THE PRIMARY MOMENT

[David Filippone]

A Primary Moment – Cape May Sunset by Werner Tedesco, Sep 2020

 

THE PRIMARY MOMENT

I’ve recently completed my repeat ‘Searcher Reaches Land’s Limits’ course. The first and repeat courses have taken almost two years; that’s about 60+ classes, reading the books volumes I and II multiple times, and working with the practices at all hours of the day and night.  For me, taking the complete course one time was not enough to absorb and metabolize everything that was being offered by the teachings the course was based upon:  the book, ‘Revelations of Mind,’ by Tarthang Tulku.  That’s why our teachers recommended we repeat the course in order to get a more grounded sense of the depth and breadth of the teaching.  And it’s true, repeating the class definitely deepened my understanding, and as time passes my heartfelt intent is to invite Understanding by “directly engaging [with experience] again and again…relaxing into a beautiful habit that occurs effortlessly.” [‘Searcher…’ Volume II, p. 326]

Practicing the exercises, along with the readings, has stretched me ‘experientially,’ revealing that my ordinary perceptual process involves many hidden assumptions, subliminal presuppositions, and judgments.  Pointing them out to me conceptually is one thing, but actually experiencing what was pointed out has been critical. For example, all the description in the world about ‘what’ honey tastes like just can’t touch the actual experience of tasting it.  And that’s a little bit like what ‘Revelations of Mind’ does, a path that takes us back to Understanding, with a capital U, to direct experience as the bases for any description about an experience, such as a taste of honey. Instead of a concept of what it might be like, experiencing directly is the foundation… our ‘ability’ to know prior to conceptuality. Our ‘knowledge-ability’ as Rinpoche explains.

I love this quote in, ‘Searcher Reaches Land’s Limits’, by Richard Dixey:

“Once we recognize the bases for our ordinary cognition, we’ll find a foundation for knowingness. We can know concepts but cannot know what’s nonconceptual. Yet the nonconceptual calls forth knowledge. Our actual state is one in which knowing and being are merged, a state that is inherently non-dual. We cannot witness this state because we are this state. Forever beyond conceptual knowledge, it is experience itself.

Seeing this leads to a deep realization that experience itself is magical... Rather than fully embracing and appreciating the magical nature of our own experience, we want it to be ‘manageable’ and ‘rational’. In a sense, we construct a cognitive entity, a vessel by which we can navigate this extraordinary, magical thing called experience. As we get older we can look back and observe how we’ve constructed this entity over the years with reinforced ideas about who we are and what we’re doing. Revelations dissolves this entity with clear seeing and engagement.” [Volume II, p.300-01 Emphasis added]

So, ‘knowledge-ability’ is the experiential realization that “the non-conceptual calls forth knowledge.” Looking into the not-known, looking into the fog of confusion, looking into the gaps between thoughts, looking into the incomplete images of memories, seeing into the ‘betweens’ of the known… opens a ‘center-less luminosity‘, a sense of the immeasurable.  I am just a student, not a teacher, but this is what Revelations, and the years studying the Time. Space, Knowledge (TSK) vision, has unveiled for me.  I much appreciate the true depth of this quote:

“Our birthright is to know. When children are born they immediately engage with experience. This is because at our base we are knowing beings. Recognizing this is to recover our birthright from its projection into a conceptual body of knowledge. We are returning to ourselves, reclaiming ourselves. With this turning, we are connecting to the moment when our being and our sense inputs make contact. This is the primary moment when the entirety of perception arises. By thoroughly understanding the display, and through relaxing and allowing ourselves to embody this primordial union of being and experience, we open into the infinite richness of what it means to be human. It is to experience the unbounded, beyond concept.”  ‘Searcher…’ Volume II, p. 324-25 [Emphasis added]

 

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