TSK Practices for Integral Concepts

The Time, Space, Knowledge teachings include over 120 exercises for exploring and opening up its vision of reality. These practices range from discursive meditations on particular aspects of reality, to phenomenological investigations of embodied experience, to fairly sophisticated visualizations, to explorations of energy and emotion that border on Eastern yogic disciplines, to visionary inquiries that defy easy classification. Together the practices make up a subtle and comprehensive vehicle of transformation, the power of which has been attested to by numerous practitioners (Moon and Randall, 1980, pp. 183-293; Tarthang Tulku, 1993, pp. 182-191).

While the vision as a whole would make for a vital component of an integral transformative practice (ITP), I believe a number of its exercises could be fruitfully employed in the classroom to explore, open up, challenge, or experientially ground some of the key ideas of Integral Theory. Just reviewing the exercises, I was able to identify 30 that could serve these purposes fairly readily, although I am certain, given the consonance that I believe exists between these visions, that others could also contribute in ways that have not yet occurred to me.

Because of the space limitations of this paper, I will not be able to discuss all 30 of the practices I identified, but I will explore a representative sampling of them here, and will include others in Appendix 2. In particular, I would like to look at how TSK exercises might be used to interact with some of the notions that feature prominently in Wilber's (2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2005d) latest writings: person perspectives, holons, prehensive unification ("karma and creativity"), pan-experientialism, and enactment. As I will discuss in more detail below, many of the fields of experience engaged by TSK practice offer the practitioner an immediate and embodied understanding of these ideas.

According to Stephen Randall, Ph.D. (personal communication, February 6, 2005), a long-time TSK student and one of the proof-readers for the first TSK book, the 35 experiential exercises in Time, Space, and Knowledge were only added as an afterthought. They have since become quite an important part of the TSK vision, however, and in my opinion may even be considered foundational to the vision as a whole. For this reason and others (which I will make clear below), I will open with a discussion of a number of the key exercises from the first book.

Among all of the TSK practices, perhaps some of the most well-known are those that deal with the Giant Body. In these exercises, you are asked to visualize a giant human form, male or female, suspended in the space or the sky before you. Adopting the perspective of a proportionately tiny observer, you approach the body and begin to explore it in intimate detail, first observing its surface features and then entering into it to travel through its internal spaces, systems, and structures. Over a series of six exercises, as you conduct this exploration at increasing levels of detail and finer levels of magnitude, you are encouraged to "open up" and transparentize the boundaries of the nested structures and systems that comprise the human body. Carried out faithfully, these exercises allow you to encounter "a very deep and expansive space" (Tarthang Tulku, 1977, xi). This space may appear first as the spaces between boundaries that make up and allow for the "shapes" of given organs, cells, or molecules, and then become more pervasive as boundaries are opened and the transparentized body is experienced as an intricate world of "interactions and shining outlines" in space (p. 26). At a deeper level, however, this sense of space and transparency may shift in such a way that it becomes apparent to you that the body in its "normal" solidity and opacity is simply a particular way that this more open space dimension "shows up," and is inseparable from its allowing and fulfilling clarity (pp. 24-30).

It is a happy coincidence that the visionary artwork of Alex Gray is so prominently featured on the Integral Naked website and in association with Wilber's work. His depictions of the transparent and luminous human form, in all its layers of anatomic detail, are quite evocative of the sense of the body communicated through this series of TSK practices. A video montage of Gray's paintings (e.g. Figure 3 below), in fact, might be helpful as aids in preparing a class to do the Giant Body exercises.

Figure 3. The Giant Body

But beyond this aesthetic connection to an aspect of integral culture, these exercises are helpful for evoking experiences and insights that I believe highlight important aspects of the emerging integral worldview. I will illustrate this with several passages from Tarthang Tulku's (1997) commentaries on the Giant Body practices. Consider the following:

Neither the body nor any of its structures, systems, and subsystems are solid 'things'. They are not regions demarcated by opaque surfaces that are filled inside with dense, inert 'stuff'. A change in our usual focus shows each discrete structure or region to be largely space. This space both accommodates and is defined in its extent by interactions between other (smaller) structures or regions. These latter structures are in turn subject to the same observation. (pp. 23-24)

Through a detailed exploration of the Giant Body, either as visualized out in space or else one's own, the student may come to a direct and immediate apprehension of holarchical organization. I will briefly comment on a teacher's experience with this insight in a subsequent section. Tarthang Tulku (1977) continues:

[I]n the physiological model which has so far guided our investigation, the sentient 'body' is viewed as a cluster of insentient physical systems....As an alternative to this picture, it is possible that some kind of `knowing' is the primary fact of embodiment. The 'known', 'unknown', 'unknowing', and (directly) 'unknowable' things (like subatomic particles) would then derive from particular stances taken up by this 'knowing'. This may seem to be a difficult concept, but it will become more clear with the practice of the exercises. (pp. 24-25)

The student is encouraged to consider and begins to encounter knowing (sentience) as foundational to existence. Hinted at here (and developed further in subsequent exercises) is the role of perspectives in establishing and enacting the worlds that we experience.

Following the introduction of the fourth exercise, Just Interactions and Shining Outlines, in which the student is guided to view the body as a translucent nesting of outlines and to explore seeing it from multiple perspectives at once, Tarthang Tulku (1977) comments:

'Things' depend on a particular type of observation being conducted from a particular vantage point. Often 'things' are summary terms or abbreviations for the possible ways of viewing (and things to be viewed), which show what we are actually interested in encountering or considering at a particular time. Our 'interest' also reveals what type of awareness is operative in the encounter.

In Exercise 4 we can develop a mode of 'seeing' which is not limited to a particular position or 'point of view' at all. Because the 'eyes' are an embodiment of a type of 'knowing' which must take a position in order to perceive or know, try to perform these exercises without using your eyes or insisting that what you 'see' conforms to the usual presuppositions involving vision. These presuppositions will be singled out and challenged as we go along...

We may begin the exercises by 'imagining', but may progress beyond that to learn to 'know' in new and quite incontrovertible ways. Our 'knowing' is usually a simple conjuring up of conventional elements; but we may now learn, instead, more about how the conventional world of appearance emerges and unfolds in terms of bodies, knowers, and things known. This new type of knowledge may be concerned more with an open field or dimension--which makes it possible to take up various points of view-- than with the observed objects deriving from such particular points of view. We will have to explore further to decide. Perhaps there is a balance possible between these two concerns. (pp. 27-28)

Here, the student is encouraged to explore both the enactive role of perspectives and to begin to contact a type of knowing which may be considered "prior" to or constitutive of their enactivity in time and space. This higher-order open dimension, in which all particular vantage points can be taken up, is more fully introduced in the fifth exercise, Released to Space, and in multiple ways in subsequent exercises as well (Tarthang Tulku, 1977, p. 29).

In a series of practices which immediately follow the Giant Body exercises (Body-Mind-Thought Interplay; The Translucent Person; Participation as Observer/Participation as Embodied Person; Participation and Space), the student begins to attend to the interaction of body, mind, thought, and emotion in relation to her more spacious and open sense of embodiment, opening up boundaries and partitions in experience in subtler ways, and paying particular attention to the presence of the observer in the overall constellation of experience (Tarthang Tulku, 1977, pp. 35-42). These exercises are valuable on many levels, constituting an integral approach to exploring embodiment, but I will comment on just one aspect here.

Having been led to an experience of space as an unqualified openness, the student is enabled to more clearly perceive the co-emergence and co-constitutive nature of subject and object poles of experience. As Tarthang Tulku (1977) writes, "Following concerted practice of Exercise 9, it may be possible to see the emergence of objects and of the ordinary `knower' as a tendency toward `freezing' what is actually a completely open dimension" (p. 37). Here and elsewhere, Tarthang Tulku leads us in an exploration of the emergence of subject-object perspectives as a never-fully-consolidated freezing tendency that I believe gives us a visceral understanding of the process Wilber (2005c) notates in his integral calculus as 123/p, and which he describes as a momentary stopping or "freeze frame" in the "cascading flow of infinite perspectives" that allows us to apprehend objects in a world (Appendix B, para. 62).

Other approaches to investigating the dynamics of perspectives and the co-determination of subject and object poles of experience are offered in exercises focusing on the time and knowledge facets of being. These facets are of course intimately related to the space focus of the exercises above, but they allow for a fuller understanding of the dynamics to emerge. Several exercises on time are worth mentioning here.

In Exercise 17, The Object and Its Glow, the student is encouraged to consider the image of a phosphorescent cactus blossom as analogous to the "given togetherness" of the object and the "you" that perceives it, as a shimmering presentation of time. As Tarthang Tulku (1977) explains:

The image glows, but in a sense the image is inseparable from the glow. There is certainly no distance between the two aspects. Even the notion of `two' is an additional interpretive move. `The self and object in a world' is an undivided unity when seen as an instantaneous broadcast message of `time'. Yet the self (the glow), insensitive to `time', for that reason feels separate, distant, and independent. (p. 171)

It appears Tarthang Tulku (1977) is describing a quadratic view of the world, with self, object, and world emerging together in a unified presentation. The role of time here is significant, both in the creative "tetra-emergence" of phenomena, and as that which, when fully appreciated, allows the self to end its habitual alienation and "distance" from the world.

That the world consists not just of objects but of living presences may not be immediately apparent in the above exercise, but this dimension of reality is explored more directly in TSK Exercise 31, A Subject-Object Reversal. In this exercise, instead of experiencing the "you" (your sense of being a subject) as a presentation of time or the inseparable glow of objects, you instead shift the sense of subjectivity "out" into the world, such that all objects are a Thou, a presence which perceives you as an object. Imaginatively inhabiting the third person mode of experience, you allow your habitual center of identification to be the "known" pole for an infinitely and actively knowing universe.

I have spent a lot of time discussing exercises which relate to perspectives and subject-object interactions because these concepts are so central to Integral Theory, particularly in Wilber-5, but I would like to take a moment also to mention one other important idea that TSK practices might help to highlight: prehensive unification (karma and creativity).

Wilber's (2005a) quadratic elaboration of the Whiteheadian notion of prehensive unification, which holds that each unfolding moment of the universe transcends and includes the moment that came before it in such a way that continuity and creative novelty are both preserved, makes intuitive sense. A number of TSK exercises provide ways to explore this idea in some depth, however, with the potential to ground it experientially and to challenge naïve interpretations of it.

In a pair of exercises entitled Past and Future Projections, and Past, Present, and Future of Each Moment, the student is asked to attend, first, to thoughts, feelings, and images which have a temporal directedness, as a general developmental tendency, and then to investigate how "past" and "future" may also show up as characteristic tinges of each present moment of experience. In the first exercise, we simply notice how thought tends to head off in a particular direction, and we may note (in this and other exercises) how those directions have felt qualities that distinguish them from the feeling of the present. When we are familiar with these feelings, we may notice that, in some sense, they are already present in every moment of experience that we can identify.

Working with these exercises, we can explore first-hand the mix of "pastness" and creative novelty that characterize the prehensive unfolding of moments, and in an Integral classroom we might also notice the quadratic nature of these moments. In the TSK context, the exploration of the nature of time does not stop here, and Tarthang Tulku (1977) suggests that these exercises will also provide insight into the temporal emergence and consolidation of the self in each moment and the impact that has upon our experience of time as strictly and literally linear in its movement (p. 175).

In Love of Knowledge, Tarthang Tulku (1987) offers a range of exercises for exploring time. One is worth noting in the context of this discussion:

Inventing the Past: Focus on the memory of a specific event, either 'routine' or emotionally charged. Trace the future that developed out of that remembered event. Experiment with ways to 'strip away' this future, for example, by 'transporting yourself' directly to the past event, or by making the same journey sequentially, 'dropping' subsequent memories as you go. In doing the exercise, also pay attention to the evidence meant to validate the accuracy of what is remembered. (p. 107)

If we were exploring prehensive unification in the classroom, we might practice this exercise as a follow-up to those mentioned above. Its value, I believe, lies in the insight it may provide students into the actively and continually re-constructed nature of the past we "carry forward" into the present. On the level of polar knowledge or sensory experience, the past as included and transcended in the present moment appears as given. But this is complicated at the level of descriptive knowledge, and this exercise invites exploration of the narrative dimensions of the "presence of the past" in our ongoing experience.

TSK does not deny the truth of prehensive unification on the conventional level of experience, and it offers ways to explore this phenomenon as I have briefly discussed above, but it does suggest that there are perspectives which may transcend and include it, ultimately changing its import. Tarthang Tulku's (1977) words here are provocative:

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.' (p. xiv)

I believe Wilber would agree with this perspective. The direction in which TSK would open up and ultimately dismantle a notion such as prehensive unification is fully in accord with the non-dual vision of Spirit that informs the Integral model. If we embrace this vision, we must also be cognizant as we make our claims that it is the nature of phenomena to self-liberate - even the models we so carefully build!

In these few pages, I have only been able to offer a sampling of the TSK exercises that I suggest can be brought fruitfully into the integral classroom. As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, I found, in my initial review of the TSK exercises, 30 that illuminate or complement important aspects of the Integral vision (see Appendix 2). But truthfully, I believe the whole body of teachings is an invaluable resource. If I have accomplished my aims here, I will have given you at least a taste of the practical and nourishing promise it bears.

Prospects

In this presentation, I have focused on the potential of the TSK vision to highlight, open up, and explore a particular map of reality. As a visionary mode of inquiry intended to inspire love of knowledge and an appreciative engagement with Being in all its dimensions, TSK is particularly well-suited to this task. But beyond these important aims, it may also contribute in several concrete ways to an integral mapping of the Kosmos. I will not be able to explore these prospects in detail here, but I would like to bring them to your attention as additional areas of TSK-Integral interface that I believe merit further inquiry.

After briefly mentioning four suggestions, I will explore a fifth in a little greater detail. Because of space limitations, the treatment will be necessarily cursory. But even within the TSK context, most of these ideas have not been extensively developed, so the possibilities for interaction with the Integral vision are wide open.

• Tarthang Tulku (1997), in Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space, suggests a type of time-space-knowledge psychograph, based on the three levels of experience described in the TSK vision (p. xxxiv). Given the potential for an individual to operate from and perceive at different levels of time, space, and knowledge concurrently, Tarthang Tulku indicates that there are 27 possible variations in experience. These variations could be used to assess particular areas of confusion, or to gauge different ways to present the TSK vision (Tarthang Tulku, 1997, p. xxxiv), perhaps in conjunction with other Integral assessment tools.



• In an essay he contributed to Light of Knowledge, Stephen Randall, Ph.D. (1997), drawing on the ideas of focal settings and levels in TSK, proposes a way to map human experiences and knowledge disciplines according to the depth of experience and the breadth of focal setting they represent. He calls this map a "circle of settings" (p. 156), and suggests that the center of the map represent the highest (or third) level of experience. In an earlier section of this paper, I suggested a TSK reading of AQAL, which of course also maps perspectives and levels of experience. To my knowledge, Randall has not yet developed his map in much detail. I believe the AQAL map may help to flesh out his proposal, which is something I would like to explore further.



• Piet Hut, in a published conversation with Tarthang Tulku, proposes that math represents a space-oriented discipline, physics a space-time discipline, and biology a space-time-knowledge mode of inquiry (Tarthang Tulku & Hut, 2004, p. 240). He later develops these ideas more fully in an article entitled, "Complexity and Functionality: A Search for the Where, the When, and the How" (Hut, Goodwin, & Kauffman, 1997). Applying these notions to the discussions of levels and focal settings above, a more comprehensive and sophisticated time-space-knowledge analysis of various knowledge disciplines could be attempted, perhaps in conjunction with Wilber's analysis of these traditions according to native perspectives.



• Pointing to several places in which Tarthang Tulku examines the "rhythms" of time, space, and knowledge in history and the development of culture, John Smyrl (1997) proposes a comparative study of the TSK vision and Jean Gebser's work. He draws particular attention to Gebser's discussion of the shift from perspectival to aperspectival worldviews, which from a TSK perspective would be understood as a second-level `read-out' of time, space, and knowledge (Smyrl, 1997, pp. 435-439). Further study in this area is merited, in an integral context, because of the prominence of Gebser's ideas in Wilber's work, and because many TSK practices are aimed precisely at facilitating this shift to aperspectival vision (and beyond).

The fifth area of interface that I would like to propose for future inquiry is the relationship of Wilber's Integral calculus of indigenous perspectives to the "geometry of experience" developed by Tarthang Tulku (1997) in his most recent book, Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space. Both systems are too complex for me to adequately describe here, but I believe a brief survey of some of their common features will be sufficient to demonstrate their potential for mutual enrichment.

In an appendix attached to Excerpt C from the forthcoming Sex, Karma, and Creativity, Wilber (2005c) proposes a mathematical system which takes perspectives, rather than quantitative variables, as its basis. Through this system, Wilber (2005c) is able to describe the Kosmos in terms of interacting first-, second-, and third-person perspectives, which evoke through their interrelationship the world-horizons that comprise the lived experience of sentient beings. The notational system is quite complex, but its basic elements allow the user to demonstrate the many ways that sentient beings, in various person-perspective modes (1st, 2nd, 3rd, or even beyond), enact phenomenological spaces (an I-space, we-space, or it-space). Wilber (2005c) claims that he has taken this mathematical system out to the 7th person perspective, and that from it he has been able to generate the eight native perspectives that constitute all of the major modes of human inquiry.

A brief example of this notational system might help here:

1p(1p) x 1p (3-p) x 2p (3p)

This equation indicates that the first-person speaker [1p(1p)] is taking a third-person perspective [1p(3-p)] of a second person, such that only the objective aspects of that second person are disclosed or enacted [2p(3p)] (Wilber, 2005c). The equation has three distinctive parts that are worth noting: the first indicates the phenomenological space ("I") of a perspective-event, the second a perspective-mode being taken (third-person or objective), and the third a particular dimension of experience that is being enacted (an objective range of phenomena). An important feature of this mathematical system is that it requires the user to acknowledge the perspective-dimensions (and in many cases the subjectivity) of the persons and objects with which he interacts. For example, if I wanted to indicate that my first person is perceiving your first person, I would write, 1p(1p) x 1p(1-p) x 2p(1p). Including the (1p) after the 2p, I acknowledge that I am addressing someone who also possesses a first-person perspective of her own.

Other operations are also possible, indicating for instance that one person's perspective agrees with another person's, or that a particular person-perspective stops at (focuses on) and enacts a particular object or phenomenal space. This latter operation, which I briefly mentioned earlier in this paper, is written 123/p - the "freeze frame" that appears to be analogous to TSK's "freezing" of focal settings.

Although much more could be said about Wilber's system, I will turn now to a brief discussion of Tarthang Tulku's geometry of experience. Starting with the basic first-level intuition, "I am here" - in which "we can take `I' as the point of view operating at [a] particular point, `am' as being alive in time now, and `here' as the zero-point in space from which we begin" - Tarthang Tulku (1997) unfolds an inquiry into the dimensions of living experience that he represents graphically with zero-points, axes, baselines, cones, and spheres (pp. 3-5). Notably, Tarthang Tulku (1997) identifies the "I" or "knowledge" component of the above statement, not as an entity, but as a point of view or perspective.

Pointing out that here, now, and subject make little sense without the corresponding poles of there, then, and object, Tarthang Tulku (1997) constructs a geometry of manifest experience from the baselines established by these poles. As in Wilber's calculus, this mathematical system is built, not of static or pre-existent third-person entities, but of interacting knowledge-perspectives on time and space which enact subjects-in-worlds (pp. 4-8). A comment by Wilber (2005c) is worth noting here: "Thus, a universe comes into being, not when an inside is marked from an outside, or a before is marked from an after, but a group of sentient holons arise" [my italics] (Appendix B, para. 25). From a TSK perspective, Wilber (2005c) is arguing that the factors of time and space are not enough to enact universes; knowledge (sentience) is also required.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a detailed account of the elements of Tarthang Tulku's (1997) geometry. I will illustrate some of the foundational geometric structures here, and will direct the reader to Sacred Dimensions of Time and Space for a fuller explication.

A baseline is established by here and there, now and then, and subject and object.

A point is located by the intersection of two axes. (This figure evokes AQAL).

The end-points also require intersecting axes to fix or establish them. A single zero-point is thus ultimately established by 16 points.

The stopping or "freezing" of a particular point in space-time awareness is reminiscent of Wilber's 123/p operator.

Tarthang Tulku (1997) builds on these starting principles to construct an eightfold compass (evocative of the eight native perspectives), which he interfaces with a second eightfold compass to establish a sphere (suggestive of multiple holons enacting worlds).

In the spherical model, as in the previous example of "fixing" endpoints, 16 is an important number and represents in this geometry the fullness of experience. The fullness of the objects enacted by knowledge-perspectives is never divorced from space, however: the geometric forms represented by 16 or by combinations of this number, while complex and often densely fractal, are in an important sense always echoes of the "zero" out of which they arise (Tarthang Tulku, 1997, pp. 50-54).

Another important component of this geometry is the cone, which represents the dynamism of zero as it expands in time (Tarthang Tulku, 1997, p. 28). Tarthang Tulku sometimes describes this structure as a cone of knowledge, representing the temporal unfolding and development of worldviews and other structures of knowledge (pp. 151-154).

Figure 4. Cones of Knowledge

Together, these geometric figures interact to create complex, dynamic structures representative of the interaction of time, space, and knowledge in enacting infinite world-spaces. I cannot give a full presentation of this geometry here, but the following figure is one of many that Tarthang Tulku (1997) builds in his playful and highly creative inquiry.

Figure 5. Cones and Zeroes

If you look closely, you may see the AQAL axis and its radiating arms of time flowering ever outward in cones of knowledge as the abundant echoes of zero.

While the details of the correspondence between this geometry and Wilber's calculus are yet to be worked out, I believe there is enough common ground and mutual resonance to recommend further exploration. In an Integral classroom of the future, I would love to see computer animation used to bring these unfolding perspective-worlds alive, in a visionary celebration of a new way of knowing and being.

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