Hayward Questions

Michael,

I struggled with your blog as I had a different take on the issues.
In the sentence “I am sad“, I thought sad was an adjective
It seems that as such “sad” can erroneously be “identity” describing how or what “I am”.
If, however, we add ness we get sadness. Ness added to any word (I thought) meant “the quality of“.

So we get sadness as a quality of experience.
As a quality of experience, it is no longer a personal identity.
It is not that I am sad, but rather I experience the quality of sadness.
As such sadness is a state of mind, not an identity.
There seems to be some benefit in recognizing an experience as being state of mind specific, rather than identity.
When we become sad, (I am sad) we are trapped.
But sadness as state specific is a way of knowing, not an identity.
The identity is “knowing” and sadness is an experience or way of knowing.
From what you wrote, this is just the opposite of what Rinpoche was saying, and I am reluctant to disagree, but….

This is a knotty issue and I am not certain I have explained my point clearly.
Let me know
Thanks,
Hayward

Michael Scrambles

Hayward,
Thank you for engaging my recent blog post and I’m sorry that I forced you to struggle with it. My only excuse is that I don’t understand any of this material as well as I wish I did.

I completely missed the fact that sad and happy are not nouns, but adjectives. It rather spoils the point I was trying to make–that adding the suffix ‘ness’ turns a momentary experience into an established emotional state that thereby has a way to stick around longer than it warrants. I agree with you that sadness and happiness are a quality of experience.
I have probably never grappled with the distinction you make between “identity” and “state of mind specific experience“. I actually used the phrase “state of mind” thinking of a video you once sent me (like everything else these days, a decade ago) in which I understood you to be pointing out how the state-specific ways we interpret experience tend to mask the openness of space and the dynamic freedom of time. Clearly, I wasn’t thinking in my piece that both “sad” and “sadness” –the one through being an identified experience, the other a state-specific quality of experience–tend to obscure the openness and freedom that TSK illuminates.

I have to say that my motivation for beginning to write about what came up reading Rinpoche’s book was that I was trying to clarify something for myself. Then the piece, which I hoped could be a vehicle for understanding, became an object in itself that I polished and buffed like it was a shiny red convertible in the driveway.

Now you’re making me rethink things. If sadness is an’ identity’, which removes it from the more immediate “quality of feeling” expressed in “I am sad“, which of the two is actually closer to the heartbeat of being? I guess I think of ‘feeling” as more immediate than ‘experience‘. And that once we identify a state of mind (such as sadness) we have already taken a step away from what we were feeling. I guess I was claiming that to speak of ‘sadness‘, or even ‘experience‘, we have already taken that step away from feeling and placed it in a past that we are holding onto longer than it deserves.
As for my ability to represent “what Rinpoche was saying“, today I feel more distant from that ability. I began that blog with a sense that I was lacking that ability to understand some pages in “Keys of Knowledge” but willing to look more closely. And I didn’t even get to the parts that really befuddled me (about the “cut” of discernment being like the line between the numerator and denominator in a ratio).

I’m copying David because I copied him on my original e-mail to you and because I expect he will be interested in the trenchant engagement you have made with my post.
Thanks,
Michael

Hayward Punctures my Unintended Bubble

Dear Michael,

I loved the struggle with your piece.
And I so appreciate the opportunity to relate to you and David about these matters

How about the following:

All experiences (thoughts, feelings and actions) are specific to our body mind state in operation at the moment of arising.

Every state has a self of that state.

It is not that the self has many states, but rather quite the opposite
The experience of self is just another state specific experience.

To see what arises, (self, experience and situation) to be a function of “a way of knowing”, is to recognize the presence of Knowledge and the influence of time and space as to how it is known.

Well, that is all that occurs for now.

Thank you for the dialogue.

Hayward