Time, Space, and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality (Nyingma Psychology Series)

Amazon.com: Books: Time, Space, and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality (Nyingma Psychology Series)
I have had this book for awhile - a few years now, and I have found it difficult to penetrate. Last night though, I had some success and find it to be a most remarkable exposition on a new view of Time.

I’ll be posting some exerpts from the book here and I will give some comments from my own understanding. This book is writen by a Tibetan Lama but it is not a Buddhist book, although it does not contradict the teaching of the Buddha at all. It takes a strictly modern approach and investigates some things that are actually overlooked by science at this point.

Let me just say this: We feel as if we are being sept away by time towards the brick wall of our death. There is just moment after moment after moment and we are helpless pulled along like that. But there is a possiblility of penetrating any of these moments infinantly. All of our technlogy and religion is to help us to feel in control or at least on the right path under the cloud of inevitablity, but these both would have limited applicability if it were possible to experience a greater depth and openness to the dimension of Time. This book offers a step by step way of opening one’s view towards this new understanding and meditations that promise to help to directly experience this primordial dimension.

This need not be a ’solution’ towards any ‘problem’ because from the vantage of this Great Time, there was never a problem in the first place. But somehow we need to take the journey to find that we have never strayed. What I like about this presentation is that it is not just some philosophy or world view, it is actually an alternative view to those usually gleaned from our ordinary interactions with the world. In synopsis it sounds like new-age sort of thinking, but it is more profound than to be fit in with any specific religious ideology.

Here’s a synopsis:

At every turn, the reader is invited to look with fresh eyes at the structures we have all learned to take for granted. Does time really move from past to present to future, or could we dive into its structure in a completely different way? Does subject truly perceive object, or could we reverse their relationship? What is the guarantee for the reality of what we see and take for granted? Asking such questions invites knowledge to take form in new ways.

Hailed for its lucid, penetrating presentation, Time, Space, and Knowledge blends reasoning and experiential inquiry to offer each reader a unique path to insight and transformation. Challenging and disquieting, yet deeply exhilarating, this pathbreaking work gives readers a language for asking the questions that our conventional training teaches us to ignore. It awakens a knowledge we have somehow always known is there.

Time, Space, and Knowledge unfolds vigorously, following a careful structure that takes the reader progressively deeper into the vision. Thirty-five exercises play a central role in the text, and much of the discussion comes in the form of commentary to the exercises. The approach is challenging and bracing, a kind of martial arts for the mind. Perhaps this is one reason that readers regularly remark that they return to the book again and again, finding new riches each time.

A bold step beyond conventional modes of thinking, this book reunites science, philosophy, and direct experience through analysis and exercises, unveiling a profoundly liberating way of investigating ourselves and our world.

“A rich and rewarding book; a remarkable attempt to bring us to the limits (and beyond) of our capacity for thought and awareness.” –Parabola Magazine

“Nothing less than a challenge to every premise and presupposition ever made concerning the nature of existence–leaves even the most spiritually hip with nowhere to stand.” –Yoga Journal

“. . . lays out a complex structure in which space, time, and knowledge are understood to be operating at three different levels. The intention is to make clear that we cannot stop with one interpretation or understanding; that knowledge must be dynamic and self-referential. The presentation doubles back on itself, undermining its own claims, using structure against structure.”

Check out the Time, Space, and Knowledge Accociation if you want to read ahead.