.
KTS, p. 46: The force of time manifests in the established 'order' through a momentum whose thrust and directionality are preestablished. . . . . It makes possible units of measurement, transitions, sequence, measurement, and calculation. It provides for birth and death, growth, control, formulation, and responsibility.
KTS, p. 97: . . . substance could be understood as a kind of 'holding pattern' against the force of momentum, a way of using momentum to support what persists. But acceleration continues even when held in check, proliferating the constructs of lower-level knowledge. As thoughts acceptable within the 'logic' of the 'logos' are piled atop one another, existence becomes opaque, so that we can see only surfaces. Bound to the position of the 'bystander', we struggle to satisfy our needs and concerns, but end up feeding the same patterns of acceleration. In the end we can sustain the gathering momentum only with our own substance. Not attuned to the 'aliveness' of rhythm, we find ourselves aligned with a momentum that moves steadily toward death.
KTS, pp. 139-40: The two aspects of space interact; for instance, if I move my hand from one place to another in front of my face, it seems that 'my' space, as inhabited by 'my' body, moves 'through' the common, shared space.
When we say that two people cannot occupy the same space at the same time, this seems to be true for both aspects of space. My body cannot appropriate the 'owned' space already inhabited by your body, nor can I move into the 'empty', unoccupied space 'through' which you are currently moving. However, two different kinds of nonavailability are being invoked: The latter is momentary, while the former apparently endures as long as my identity and yours persist.
In light of the aspect of space that can be 'owned', we are entitled to ask a rather unusual question: What happens to 'my' space when I die? It seems that in death I give 'my' space up. We might imagine that as the body disintegrates into its chemical constituents, each of them continues to take up 'its own' space, but the space of the self is different, and that space is no longer inhabited. Does this mean that now someone else could occupy 'my' space? This seems inaccurate, because my space is uniquely mine; for someone else to occupy it they would have to be me.
Then can we conclude that after I die, 'my' space is retired from service and is no longer available to the universe? This also seems unlikely. If my space were unique in this thoroughgoing way, it is hard to understand how space could also be shared in common. If space were completely unique, how could we ever bump into someone else?
Perhaps our connection to space is somewhat more tenuous. . . .
We might imagine that once the self disappears, there is no longer any distinction between the space it formerly occupied and the far more encompassing space that impersonally accommodates all possibility for appearance. Again, we might consider that these two spaces merge into one another, since there is no longer a need to separate them. Does this view do justice to the specificity of 'my' original appearance in space? If 'my' space can merge with 'empty' space, how does 'my' space ever become uniquely identified to begin with?
KTS, p. 181: Consider what happens when someone in the prime of life dies suddenly. First a particular consciousness and knowing, linked to a particular time and space through embodiment, is in operation. Then (we might imagine) comes a moment of instantaneous recognition of danger, when these factors all change drastically. Then a sudden wrenching shock, like an earthquake. Suddenly time itself 'collapses'. Energy, memory, awareness, perception are all reconstituted: The old 'field', its limits maintained through the constant 'feedback' of an echo effect, is gone. There is total discontinuity, like entering a black hole-space, time, and knowledge in the conventional sense are gone.
This kind of dramatic change is rare in conventional experience, precisely because the 'field' is penrasive. An underlying force, a kind of 'gravity', sustains amechanism' according to which everything operates. A specific knowing is allowed, and through 'field feedback mechanisms' this knowing itself shapes the 'field and what it will allow.
KTS, p. 334: As we move from layer to layer, level to level, we will readily abandon the view that proclaims things to be simply as they are. We will discover an interweaving that seems to shape experience, as though we were bound to all the universe by gossamer threads-a web of meaning that vibrates everywhere when touched anywhere.
When we know this interweaving, concerns that formerly seemed basic may alter. Birth and death are fundamental to existence, but what significance do they have if existence cannot be separated from nonexistence?
KTS, p. 416: When the self dies, it remains a part of space and time: 'Where' else could it go, and what else is happening?
KTS, pp. 453-5: From one perspective, all appearance can be understood as akin to art: Space dancing the universe of Being. The drama of existence unfolds like a well-loved epic with countless episodes. Within the epic, there is joy and suffering, birth and death, victory and defeat. But as the playful display of Space, such an unfolding of events simply reveals new facets of the Body of Knowledge. No structure 'outside' the display selects presentations to be taken up for later consideration so that they can be assigned value and meanings within a model.
In the vast play of continuous creation, models drawn from the first-level world of substance are applied by human beings to reckon gains and losses, pleasures and pains. Yet in the presentations of Space and Knowledge, substance has no foundation. In the allowing of Space there is no becoming; in the free play of Knowledge there is no seed. In the interaction of Space and Knowledge in Time, what changes does not come to an end, and there are no transitions. Even the transition from life to death remains ever embodied in the Body of Knowledge. . . .
In the creative dynamic of the Body of Knowledge, whatever appears can be a sparkling jewel, a precious offering. Even patterns that repeat endlessly, in cycles that limit and confine, express this creative surge. We can reject, but we can also reunite, re-express, re-determine, re-value, re-reward. We can reemerge, renew and re-access, re-continue, reincarnate, re-remove, re-unsettle. A steady stream of rebirth reexamines even what is repressed or re-denied, reassessing what is re-thought.
entry 0003:
SDTS, p. 41: For our embodied existence, the ratio makes real, inviting fulfillment. But ratio also unfolds into the final transition of death. At that moment there are no extensions. If we imagine looking back from the moment of death, what we might see is the ratio of opportunity to actual participation.
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