There are two study guides on this 'page'. That immediately below is a general guide by topic. The second guide is for Knowledge of Time and Space only.
This Study Guide represents one way to approach the TSK books. Feel free to use it any way that seems productive: Use parts of it, don't use others, modify it, add to it, build on it, come up with your own guide that fits better with your own experience and submit to include on this web site. One proviso: Please do not copy this guide onto other web sites or in print or use commercially without first seeking written permission from Dharma Publishing.
In the outline below, "ch." stands for "chapter," "Ex." is an abbreviation for "Exercise," and "Q." abbreviates "Question." Abbreviations for books--such as "TSK," "LOK," and "KTS"--are explained in the Bibliography.
Below are some questions that are intended to help us focus our reading-exploration. One way to proceed is to read a chapter and write down insights and questions you have about the text as you read; then review the chapter in light of the questions for that chapter. 'Answers' to questions may not be so important as noticing what arises as you consider the questions.
p. 3, PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
What is it that allows experience to unfold? Where does the 'substance' of time come from? From the past? Present? Self? Future?
How are past, present, and future related to each other?
p. 8, BODY OF TIME
What does this mean: "The creative surge of what we embrace in the present is the outcome of a momentum that gathers toward specificity." (p. 8) [No answer is necessary. This might be helpful: Have you ever awakened in the morning to see, first thing, a kind of open, light nothingness? Then realize it was a white ceiling? You didn't know anything else, like which room you were in, in which direction you were oriented, what day or time it was. Then your ordinary reality started to be pieced together. You realized you were in a particular room, oriented in a certain direction, but didn't know what day it was. Then you figured out what day it was. Before long you were thinking about what you needed to do that day, feeling the typical weightiness of 'reality'.]
How might past, present, and future interact to give rise to experience?
Is there some aspect of time that is not covered by the categories "past," "present," and "future?" Do these categories partake somehow of a unified "body of time?"
What distinctive qualities do the past and future have that set them apart from the present--and from each other? (You could also explore some great related material in SDTS, pp. 82-6, on the 'feel' of the past and future.)
Is time only one-dimensional, linear?
How does occupying 'the present' cut us off from time?
p. 12, PASSAGE OF TIME
Is time simply objective, or does the presence or absence of human knowing and concerns somehow affect time's flow?
How do you relate to this: "The [ordinary] continuity we experience and accept is linked to the basic sense that we are 'here' in space and time, for the specific territories of experience are carved out by a fundamental rhythm that situates and positions." (p. 14) [No answer is necessary.]
What happens to the passage of time if there is no private domain of the self? Does continuity of time depend on the maintenance of a separate self?
P. 15: "continuity depends on mechanisms of repetition and derivation." It may not be clear what repetition and derivation refer to, since at this point not much has been discussed regarding repetition and derivation (derivation is mentioned on p. 7)-these will be taken up repeatedly later in the book. Note, however, that the word identity is from the Latin for sameness, a variety of repetition and multiplication.
What does this mean: "A rapid rhythm expresses the dynamic of continuity and unity in the form of patterns that generate a characteristic 'friction'." (p. 15) [No answer is necessary. This might be helpful: Consider how the continuity of a movie plot is projected.]
Could 'events' arise that are 'discontinuous'-that have no place within the temporal order?
Could a unified 'body of time' be suggested by the description (pp. 16-17) of all of time as "a single 'moment'" in which each 'event' that has taken place is understood as inseparable from every other 'event', and in which there is no separation between past, present, and future?
Is there a kind of time not parsed into moments?
p. 19: INTENSIFICATION OF TIME
How does time set up boundaries, identities, partitions, and limits, affirming a 'from-to' order that moves away from the centerless center of time's flow?
How does appearance mechanically unfold from past to present to future, committed to existence and becoming, establishing the self on the surface of time? How does tension, pressure, and friction develop? Have you noticed this process operating in 'your experience'? What stands by at the center of the resulting structure?
The word logos is introduced in this chapter. From p. 415, LOK: [Logos:] The governing understanding active within a temporal order. The 'logos' operates in accord with a specific and characteristic logic, establishing possibilities and defining limits. On a lower-level, the 'logos' is invisible, operating as 'the (temporal) way things are'. With more knowledge, the focal setting shifts, and the 'logos' becomes accessible as a structure to be investigated in terms of prevailing 'read-outs'. As investigation continues, the distinction between 'logos' as knowledge and 'logos' as the prevailing order of time and space gives way to a more comprehensive 'knowingness'.
p. 24: SELF AS BYSTANDER
How is the self an 'outsider' with respect to the temporal dynamic? Does experience stand outside the temporal flow? What is meant by this: the self and its experiences are an interpretation of time's momentum.
p. 27: EXPERIENCE AT THE CENTER
Is there a variety of time other than subjective time and objective time?
What are the effects of the self being an outsider with respect to time? How do we try to handle the effects? What's the result of our efforts? What is lacking in our approaches?
p. 31: SHAPING EXPERIENCE
How does linear time arise? How are linear time and experience related?
What is witness to the truth of experience and linear time?
What is the mind 'within' which awareness arises?
How are the following related: linear time, the bystanding self, experience, and the mind within which awareness arises?
p. 33: "Yet mind is not easily grasped; like a clever thief, it is always a step ahead of our inquiry, active in a way that we cannot ignore but that remains enigmatic." See pp. 173-4 for a related exercise.
What are some of the 'rules' for the exhibition of appearance to mind?
p. 34: "If it is time that reports experience, there need not be a subject of the report, nor even an owner." See p. 250, DTS: "there is no need to report back on what is thought."
Does there need to be a subject or owner of experience?
"We can cut through the structures of the temporal order to a 'sense intensity' that expresses this 'aliveness' directly." See pp. 225-6, KTS; exercises 3, 5, and 30, LOK; and Wholeness of Perception, exercise 24, p. 335, DTS.
p. 35: TEMPORAL ORDER
In terms of a second level momentum or dynamic, how is the ordinary 'substantial' or 'solid' temporal order and world with subject and objects set up? (You may also want to see pp. 17-18, 22-23, and the bottom of p. 49-p. 50 of DTS, which is very closely related.)
How are objective and subjective realms established? What role do the law of causality and logic, and codes of laws and customs play?
How is this chapter's depiction of the arising and establishing of consciousness and physical objects, linear time and empty space different from a historical explanation of the origin of these same 'things'?
How do objective time and subjective time differ?
p. 44: DYNAMIC BEING
In what ways are our lives sometimes or to some degree like pre-written and pre-staged plays that we 'play into'? How do we to some extent act within a pre-established order?
How might such a fixed environment act as a restriction? What might be responsible for setting up such apparently built-in restriction?
p. 48: INTERPRETIVE STRUCTURES
Is the subjective 'order' more basic than the objective, is the objective 'order' more basic than the subjective, or is there another way to view the relation between subjective and objective?
Is language always limited by the temporal order of transition, linkage, and succession, with its mechanisms of polarity? Or is it sometimes linked to a deeper knowing?
p. 54: "If what is said here is understood in accord with linguistic structures--for example, in terms of criticism and argumentation--it will only further positioning, and the insights it fosters will prove of little lasting value." If the reasoning presented in this chapter is not criticism or argumentation, what is it? Does it have a purpose?
p. 55: UNFOLDING TIME
How is the repetitiveness of the temporal order related to technological knowing?
p. 59: RHYTHM OF ALLOWING
Can you think of how a "prevailing way of knowing" is linked to current "doctrines, models, ideas, understandings, and beliefs that shape a specific environment for knowledge?" How does this way of knowing show up in social institutions, in a specific understanding of the self, or in other structures?
p. 62: FABRIC OF TIME
Is there a relationship between the levels portrayed on pp. 62-3 and the diagrams of pp. 150-51 of TSK?
p. 65: MEASURING OUT OF RHYTHM
What is meant by the "measuring out of rhythm?"
How is the temporal order of self and world deceptive?
Can you think of examples illustrating this: "Through the structures of distance, measurement and scale, the prevailing temporal rhythm manifests as objects."
p. 72: RHYTHM WITHOUT SPECIFICATION
What does it mean that rhythm without specification is not just subjective?
What is the "feedback" mechanism being discussed? If you've read Dynamics of Time and Space, how is feedback related to "conducting?"
If the points 'through' which time's momentum flows are ultimately 'zero points', where does momentum originate?
p. 77: ENERGY OF TIME
When you focus on second-level momentum, do 'outsiders' and 'by-standers' disappear?
Can you see how 'you' are given together with what 'is'?
How are existence and existents specified?
p. 80: CREATIVITY OF TIME
What limits traditional views of creativity?
How can creativity be defined in terms of time?
p. 83: MOTION OF TIME
How does rhythm set up points, segments of time, origins, boundaries, continuity, and world and self?
How does the strength and stability of a point arise?
Is impatience an extreme version of friction?
p. 88: EXHIBITION OF ZERO
p. 93: INTRINSIC MOVEMENT
p. 99: DYNAMIC POTENTIAL
p. 100: "Suppose that existence were a visualization of space. We could represent this as the circle of 'zero' transformed into the symbol of a triangle." The transformation is done by 'nailing down' three points of the circle, then pushing the resulting three arcs toward the center to form a triangle. This is clear from p. 102: "We could think of this last 'second' of arc in terms related to our initial image. In the triangle that forms as the symbol of 'zero', there is a part of the 'zero circle' that the triangle (or even infinitely replicated triangles) can never encompass."
p. 101: "Yet both A and B 'remain' zero; they invariantly go toward 'zero'. This 'going toward' points toward another point 'C' as the 'zero' of A and B." This seems strongly related to ex. 22, LOK, p. 183.