Video: Meditation in Fractured Times

The vast range of meditation practices in Buddhist traditions has stood the test of time. Still, we live in a culture that differs radically from Buddhist cultures of the past. Our minds and lives are fragmented, and people find even basic concentration challenging. In such circumstances, an approach grounded in inquiry at a deep level, together with non-dual acceptance, may be of special value.

Tibetan teacher Tarthang Tulku, active in the West for more than five decades, has developed such an approach: the Time, Space, Knowledge Vision. Jack Petranker, one of his senior students, introduced the inquiry-based Vision and present practices that derive from it. Jack Petranker is the Director of the Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages and the Founder and Senior Teacher of the Center for Creative Inquiry. Editor and author of numerous books on contemplative inquiry, Jack is a senior student of Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tarthang Tulku, an innovative, traditionally trained lama resident in America for fifty-five years.

This event took place on March 7, 2024.

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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Meditation in fractured times. March 7th, 2024.

ELON GOLDSTEIN: So welcome, everyone, to those of you in person and then to our larger crowd on Zoom. Welcome to Harvard Divinity School and Center for the Study of World Religions for our public talk with Dr. Petranker on meditation for fragmented times. My name is Elon Goldstein. I'm a lecturer at Harvard Divinity School. And for those of you, particularly on Zoom-- because I know most of the people here in person-- if you're affiliated as students of Harvard, then you should feel free to check out the listings in Harvard Divinity School. And we have courses given on Buddhism every semester that have no prerequisites, at least some of them. And so, you're very welcome to cross-enroll.

There is a great deal that one could say about Jack and the activities he's been involved in for decades and the projects that he has and continues to initiate, so I'll just give you a little slice, and we can maximize our time with him. Jack is the director of the Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages that's based in Berkeley, California. And through Mangalam, he coordinates a number of different kinds of initiatives. Mangalam holds academic conferences on topics related to Buddhist studies. And then sometimes, from those conferences, volumes are published. So, for example, a volume on the language of the sutras-- the language of the Buddhist scriptures.

Mangalam coordinates translations. And some years ago, the English translation from Sanskrit of a very important Mahayana Buddhist scripture-- the Vimalakirti Sutra was made under the auspices of the publishing side of Mangalam. So you can check out that English translation done by Paul Harrison and Louis Gomes.

There's an ongoing series of academic speakers of Buddhist studies through Mangalam that's highly worthwhile. It's geared for the general public, where scholars are boiling down their current research and then presenting to a general audience who's interested in Buddhism. Jack is also the founder and a senior teacher at the Center for Creative Inquiry, also based in Berkeley. But many, or even most, of the offerings of the Center for Creative Inquiry are given online. So they're accessible really to anyone, anywhere.

And the programs that Jack and other teachers connected with him at the Center for Creative Inquiry offer are related, either directly or indirectly, to the approach that he's be sharing with us today. So you can check out the websites of center for Creative Inquiry and of Mangalam Center for Research in Buddhist Languages. And then Jack has a law degree from Yale. Two other impressive degrees.

And for many decades, he's worked on projects closely with a Tibetan teacher, Tarthang Tulku, who was traditionally trained in Tibet in a thorough manner, both in outlook and practice, prior to the disruption of Tibet with the Communist armies invading in the 1950s. And then that teacher has been based in California for the past 55 years, working on a variety of large-scale projects, and Jack has worked closely alongside him for a long time.

So both on traditional projects related to preservation of Buddhist teachings, both Mahayana and Theravada, and then also on projects that have to do with various innovative explorations of how to present the gist of some of the transformative value coming from Buddhist teachings for a contemporary audience geared toward folks such as ourselves, who, for the most part, we know the lives we lead. We lead busy type lives, and we have many commitments. And many of us work and/or we have families and so how to start to convey transformative value for people such as ourselves who are not full-time contemplatives in a manner that some people were in the past or even are today? So those are some of the things that Jack has been involved in, and I'm happy to have him here with us and happy to turn it over to you. Thank you.

JACK PETRANKER: Thank you, Elon. Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. I appreciate the invitation and thank you to the Harvard Divinity School and Center for the Study of World Religions, and certainly to Dr. Goldstein for arranging all this and getting it set up. And thank you to those of you who are present here today for coming. And to those of you who are online, the invitation went out to the Center for Creative Inquiry mailing list, so I assume that some of you online, even though I don't see you now, are people I know. So, hello there.

So what I want to talk today about is this approach to meditation. Elon-- Dr. Goldstein has already pointed some of that out. It grows out of the work of Tarthang Tulku, who is one of the last remaining Lamas who received a complete education in Tibet-- he's 88 years old-- before the time that is of the Communist takeover and all of the difficulties that followed.

So I'm going to start with a little overview of what he's been doing in this country. And I'm to doing that or doing in the West since he arrived here. I'm doing that partly because I think people should know about it. It's pretty impressive work. And since he has not been teaching publicly for almost 50 years, people don't know him very well. They don't know his work.

So I appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit of that, but also because I want to address this issue, which comes up that will lead into the main part of the talk, and that is, why would a llama trained traditionally in the Tibetan tradition, why would he choose to adopt a style and a mode of teaching that is not traditional at all, even though at the same time he's strongly supporting the tradition? So I think that dichotomy-- is not really a dichotomy-- but those two different directions, it's a very interesting question. How is he doing both of those things at once?

So this is a picture of Tarthang Rinpoche. He's the one on the left. And this picture is pretty old. It was taken probably about 20 years ago, but I thought it was an appropriate picture to start with because so much of his life's work has been dedicated to preserving the written tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He's spent years and years, and our community has spent years and years doing that. And so a picture of him handing some books in Tibetan to a monk-- that just makes sense to me.

Now, this is a mandala that describes some of the work he's done. I think you can read it. I'm not going to go into all the details. It has a lot in it, like most mandalas do, I guess. But in the center is TNMC. That's the Tibetan Nyingma meditation center. That's the name of the church that he founded when he arrived in this country. He came here in '68. Moved to Berkeley in '69, and then founded TNMC that same year.

Underneath it, which is the east in a mandala, is the Yeshe De text project. That's the text preservation project. And some of the translation activity that we've done also comes under Yeshe De text project and then also Dharma Publishing, which is more oriented toward publications for the West. And that's where Rinpoche's books are published. He's written more than 30 titles at this point.

To the left-- so that would be the South-- is the Tibetan aid project. When he started that in 1969, it was primarily about helping the Tibetan refugees in India with material support so that they could survive. But over the years, as they became more firmly established, the focus of the Tibetan aid project switched to really supporting the text preservation projects and supporting monasteries through ceremony support and through rebuilding monasteries in Tibet. That's actually carried out by some other organizations. He's founded about 17 different organizations in all.

And then Odiyan is our country center. You'll see a couple of pictures of Odiyan toward the end of this little presentation. And Ratna Ling is our retreat center. I'll have more to say about those later. And then the Nyingma Institute is actually where he started presenting the teachings formally, you could say, to the West. It was founded in 1972, and I'm going to show you a picture of the institute. This was actually started-- the building was acquired in 1973. And it's been working steadily since that time.

They used to call themselves gateway to Buddhism in the west, which is a nice title, but nowadays there's lots and lots of gateways. When we started in the early '70s, there weren't many Buddhist centers, especially Tibetan Buddhist centers around. So things have changed, but it's still actively offering classes and programs. I'm going to show you a picture of the meditation room at the institute.

These were people practicing what we call Kumeyaay Tibetan yoga. And the reason I'm showing it to you is because it's actually of all the teachings we do, it's probably the most popular. It's a physical movement. Kumeyaay means something like touching the subtle body or touching subtle body energies. Something like that. And it's very popular, especially in Europe and South America, where we have centers. And in the West, and in the United States. So that's been an ongoing part of our activities.

Now, the main focus of what Rinpoche has done-- or let me just say that Rinpoche taught at the Nyingma Institute until or through 1977. And at that point, he said to his students, he said, OK, then I have other things to do now. You all are westerner's. How to speak to Westerners. You teach. So that was a big shock, actually, to the people who were at the institute at the time. But they figured out a way to do that.

But he started working primarily on two things. One, the Odiyan Country Center, which we'll talk about later, and the other was this text preservation project. So this is a picture of the floor-- the working space at Dharma Press, which is located at our retreat center. As you can see, it's a big, big operation. What you actually see in the middle of the picture is a collator, where they're gathering the texts so that they can be produced.

These are texts that are done in the traditional pecha style that's used in Tibet. But we do a lot of texts now in Western style because, actually, Tibetans prefer that for the most part nowadays. And there was a lot of work that went into collecting these texts. Rinpoche wanted to collect everything that he could lay his hands on, basically, especially related to the Nyingma tradition but also the Tibetan Buddhist canon. And that was the first part of it.

And then typesetting these texts. Originally, we worked with photocopies because it was before you could typeset in Tibetan, but since-- gosh, I don't know-- the early '80s or mid '80s, we've been typesetting in Tibetan. So that's a big part of it. And then the books are produced here. They're shipped over and distributed, for the most part, in India. So we've given away over 6 million books. We've produced and distributed and given away over 6 million books in Tibetan, all Buddhist-related. There are some Tibetan histories and things that have gone into that too. That's been really, as I say, his life's work, his heart work, what he really deeply, deeply, deeply is committed to preserving because he feels that if these texts are not available, the tradition will be lost.

Now, the other branch of our publishing operation is books in English. As I said, he's written about 30 books. What you see here is a sample of our latest books. The ones on the top row are all by Rinpoche, and you can see if you can see the titles-- I guess you can-- on the left-hand side, you have the compassion side. The Gesture of Great Love and Caring. And then on the right-hand side, you have more the wisdom side, which is more what I'll be talking about today. Keys of Knowledge, Dimensions of Mind, Revelations of Mind. Those are the kinds of things he's been exploring.

The two books down below on the left are by students of his related to his teachings, and then the other two books on the right-hand side below are-- that's a textbook for colloquial Tibetan that we've also published. The books that are distributed in India normally get distributed at another project of his, the World Peace Ceremony. In Tibetan, that's called the Monlam Chenmo-- Nyingma Monlam Chenmo. This is a picture of the world peace ceremony. About 8,000 monks gather there every year. He started that in 1989. The first year, there were about 300 monks, but it grew pretty quickly. And we've been sponsoring that and originally organizing it, but now it's been taken over by Nyingma organizations in India and the Himalayas.

Another big part of his work, besides the text preservation and distribution, is working with certain kinds of ritual objects. Oops, go back here. These are prayer wheels. Some of you are going to be familiar with prayer wheels in the Tibetan tradition, typically handheld, but there are also bigger prayer wheels. These are handheld prayer wheels that we produce.

We've given away about 200,000 of those, I think, over the years to Tibetans. They're very highly prized because we have all this printing technology, so nowadays we print these on microfilm so you can fit the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon twice in one little handheld prayer wheel. So people think that's pretty cool. I think it's pretty cool, too.

This is a machine that one of the volunteers invented. All of our work is volunteer work, by the way. Just about everybody in our organization is a volunteer-- full-time volunteer or part-time volunteer-- short-term, but some, like me, have been there-- I've been there 45 years. Anyway, this is for rolling a whole bunch of prayer wheels at once.

There's also prayer flags. And our prayer flags are sort of typical of Rinpoche. He does things big. So you may be familiar with Tibetan prayer flags. You see them hanging in strings. Ours are big. This is one of them. This next picture shows them silkscreening a prayer flag. So you get an idea of the size of the prayer flags. And we have thousands of these flying at Odiyan, and we distribute them in different places also.

There's also tsa tsas that he does. This is a very complicated one. These are objects that are molded and then and then stamped out in clay. And one of the things we've done with tsa tsas is there's a project we've started called planting seeds of healing. And tsa tsas were traditionally often buried in the ground as protection against earthquakes, for instance. And so we have been burying tsa tsas in the ground to heal places where there's been real suffering. So the first places they went were concentration camps. I'm sorry. I went the wrong way. Were concentration camps. Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz were the first two. And that's an ongoing project.

OK, I'm going to move on to our retreat center, Ratna Ling. This is a picture of Ratna Ling. This is actually the back entrance to Ratna Ling. But it's a very nice retreat center. We acquired the land for it and started the building really in 2004. And I should mention-- I don't have another place to say it-- that we also have centers-- well, I did mention that we have them in Brazil-- three centers in Brazil, one in Argentina-- while study group in Argentina-- and then centers in Germany and the Netherlands.

One more building I'm going to show you-- this is not a complete picture, but you're getting the idea-- is center. This is where the Mangalam Research Center is located, and also where the Center for Creative Inquiry is located. And that's in the middle of downtown Berkeley. And I'm also now going to show you our country center. That's what we call it. It's Odiyan country center. This is the central temple at the country center.

You can see it's not traditional Tibetan style. Nowadays, there's quite a few Lamas who have been to the West, and they've built these Tibetan temples, and they tend to be in the traditional style, which is sort of they look a little bit like the Potala Palace in Lhasa. This is not. It's a kind of a blend. There's a lot of Tibetan elements in this, but the dome is something you never see in Tibet. So it's an interesting example of how we've tried to incorporate or move toward Western styles.

And then I'll show you one more picture of Odiyan. This is the Odiyan stupa. It's located it's on the same property at Odiyan. It's about a third of a mile from the Odiyan-- from the central temple. Its gold leafed, which is a big project. Has to be redone every 15 or 20 years. Yeah, it's a big project. It's a 113ft high.

It's always kind of amazing to me in one way that people don't know more about this. I mean, as far as I know, this is the biggest stupa in North America. In one way, it's also not surprising that people don't know because, as I said, Tarthang Tulku withdrew from the public view in 1978, and Odiyan itself is closed to the public. The retreat center is open to the public. Of course, the Institute is, but Odiyan itself is very rarely open to the public. Occasionally, we'll have an open house.

So that's really all I want to say about Rinpoche's work-- what he's been able to accomplish. It's not a complete picture, but I think it does give you some idea of what he's been doing all these years. He's been here 55 years. So what have you have to say for yourself? Well, he has a few things to say for himself.

But now I want to turn and-- because Rinpoche turns from that. So Tarthang Tulku turns away from the tradition. I don't mean he turns away in the sense that he turns his back on it. I just mean, it's like now he's going to face in another direction, and the direction that he's facing in is toward the west. And the reason-- what leads me to talk about fragmented times-- and I'm going to talk in a moment about a fragmented mind-- what leads me to talk about that is that it's so different from traditional Buddhist cultures.

Now, many of you probably know that Buddhism has adapted itself to different cultures. Wherever it's gone, it's taken on different forms. But there is a kind of a thread that runs through it that has to do with being a part of a culture that adheres to a tradition, and that makes room in its understanding of the world for spiritual values. Or you could say religious values. Whatever form that takes, there's that kind of commonality among all of the cultures that Buddhism has gone into in all of the countries, just about all of the countries of Asia. And I'm not going to go into all of that.

You come to the West, and things are really different. That's not what this culture is about. Some of you may be familiar with Charles Taylor's book, A Secular Age, where he basically says to be a secular culture means to live in a culture where you can entertain the idea that there are no spiritual values, that there are no religious values. And that's our culture. And people have turned their back to a very large extent.

Of course, maybe I'm talking in the wrong place here to study for world religions, but I think you all know this. People have turned their back on traditional religions in a lot of ways. And the result is that there's a kind of a loss of a center. We live in, as I say, fragmented times in a disenchanted world. That's the way that people often talk about that. We live in a world in which there's nothing that coheres. The things fall apart.

And I chose that phrase because it comes from a very well-known poem-- many of you probably know it-- by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming. I'm just going to read this briefly because I think it epitomizes the age. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre." A gyre is a spiral, basically. "The falcon cannot hear the falconer." So it's this image of a falcon that's been sent out. And now it keeps going farther and farther out, and it's lost its connection to the falconer. It's not going to be able to find its way back. "Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

What are you going to do in a culture like that? You come from a traditional Buddhist culture. It actually always amazes me that someone like Rinpoche-- I'm not saying he's the only one, but he did come from this very traditional culture-- you come to a culture that's so completely different. He had things that we've taken for granted. When he escaped from Tibet and made his way to India, he suddenly encountered things that he'd never seen before, just things we take for granted.

And somehow he's managed to find his way to work with that. And he's not only in terms of surviving-- I mean, he comes to this country, and he has to deal with all the red tape of how do you found a corporation, things like that. But more important, really, how do you transmit these teachings to the West? What's the right way to do that?

And the problem is partly that we live in this strange culture. We're really kind of unique in the history of the world. I mean, I suppose all cultures are unique in their own ways, but you could still kind of say, Well, here are all the traditional cultures over here. There's like 10,000 of them, and then here's America, or the west, I should say. And it sort of stands by itself. It's just one of the very, very few cultures, and there have been materialist cultures in the past. It's rare.

It's not only though, that we live in that kind of a culture, but partly because of that, our minds are fragmented as well. And I'm just going to list off a few things. You all know this, so I don't think I need to go into it in any detail. We're just bombarded with information. It's overwhelming. We are invited all the time to participate in social media.

And of course, the whole way that social media operates and the whole way that our capitalist system operates is to feed on emotions, to encourage emotions, to build up desires and wants and needs, all of which is pretty much antithetical to a spiritual or meditative or contemplative way of life. And then there's this tremendous pressure of time.

And so the question you can ask yourself-- and I'm sure you all would answer this in different ways-- but so you want to meditate, do you find time to meditate? And how many of you actually do? Now some you, I'm sure, do, but it's not so common. And years ago I was Dean at the Nyingma Institute, and at that time we would do four-month retreats and two-month retreats, and so on. Nowadays, we do like weekends because people can't find the time to do that. It's not out of a lack of an interest. People just-- their time is taken up.

And then finally, an inability to concentrate. And there are lots of studies done about this. People can't focus on anything for any length of time. I read a study the other day that said-- and you can read different studies that give you different numbers. The one I'm thinking of said that people in their tests could only concentrate for-- What was it? eight seconds before their minds went on to something else. They said, actually, goldfish can concentrate longer than human beings. They can do 10 seconds.

So it's pretty amazing. That's our situation. So OK, you're interested in meditation. You would like to be able to communicate the value or benefit of meditation. Now, what is meditation? Am I really going to claim that I can answer that question? No, but what I can say is that the word that usually gets translated as meditation-- There are others in Tibetan, it's gum. In Sanskrit, it's bhavana. And it really means something like cultivate, cultivating, bringing to life.

There's some sort of teaching or there's some sort of insight, and now you want to cultivate it or bring it to life. How do you do that in a culture that's fragmented in these ways-- when our minds are fragmented in these ways-- when we can't really concentrate? It's not that it's impossible to do that. I mean, I'm sure many of you have ties to different meditative traditions. It's possible for people to do that, but it goes against the grain. It's just so difficult in a world where we're constantly being pulled in different directions.

So traditional meditation can still work. But it's a real challenge. I think a challenge in a different way from what it would have been in a culture that doesn't have this incredible proliferation of stuff. And I mean stuff on the kind of material level, but also on the mental level. Our minds are just stuffed full of stuff. What can you do with that? What can you do with traditional meditation?

You can work on it. And there are people all over the west, all over America, the United States, who do sincerely practice. They go on long retreats. But boy, they're the exception. It's very difficult to do that. And when it comes to retreats, so few people can find time for retreats.

OK, so what happens in that kind of situation is that meditation itself gets turned into a technique. It's just one more thing to fit into your schedule. And why would you do it? Well, because there are things in your life that are giving you trouble. You're tense. You're stressed out. You're anxious. You're feeling depressed. Excuse me. So maybe meditation will help you relax.

So very often nowadays, you see meditation used that way. You see meditation presented that way. This will help you relax. This will help you feel better. This will make you happier. Those are all good things. But it is not about meditation in the traditional sense, which is about transforming our vision of reality.

Meditation is a method-- it's a means-- I don't want to call it a technology or technique-- but it's a means for cultivating the mind so that you really begin to understand yourself, and your mind, and the world that you inhabit in a different way. And that's the part, I think, that Rinpoche seized upon when he came to this country.

So I like to think of it as a path of inquiry. He writes a lot about inquiry and the importance of inquiry. And I think that's because that's one thing he found when he came to the West. People were not so able to meditate. The reason he introduced kum nye, the Tibetan relaxation or Tibetan yoga that I talked about earlier, was when he started teaching Westerners in a kind of sustained way. He led some summer retreats at the Institute. He found they just couldn't meditate. They just couldn't sit.

And so Kum nye is a traditional practice, and he found that if people did Kum nye first, then they could tune in to their experience more. So that is one approach-- one way to do it. But again, it's sort of working with what you have and trying to make it a little bit better, a little bit more able to concentrate, a little bit more able to focus. And when you get more into it, then yes, of course, that can develop for those people who really can go that way.

But what he did find was that Westerners have very quick minds. And I've heard him talk about that. I'm not sure he uses this word, but let's just say they're very good at grasping concepts. They can move quickly.

Things that I've heard him say, that things that Tibetans would-- they'd receive a teaching and they'd go away and study it for two years, and then they'd come back and say, Well, now I'm ready for another teaching. Westerners would receive it, and they'd come back the next day and say, Boy, that was really interesting. What else can you tell me? It's like that. Well, so that has a downside, but it also has a positive side, but you can use that. That's what he decided he wanted to do.

And it's not a question about of learning to experience differently or feel differently. That's part of it. But what he really, I think, emphasized was that learning to see differently. So the specific teaching of his that I'm going to be focusing on and drawing on starts with a book that he published in 1977 called Time, Space, and Knowledge. And so he wrote it-- it was published after he'd been in this country less than 10 years. So he drew some quick conclusions and started acting on them. But the subtitle of that book is a new vision of reality. And I think that tells you a lot about what he is really trying to introduce.

Another book that he wrote in that series-- we abbreviate it usually as just TSK, Time Space Knowledge. Another book that he wrote in the TSK series is-- it's called Visions of Knowledge. And the subtitle of that one is liberation of the modern mind. And again, I think that's kind of a good clue.

We have a particular kind of mind. You can call it a modern mind. You could call it something else. But our way of being mindful is different, and that is something he's trying to work with, with the TSK teachings and other kinds of teachings and books that he's written. But I'm going to focus, especially on the TSK teachings.

So what he really emphasizes is the importance of inquiry, and has explored it in so many different ways. I'm going to give you a quote here from a chapter in one of the books. This book is called Love of Knowledge. You notice they all kind of have similar titles. Makes it hard for people to keep them straight sometimes.

Anyway, there's a chapter in that book called A Rain of Questions. So this is just one paragraph that I picked out of this chapter. But I think it gives you a kind of a sense of the questions he thinks would be important for Westerners to investigate using this capacity for inquiry-- this quickness that the Western mind has. So I'm going to read you these.

"What is behind our mental patterns? How do they arise? What is the mind gain access to what it feeds on? Who experiences? Who knows? And who responds? What role do memory and interpretation play in shaping the contents of consciousness? How does experience arise? And how do thoughts and the senses interact? What is it that changes over time? And how?

So I tried to read that slowly enough so that you could, maybe for just a few milliseconds, engage each one of those questions. But as you can see, I mean, that paragraph is like, OK, let's do a two-month retreat and work on this. Even for Westerners. These are very profound and subtle questions, but they can be explored at a lot of different levels. And even beginning to explore them-- even beginning to realize that you could ask these kinds of questions is already opening up, you might say, to a new vision of reality.

So he says-- this is from the same page on Love of Knowledge a little further down, he says, "Such a way of investigating reveals a rich source of knowledge available in this very moment. We touch it when we turn from the content of what we know to investigate how our knowledge is put together." I'm going to returned to that point at the end of this talk. "Turning away from the content of what we know."

So there's a poem that I like-- or at least I like the beginning of the poem. I'm sort of a shallow reader. I know the beginning of this poem, but it's a long poem. I've never read the whole thing-- by Wallace Stevens called The Man with the Blue Guitar. This is the first stanza. He says, They said, You have a blue guitar. You do not play things as they are. The man replied, things as they are changed upon the blue guitar.

So if you think about what Rinpoche is doing, you could say he's playing a blue guitar. He does not play the guitar, but you get the idea. The idea is to be able to turn things a little bit. It's like if you imagine you have-- this is reality and then you just tilt it by 10 degrees and suddenly things look really different. That's the blue guitar. That's what happens when you start to do this kind of inquiry. And while Stephen's blue is the color of poetry and imagination so I think it's completely appropriate.

OK, so now let me get into the TSK teachings, and that will lead us into the kinds of meditation that would work for fragmented times. That's really what we're looking at. So TSK-- I'm going to make a comparison here with Buddhism. Rinpoche is very, very clear from the first book on that TSK is not Buddhist. He's not talking as a Tibetan Lama. I mean, he says, Look, I got this training. It's a Tibetan Lama that probably influences things-- how I think about things, but it is not Buddhist.

So when you make comparisons-- I'm about to make a comparison, and that's probably not quite true to the intention behind the TSK vision, but I'm going to do it. So Buddhism starts with the self. I mean, people. Could say it differently, but that's what I'm saying. As you probably all know, the Buddha said one of the characteristics of conditioned existence, the world we live in, is that there is no self, or at least that the self is not what we think it is.

So when you start from that approach, one of the things you begin to see is how the self is. governed by-- is driven by what are called the three poisons. Greed, hatred, and delusion. And the practice here is to reject, you could say, the existence of the self, or you could simply say reject the importance of the self.

So you do that by applying antidotes to greed, hatred, and delusion. That's one way. You do that by developing compassion-- relative compassion-- absolute compassion. Or you do it by seeing things as they are. The Buddha said-- that's what he said. He said, I've seen things as they are. That's kind of what we're aiming for.

Now, how they are-- One of the whole one of the key questions in TSK and in Rinpoche's writings generally is, What does it mean to say something is? Maybe it doesn't mean what we usually think it does. And that's one of the questions that we explore.

But TSK does not focus on the self directly. There's a lot of discussion about our ordinary understanding of the self and how that gets put together. And we'll say more about that. But it talks about time and space and then knowledge.

And the point that he makes-- this is kind of the key move, it seems to me-- is that the way we understand time and space commits us to the self. If you understand time the way we understand it and you understand space the way we understand it-- and I'll be talking a little bit about that understanding-- then it follows that you have a self at the center of existence. And now you've got greed, hatred, and delusion-- all of these different factors that play into it.

So in the TSK approach, you question our understanding of time and space, and then when time and space are different, knowledge is different. And one of the things that's different-- to jump ahead a little bit-- is that knowledge is not something that's owned by the self. Different kind of own. So let's start with time.

So our usual view of time-- of course, everything I'm saying is really kind of simplified-- but our usual view of time is that it's divided into three domains. The past, the present, and the future. And another part of our usual view of time is that the way we move-- and we do move. I guess that's a presupposition. We do move from past to present to future, and we do that moment by moment by moment. That's our understanding of time. It's a linear understanding of time in the sense that it's a line. It's a one-dimensional line. Moment, moment, moment, moment, moment. And somehow, those moments give us past, present, and future.

And that particular way of understanding time is based on the self and its needs. And the way to think about that is that the self is a narrative. There are some people nowadays-- some philosophers like to say, No, the self is not a narrative. Most people-- it's kind of a popular idea these days, actually. The self is a narrative structure. And I mean, I don't care for my purposes right now what philosophers say. Is just that when you think about what it means to be a self, it means that you have a past and a present and a future. There is an unfolding of the self across time.

There's a who I am. There's a present. There's a how I got here. There's a past, and there's a where I'm going. It's the future. And if don't have those, you don't have a self. So the self and linear time are very closely connected to each other. And it's not only that the self unfolds across time like that, but that it does so in a specific way. The self always wants something.

This is a Buddhist term too, or a Buddhist idea, or an idea from the Buddha. In Buddhism, you say we live in the desire realm. That's the world that we inhabit. So we're always moving on the basis of our wants and our needs, and of course that includes our fears-- the things we want to avoid. And so on. So it's that wanting that commits us to linear time.

So Rinpoche has a sentence that I love in one of the TSK books that expresses this. He says, The force of the self's desire unfolds as the momentum of linear time. The force of the self's desire unfolds as the momentum of linear time. So if we didn't have a self at the center wanting things and being spread out across time, you wouldn't get linear time to begin with. That's our story.

Our story about time is that it's linear and that it has a momentum. And why is that? Because of our desire. Rinpoche talks about specifically about the desire to exist-- to be. We have a desire to exist. All sorts of desires. The force of the Self's desire unfolds as the momentum of linear time.

Now, that might make you think that this is a view that's idealist, or it says that time-- keep it simpler, time is not subjective or is just subjective rather. That it's the story of the self. But it's not just that. On the subjective side, you could say, Yes, time is about me and who I am and where I came from and where I'm going.

But objectively, that is, in the world-- this world that surrounds us and that we're a part of-- that's also a subject to linear time. It's the world of cause and effect. This happens, and then that happens. The Buddha has something to say about that. But in our terms, you could say explanations. Explanations are a kind of story. They're a kind of narrative. We say, oh, stories. That's just subjective. Cause and effect-- this happened, then that happened. That's a story we tell about the way things are.

So our whole understanding of time, both subjectively and objectively, is based on this idea of linear time. And the thing that's really missing from that, and I think where Rinpoche would like us to engage or what he invites us to engage in is what's missing is the dynamic of time. When we talk about linear time, OK, moment, moment, moment, moment. Now the question is, how do we get from one moment to the next moment?

It's actually surprising to me. I read articles whenever they pop up on my feeds on Twitter or whatever. There are things about time pretty often. Time is the most commonly used noun in the English language. Did you know that? Of course, it's usually like, What time are you going to pick me up? It's not because people are walking around pondering the nature of time.

But anyway, whenever I read these things, they never talk about this question about the dynamic of time. It's very interesting to me. How do you get from one moment to the next? What power is that? Can you touch that dynamic? It's different from the moment to moment to moment quality. It's different from the linear quality. There must be something going on that's not part of that linear stream.

If you could touch that, time is experienced, as I say here, that would be very interesting. You'd be learning something new. You'd be asking questions about time, or you'd be investigating time in a way that may be opened up, and that would be one way to practice meditation. We're going to be looking at that in just a moment.

And just in passing, let me say that, because that's the focus-- because TSK is interested and I right now am interested in time as its experience I set aside anything about physics-- time in physics. I mean, really important if you're a physicist. Kind of important if you like to read articles about physics, but not our immediate experience of time. And the question there is, Well, where does this dynamic of time-- it where does it come from? What is it like? Can we touch the dynamic? Can we feel that directly?

So that's the question. Can you practice with it? And so I'm going to actually invite you to do a little bit of practice just for a couple of minutes, just so you get a feel for this. And when we go on to space and knowledge, I'll ask you to do that also, although I need to be a little mindful of time. But I'll try to do that.

So how do you practice with it? Well, the first thing you could say is just become aware of the stories that we're always telling. It's not a difficult concept. It's not so difficult to do. The idea here is right now you are telling or living-- those two are a little different. But you're engaged in a story about what's happening. It's not like you're saying it out loud or internally to yourself, but there's a story. You're making sense of the way things are. And you do that through a story about what's going on.

So that's the practice. Let's just do that for just a minute. Always good to settle into the body, to be aware, to be in the present, because the stories that are about what's going to happen tomorrow, let's say-- they don't connect us with experience. And we're really talking about experience. What's the dynamic of time?

You're not going to find that in a story about what's going to happen tomorrow. You're thinking about what's going to happen tomorrow. Sure, that's part of the story. So anyway, let's just do that for a couple of minutes. Just be aware of the stories that we are always telling.

OK. As I'm going to say later, practices in TSK can be very short. But even for TSK, that was a little short. But maybe just a little sense. And if you have questions about that or comments about it, that can come up when we do discussion later.

Now, the thing about stories-- you may have noticed this-- is get distracted by the content of the story. You remember that quote that I had up earlier? We turn away from the content. The content is sort of like a sinkhole. We just get caught in it, and we can't find our way out so quickly. Then, eventually, we find our way out. Nothing wrong with getting lost in stories, but when we do, we kind of lose the opportunity to look at the activity, the dynamic, the aliveness of what's going on because the content takes over.

So, as I say here, stories can be distractions. We get lost in their content. But-- and this is another thing that I think is important about the way Rinpoche presents things in TSK, especially in one of the books in the TSK series that I'm particularly fond of, is that stories are this culture's superpower.

And what I mean by that is we love stories. We're always involved in stories. We entertain ourselves with stories. We're always telling stories. It's just what we care about a lot. And we can use that. We can use our love of stories to really engage the dynamic of stories to what you want to do-- and I'm not going to ask us to do this right now because I'm going to move on-- but instead of getting lost in the content, the way you would do that is by dwelling in the story. And what I mean is, by dwelling in the aliveness, what does it feel like to inhabit a story?

Usually, we have a story, and then we move on to the next story. And we kind of stay on the surface. It goes along with this idea of the linear flow of time. Moment, moment, moment. A moment doesn't have much time in it. There's not much opportunity to be aware of what's going on in that moment. It's on to the next moment. But you can dwell in the stories that you tell-- in their aliveness, in the field of experience that's available you could say within each moment, even although that's a little misleading.

OK, so that's one way to do it. There's a second way that I'm going to have us work with for just a moment. And that is to break the narrative. I think break isn't the best word, but that's what I have on the slide, so let's use it. The idea here is that we are always telling a story, but we don't have to go along with the moment-to-moment narrativity of the story. We can break it.

And we can do that with a practice that Rinpoche introduces that I'm very fond of. Tons of practices in the TSK books. I don't know, over 100 practices. Moments between moments. The idea here is that every time you have an experience and then move on to the next experience, which is linked because of the narrative, we go with the link, but we fail to notice or we don't pay much attention to the fact that in between there's all sorts of things going on. There are moments between the moments.

So the example of that-- and I'm just going to give you a very simple example, but it's an important example. It's powerful-- is breathing. So most of you probably have some experience with working with breathing and meditation. So the idea here is you breathe in, and then you breathe out. Maybe there's a little gap in there or not.

But in between the time that you breathe in and breathe out, something else going on. You've thought about lunch. Or you've noticed that your knee is itching, or whatever it is. And every time you let yourself be aware of these things that come in the moments between moments, you're breaking the narrative. And you're sort of undermining the power of the narrative to catch you up.

So it's a way of engaging a different understanding-- a different experience of time. So that would be another way to do it. I'm actually not going to do it now because I'm going to move along.

But I will say that if you can do this, if you can break the narrative, all of these things that are such problems for us-- we feel guilty. We feel like we're failures. We're anxious. We're stressed. We're lonely-- all of those things-- they're stories.

I'm not saying they're not true. They're true in the way that stories are true. But when you understand something about stories then you realize that they don't control you in the way that we tend to think they do. I said before, one of the big questions is, What does it mean to say that something is? Or to say something is real. Or to say that it is-- if you understand that as meaning, it's the content of a story. Gives you a lot more options. A lot of things to work with. So that's how this works.

OK, I can see that I'm not really going to have time to really introduce the other practices so much, but I'll at least talk you through them. So space-- our usual view is kind of simple. Space is just empty. There's nothing interesting about space. Here we are. I mean, I'm talking about space between planets or plotting out how to send a rocket to the moon or something like that.

I'm talking about space in our experience. It's not in our experience. We don't experience space. Space is just the gap between the things that we're interested in. It's just empty. So we care about things. We care about entities. Space is just a blank. As Rinpoche writes in one of the TSK books, space has disappeared in our ordinary understanding.

So what happens is the self gets a job because of that. Space means nothing. There's a famous quote by Pascal in the 17th century. He's kind of coming up. People are discovering the vastness of solar space. And he says, The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. There's nothing going on. There's no meaning. The world that we live in, if it's just space, is meaningless.

And so the self has a job. It's got to tell a story to fill up the space to make it meaningful. So that's how we put things together. There's a nice quote from Rinpoche. I'm going to read it, but I'm not going to go into it. See if it kind of resonates with you. "In one unified motion, the self takes a position, posits a situation, and imposes meaning. That's the job that the self has. Lovely quote.

So the self tells a story, and that means that space becomes a world. The self inhabits a world because it's told a story. It's sort of filled up space with all this stuff, and now you've got a world that the self inhabits. And in that world, there are things to which the self gives identity. That's our world. That's our ordinary understanding. It all comes out of a particular understanding of space.

And that is true even in meditation. Now, there's non-dual meditation. I'm not going to try to go into that now. But most meditation kind of will go along with this idea that their self is involved in practicing meditation. I'm going to meditate, we say. I can't get away from that. Our language is all built up this way. But you say, Watch the breath. Well, built into that way of saying it is that someone is watching something. That's the story that the self has to tell.

So let's look at it in terms of TSK. I think the simplest way to say it is that space is what allows. Space allows appearance. It's the medium or the matrix. It's not just physical space. There's mental space. There's thought space. There's like that.

And so space becomes more of a field, and it's everywhere. The quote from TSK that-- people really like this quote-- people who study TSK. One point is all points. And in that allowing space is alive. It's not just empty. It's not just nothing at all. There's the capacity for finding an aliveness in our experience, that is not something we impose on experience. But it's there. It's built in, you could say, to space.

And the way to practice with that is by not owning your experience. Basically, to say, Well, let's stop being a self and let ourselves experience the field. And you can even experience the sense of self as something that's given by space-- given by the field of experience.

In the field of experience, one of the things that shows up as a self. That's interesting. And that self makes all sorts of claims about being an owner of experience, for instance, or being the one who experiences. That's an interesting story, but you can come at it from the other side. Remember I said, playing on a blue guitar? Shifting things. You're looking from the side of space or the field of experience instead of from the side of the self.

And if you want to try to practice this at some point later, this is a practice any of you could do at any time, letting yourself focus on breathing with the sense that no one's doing the breathing, which is true. The body knows perfectly well how to breathe. Breathing knows how to breathe. You don't need a self to breathe. But we always automatically assume and tell the story that I'm the one who's breathing. There's a practice for you. No one is breathing. Going to skip that.

I kind of like to talk about this, but we only have about eight minutes left, right? Yeah, 10 minutes. OK, let me just go over this briefly, and then I'll skip this very nice little drawing that I spent some time creating, but I'll have to just let go of it. OK.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

JACK PETRANKER: I will when I get-- OK. Yeah, OK. You're tempting me. OK. OK. So if space and time are different, knowledge is different also. I've already said that. Knowledge is not what the knower knows. Knowledge is available within the field of experience. It's very different.

I mean, yeah, the blue guitar, but boy, it's a real riff. It's like somebody going to town on this blue guitar because it's very, very different from the way we usually see things. And it means that the field itself is alive with meaning and significance. We don't impose it. It's not that it's some weird, mysterious significance. It's our experience when we're kind of our best possible selves or even better than our best possible selves. It's what's in the field of experience. So the practice would be to let knowledge arise within the field.

Here's my little chart, which I will-- It's not very complicated. It's just that normally we focus on what's in the center there, what I call here experience one. The idea here is in the middle ring there we have stories and emotions and memories and thoughts and all that stuff. You let that fall away. You let it dissolve, and now you're in pure experience. You're experiencing.

What I'm suggesting is that there's this outer layer of experience two, which is that stories and thoughts and emotions and memories and all of that is also experience. When you can experience it as experience, now, you are opening yourself up to a different kind of knowledge-- a different way of knowing. And it all has to do with not getting caught in the content. And that's why I say, You know, knowing, and knowing and that's deliberately sort of-- what's the word I want? Gnomic. But just think about it. You know you're knowing in the act of knowing. And I do want to say that even though-- there a little microphone here, I never knew that.

OK, I do want to say that to practice with this, it does help to be able to focus. I'm not just dismissing ordinary meditation because you ground in experience. Otherwise, you're going to be lost in the content. Everybody knows that in meditation. And content is not problematic if we understand that as content, but it is problematic if we understand it as reality. It's not.

So retreats are actually very helpful. And we offer retreats. We offer TSK retreats. But it does mean that once you've grounded, once you do have a kind of a foundation, then the practices in TSK can be very short. Just a few minutes. Moments between moments. Let's look at that for a few minutes. And now let's discuss it.

So we do that quite a bit, too. And then walkabouts. All I mean by that-- that's just a term I use. It just means that these are practices that are available as you walk about in your daily life. It's not something you have to enter a meditation hall to do. Gosh. Sorry. I just intrigued by how I sound on the microphone.

Also, even though time and space-- I think you've seen and what I've been saying. That really matters, but what really matters more is inquiry. It's just the time and space. Focusing on time and space and different ways of understanding time and space is inquiry at a very deep level. And that's what we care about. We want to go into this deeper dimension.

If you think about the linear flow of time, which is one-dimensional, we're talking about going deeper, but not only with respect to time but with respect to all of our experience. It's not about finding bliss. Of course, they'll say that in meditation. Most meditation teachers will tell you that. Here, what matters so much is insight. It's just learning to see in a different way.

So, OK. These are some websites, if you want to take a picture of this, if you want to go further, my email is at the bottom. These are a few of our websites. We actually have a bunch of them. The first one is the most comprehensive, but I have to be honest, it's out of date. We're actually a very small organization, and we don't have anybody to update all of our websites. Anybody would like to volunteer, see me afterwards.

OK, that's basically it. So we have a few minutes for questions, and that's it. Thank you very much.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

ELON GOLDSTEIN: So we'll take questions for a few minutes. And then I don't want to forget at the end that Jack has volunteered. We're going to head over to the Commons and sports hall, which is directly across the way, through the big gray building into the large glass building area. Grab some lunch. And anyone who wants to come along, sit around a table, pepper Jack with questions-- he's opened himself up to that. So you're welcome to come and join for lunch. Questions stemming from his talk?

AUDIENCE: I'm curious what the role of mathematics is in the the realm or field of knowledge.

JACK PETRANKER: Well, that's interesting. Myself, I never liked math, and so I've never been so interested in it. Rinpoche has had some interesting ideas about math. He sort of plays with numbers. In one of the TSK books, he has a lot of things to say about numbers, especially the number 16. I don't know. I never understood that book very well. But in general, I would say that math sort of falls into the category of knowledge that doesn't have an experiential dimension, and we are really interested in experience.

I'm writing a book right now. You can keep your eye out for it, but it'll probably be a while before it shows up. And in the book, I make a distinction between what I call the logic of exists and the logic of experience. And mathematics falls into the category of the logic of exists. So not much of a role, at least coming from me. Talk to some other TSK teacher, maybe. OK, but thanks.

AUDIENCE: I'm wondering about what TSK has to say about when our stories about time get disrupted, such as when someone has a near-death experience they talk about time slowing down.

JACK PETRANKER: Yeah, really interesting, isn't it? So, yeah, I think that there are moments of rupture-- I like that word in this context-- that help you to see that our usual structures-- our usual interpretations-- are just that. And now suddenly, you've been opened up to a new possibility. That's the big difference between one and two. When there's only one, you think that's reality. When there's two, you realize we've got interpretations going on. That there are different possibilities.

And so, yeah, near-death experiences are a great example. Or I love these stories about athletes who say that on the field everything slows down and things like that. Yeah, those possibilities are there, and they really do suggest that we haven't scratched the surface. I mean, I laughed because it's like this one-dimensional line. That's the surface. Yeah, you need to scratch the surface. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Yes, so I wonder that-- you mentioned that this TSK is a practice with three parts. So I wonder if someone is practicing this three parts that should be practiced together or in [INAUDIBLE] segments of them?

JACK PETRANKER: Should it be practiced daily, you're saying?

ELON GOLDSTEIN: Or are you talking about three parts?

JACK PETRANKER: The time-space knowledge?

AUDIENCE: Yeah. Like you mentioned on the time first and then--

JACK PETRANKER: Oh, I see. OK. It's very flexible. One of the things Rinpoche says about TSK is-- he says, You know, is not a doctrine. I really want people to come up with their own ways of doing TSK. And you can do whatever you want to with TSK. It's fine. Just don't turn it into a doctrine.

And in terms of practice, it's like, don't turn it into one particular mode of practice. So I've known people who like to go through all the exercises in sequence, but that's not how I do it. Whatever works for you, whatever you're drawn to, I think that's where the aliveness is, and that's going to be-- As soon as you're in touch with aliveness, you're in touch with what the TSK vision is about.

ELON GOLDSTEIN: We have time for one more question if someone has them. I'll ask a question. During your talk, you were talking about linear time. And at one point, when you were talking about the dynamism of time or the dynamic of time, you were saying as opposed to going from moment to moment to moment, there must be something other than that. I don't recall your exact words, but can you elaborate a little bit?

JACK PETRANKER: Well, I can, but it's difficult to talk about. Language and linear time kind of go along with each other. Language is narrative, too. There's a-- skip that. So Rinpoche draws a little diagram in one of the books. It's a real simple diagram. It's like, Here's a moment of time. And here's another moment of time. And somehow, you have to get from one to the other. So that must mean you have to drop down. So he draws kind of an inverted triangle. So somehow, you have to drop down. Well, what is that dropping down? How do you get to that dropping down?

So moments between moments is a way of doing that, although it's a practice that I introduced very briefly as a way of doing that. But you have to understand that each moment is just another moment. Like it's creating its own linear time. Even though you're between point A and point B And you get to say A1 over here. See, I'm doing mathematics after all. Sort of.

You get into A1 and AB. Well, those are still just moments between moments. But if you begin to do that or if you do that in a systematic way-- And there are tons of other practices, of course, but if you do that in-- I shouldn't say systematic because I just said no systems, but if you're interested in it, if you're really engaged in it, then you begin to realize that this whole moment-to-moment structure is suspect. It's not the way the time has to be. There can be a rupture. The whole thing can kind of crack open. I'm giving you the result. I'm not telling you how to do it because I don't think there's a way to tell you how to do it. But there are practices that will help.

ELON GOLDSTEIN: Well, thank you so much again for coming.

JACK PETRANKER: Thank you. And again, thank you, Dr. Goldstein.

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