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    • #1239
      David Filippone
      Moderator

        TSK Ex. 28 – Cycle of Seeing [practice notes] from 2009… [See exercise in the comments below]

        The Cycle of Seeing exercise demonstrated for me, many of the elements we’ve been learning for the past seventeen or so weeks. Selecting the ten ‘things’ put a focus on ‘how’ I model experience to ‘short-hand‘’ each ‘thing’  from a countless selection of choices, in order to refine and easily understand and recall them. I also saw how I construct stories by constructing the linear list of ‘things’, and then spinning it, the way I spin my daily stories of identification, desire, and worry… from waking till falling asleep at night. Working with the exercise creates the space and sub-spaces in which to construct the context of the ten ‘things’ –-a spinning world that I cycle over and over—as  the phrase comes to mind, “To see a world in a grain of sand.

        As I continued over days spinning the mental micro-cosmos of ten ‘things,’ there were more fascinating discoveries. While I didn’t see a ‘self’ manipulating the creation of the ‘things’, I did feel the presence of the narrator, controlling the process of gathering, organizing, valuing, discarding, and the interpreter  setting up distance between itself and the ‘things’.  And this imputed distance felt like tension, a gravity of ‘will’ holding the things together, made out of a value system I seemed to have set up in advance without fully understanding the consequences of doing so. This tight control was maintained until I got good at spinning, and I got sort of cocky about how easy it was, and then something extraordinary happened… As if through a magnifying glass, I saw deeper into how I structured my whirling world.

        The value scale I used in choosing my ‘things’ was: good equated ‘easy to recall,‘ and bad equated to  ‘hard to recall.’ Thus, I always chose easy over hard. Every choice based on that value system called the subject-self into play from a predetermined perspective.  I saw that my value judgments were ‘self-assumed‘; they were presuppositions that not only defined, but limited my ‘seeing’ of the ‘things.’  My initial unquestioned attitude about what was good or bad, kept me in a repetitive, one-dimensional tunnel-vision, sifting through models, like mental photographs. And this was essentially a flat, spiraling world or context, which seemed to keep my focus confined to boundaries of my own making. For example, when I chose to remember my puppy as one of my 10 things, I chose a photo of her, not a nebulous memory of her. It was easy to recall a very specific, frozen, picture. But to just recall her by name would have brought all kinds of images to chose from. Way too many to consider. Just too many decisions to make.  I had to simplify, or ‘summarize‘ her as a ‘thing’. It dawned on me how I summarize my experience all the time in order to manage memories, and language [naming or labeling experience] was my summarizing tool of choice.

        As I said, I got better at cycling and remembering the ten ‘things’ and visualizing their detail, and so my tight control seemed to ease up. As I kept spinning the ‘things’, and relaxing control, suddenly, I lost the subjective perspective, I forgot ‘me’ and seemed to become the ‘thing’.  The value system in place dissolved, the constructed nature of the ‘thing’ seemed to ‘deconstruct’  the values, while at the same time retain its objectness. All of a sudden distance and gravity dissolved, there was tremendous freedom and a sense of expansion or opening as I became free to be all I knew of the thing, in a more full and richer way… the ‘things‘ and I were one, we were made or put together out of the same stuff.

        The exercise showed me there could be intimacy with the objects of my own creation, that my structures and identities were not fixed and could meld without separation, that the subject-object reversal could happen in an amazing way, that there was a different way of knowing than I am ordinarily ruled by. This is a very powerful exercise. I often find I put down an exercise too quickly before it has had a chance to reveal all it has to show. I am glad I stayed with the practice for a sustained period.

      • #1240
        David Filippone
        Moderator

           

          TSK Exercise 28 – A Cycle of Seeing…

          “Select ten ‘things’, including objects, qualities, and other common contents of experience, such as a car, an orange, a piece of music, a tactile quality, etc. Once you have formulated a specific and ordered list of such items, contemplate the first one until you ‘see’ it quite concretely. Then go on to the second, the third, and so on until you have completed the list. Then repeat this cycle of ‘seeings’.

          Continue this over and over with the same ten items, paying close attention to the factors at work in such ‘seeing’. Notice everything, but at the same time keep an open mind about what is involved. In this way, you may discover new factors while re-evaluating the old ones.”

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