Jack Petranker Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest today is Jack Pertranker. Welcome, Jack.

Jack: Thanks, Rick. I’m glad to be here.

Rick: Yeah. Jack is the founder and director of CCI, which is the Center for Creative Inquiry.  He regularly offers programs and online courses.  He’s been a student of Buddhism since 1973 and is also the director of the Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages  and a faculty member at the Tibetan Nyingma, is that right? OK. Institute and Dharma College.  He served as dean of the institute in Berkeley from 1988 through ’91  and as North American vice president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists from ’88 through ’92.  He is the author of “When it Rains, Does Space Get Wet?”  and has written numerous academic articles in consciousness studies, organizational change,  political transformation, and the value of work as a spiritual practice.  Jack holds a BA from Stanford in political science, an MA from the University of California at Berkeley in political theory,  and a JD from Yale Law School. He’s been a member of the California Bar since 1971.  I think I heard you speak at the SAND conference a few years ago, Jack.

Jack: Oh, yeah. I was there. I’m glad you were in the audience. It wasn’t such a big audience.

Rick: Yeah. I’ve been to the last three anyway. I think one of those you were at.  Okay, good. So I was looking at your website, the Center for Creative Study, Creative Inquiry,  and there’s all sorts of interesting things on it.  And I’m sure rather than me read it all, people can read the website.  So I just thought I’d read a paragraph or two just to give people a sense of it.  The Center for Creative Inquiry was founded in 2000 to explore alternative forms of knowledge and inquiry  and their potential to bring about fundamental change at the individual, cultural, and social level.  Cutting across disciplines, CCI aims to identify and challenge basic assumptions that limit the methodologies we use,  the styles of knowing available, and the knowledge we can discover.  The creative inquiry approach is interactive, experiential, cooperative, and engaged.  Never defined in advance, creative inquiry is also just plain fun, stimulating, surprising, and always new.  So we’ll be talking about that, and we’ll also be talking about something called the TSK vision.  And it’ll be — I mean, the TSK itself, this TSK method that you teach.  So we’ll see what that’s all about.  So, Jack, I read your brief bio of your education and all that stuff, but how did you first get bitten by the spiritual bug?

Jack: Well, let’s see. So it was the 1970s, the early 1970s, and it was in the air.  And I was doing some reading and was interested.  And I was living in Berkeley, which made it a lot easier, of course.  And really, more or less by accident, stumbled across a center that had been founded by Tartang Tilku,  who is a Tibetan Lama and is my teacher.  And I ended up connecting with him, and I was practicing law at the time,  and I did a little bit of legal work for the organization.  And then when I stopped practicing law, I started taking courses at the Nyingma Institute.  And eventually went down to Arizona, where we had an institute for a while,  and then came back up to help on some publishing projects.  And that was in 1980, and really I’ve been involved full-time since then.

Rick: So I imagine that all of this entailed some sort of spiritual practice that you began to do regularly.

Jack: Oh, sure. One of the interesting things about, oh, you could say Buddhism,  or you could say the Nyingma tradition, or you could say the way that Tartang Rinpoche teaches,  is there is an incredible wealth of different practices.  And one of the problems that people have, in a sense, is too many choices, too many riches.  I’m sure you’ve heard the traditional teaching that the Buddha had 84,000 different teachings.  So if you’re there on the receiving end, it’s like this big funnel pouring into you.  You don’t quite know sometimes what to do, but you’re always experimenting.  And over time, different things seem more or less valuable and appropriate for that moment.  So I’ve practiced in many different ways, and I think at this point I have a pretty stable practice.

Rick: And is TSK kind of your own distillation of all this knowledge and experience you’ve had?  Have you brought it down to something which you feel would be most practical and effective for people?

Jack: Not exactly. TSK, so it stands for Time, Space, and Knowledge.  And it’s not my distillation or invention. It’s called a vision of reality,  and I think that’s a great way of describing it.  But it was developed by Tartang Toku and really developed for Westerners.  He’s very explicit that it’s not Buddhist.  It’s not inconsistent with Buddhism in any way, as far as I’ve ever been able to figure out.  But he says repeatedly, because people say, “Oh, you’re doing this kind of esoteric teaching and giving it a different vocabulary.”  And I say, “No, no, no, no. This is really a teaching that is designed for the West.”  And he also, interestingly, I think says, “I’m not the author of it.  I am presenting these ideas that kind of emerged in my mind,  and anybody’s free to take it and work with it in whatever way they like.”  So he’s published a number of different books in what we call the TSK series.  And that’s kind of become my specialty.  I was the editor on all of the books except the first. There are six books in all.  And with different degrees of intensity, I’ve been working with that, the vision, with the TSK vision,  and teaching the TSK vision for many years, about 30 years now.  And in the last six or seven years, it really has been a strong focus.  And that really is what lies behind the founding of the Center for Creative Inquiry, which is the way I like to say it.  It really is taking an aspect of the TSK vision that I think is the most accessible for people,  this possibility of really learning through inquiry.

Rick: So the rimpuche who developed it, he’s saying it wasn’t really a personal invention,  it was more like a cognition or a realization or something that came through him to use New Age parlance,  rather than something that he concocted.

Jack: That’s right. That’s right.  In fact, I once heard him say, or maybe I even heard it secondhand,  that the working title when he was working on the first TSK book was “One Morning, a Crazy Idea.”

Rick: Yeah. Well, you know, all kinds of crazy ideas have occurred to people in moments of insight,  which they feel like they didn’t really devise, they just came as gifts, sort of.  Was it Parmenides that was in the bathtub and he kind of realized something about the,  some principle of physics as he saw how his body displaced water and he went running through the streets naked saying,  “Eureka, I found it.”

Jack: Right. Right. Right. Right. Archimedes, actually.

Rick: Archimedes.

Jack: Yeah. But, yeah, it’s very true.  I once heard an interview with a musician who said something very nice, I thought, I think on NPR,  and they were talking about a song she’d written and she said, “You know,” she said,  “the way it is with artists, at least my sense of it, is that we’re all fishing in the same ocean  and every now and then you catch a really big fish and that’s how I felt about this song,” she said.  But, you know, it happened to be me who caught it. It could have been somebody else.  That’s an image that stayed with me, knowledge.  And, in fact, this is something that’s discussed extensively in the TSK vision.  Knowledge is not what the knower knows. Knowledge is more widely accessible than that.

Rick: Well, that’s interesting because, you know, I was going to start asking you what TSK is  and we’ve wandered into an area which I guess pertains to TSK, which I find fascinating,  which is like, you know, somebody like Beethoven, did he just completely devise his, you know,  fabricate his symphonies out of his own human intelligence or was he kind of cognizing some kind of  deep impulses that, you know, managed to get channeled or filtered through his nervous system  and became the wonderful things he created?

Jack: Yeah, I think it’s a very interesting question, the whole issue of where does creativity come from?  You know, there’s a whole sense in the Buddhist teachings and this also comes up in TSK that  most of what goes through our mind is very routine. We’re kind of stuck in the same patterns of thought  and it’s all based on things we’ve identified in the past. It’s very past-centered,  the knowledge that we rely on in living our lives. And yet, the possibility of creativity  and of something new arising or emerging is always there. And so then the question is where does that come from?  And I think you’d really have to say that, you know, insofar as the self is also a construct  that we’ve kind of patched together out of the material that becomes available to us  when we’re growing up and through our culture and so on, insofar as that’s what the self is,  that’s not the likeliest source for creativity. We must be tapping into something deeper than that.  I don’t know what Beethoven would have said.

Rick: Whatever it would have been in German and I wouldn’t have understood it.  And yet, on your website it says, “TSK does not put forward claims regarding an absolute.  In fact, it does not specify any form of substance or reality at all.  From a TSK perspective, such definitions and claims inevitably generate conceptual structures.”  And yet, what we’re alluding to here is some oceanic quality of intelligence  that we’re all just kind of tapping into. And so that to me does speak of, if not an absolute,  then some kind of fundamental underlying reality which we all see through a glass darkly  or perhaps clearly as we evolve in our spiritual development. So unpack that a little bit, if you would.

Jack: Well, sure. TSK is not going to make a claim like that.  It’s not going to say an oceanic source of higher knowledge.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s a hypothesis. You’ve got to put forward theories.  You operate on the basis of a certain understanding of the way the world works.  And some understandings, some explanations, some ways of seeing the world are more helpful than others.  But they’re all possibilities. There’s something to try on and see where it leads you.  And if you find that it leads you in a positive direction, great.  And then maybe you move on. Maybe in the end you discard that completely.

Rick: Although one man’s hypothesis is another man’s experience.  Maybe the Buddha experienced many things which to most of us would be hypothetical.  And yet for him they were as plain as the nose on his face, just experiential, everyday, normal realities.

Jack: Right. Well, it may be… It’s kind of an interesting question.  So if you think about the life of the Buddha, there’s a scene that is well known where after his enlightenment  he really questions whether he should teach at all because he says,  “This has not been an easy path that I’ve followed.  And I really don’t know if there are other people who can appreciate or understand what it is that I have to say.”  And in the end he decides, of course, to teach.  But the question that arises at that point, at least in part, is how can you express something  that is a truth that is deeply inspiring and significant for you?  How can you communicate and transmit that?  And finding the right language is a part of it.  I think really embodying it is more important.  And if you trace out that story when the Buddha does finally decide to teach  and approaches his five former disciples, they originally, or their initial impulse,  is to ignore him because they feel that he’s abandoned the path.  But when he appears before them, they can’t help it.  Something about what he has realized just manifests and they get up and pay their respects,  wash his feet, do the kinds of things that you did in India at that time.  That’s the story, at least as it’s told in the Lalita Vistra.  And I think that what you say is kind of secondary,  and yet you have to find a way of being able to express these things.  And they stay hypothetical.  They are not part of your experience.  And then the next step beyond that is that when they do become a part of your experience,  it’s still a possibility that you’re going to experience or filter your experience, rather,  through your own understanding.  And there may be a lot of layers of conceptual assumptions that you have to peel away over time.

Rick: That’s interesting because these days, of course, there are so many people teaching  and representing various traditions or no traditions, as it may be.  And if we could roughly categorize them,  I would say that there’s a certain number of people who have just merely gotten an intellectual understanding.  They haven’t actually, they’re not living it in their bones,  and yet they’re getting out and teaching.  And then there’s perhaps another category of people who have had a profound realization of some sort,  and may be temporary, may be abiding,  and they’re really good at talking about it,  but they don’t necessarily have any means of enabling others to have the same experience.  Now, some of these, perhaps a subset of that group, would be people who do have some knack for transmission, it seems.  You’re in their presence, you hear them talk, and something of that same quality awakens in you.  And it’s not so much the words they speak as it is the presence that they emit or convey, somehow.  And then there’s another category of people who feel like,  and actually another subcategory prior to that is people who dismiss the utility of practices.  They say it only reinforces the notion of a practicer, and they’re only going to get you hung up,  and so on, you shouldn’t do them.  And sometimes those are people who’ve done practices for 30 years and then had a realization,  and turned around and said, “You don’t need practices.”  But then there’s another category of people who feel like practices of some sort are really valuable,  and attempt to formalize or package techniques and practices one can do to culture the same sort of experience  that they have had or that someone like the Buddha has had or something.  So I guess you would kind of fall into that latter category, would you not?

Jack: Well, it’s interesting.  I don’t necessarily think in terms of practices so much, especially when we’re talking about TSK.  In the last year or two, I’ve started talking about variations rather than practices.  And what I mean by that is we have our way of understanding and experiencing and being in the world,  and if we want to inquire into that, if we want to challenge it in some way,  the most useful approach, or I don’t want to say the most useful approach,  an approach that I’ve found very useful is just to introduce variations in the way we engage our experience,  in the way we see things, and the way we think about things.  And you could think of them as practices if you want,  but practice suggests that you’re practicing something so that you can perfect that practice,  and that’s not really the point.  The point is really to loosen things up, to lighten the gravity of our ordinary way of being.

Rick: Yeah. Well, you don’t take a boat to perfect the boat.  You take a boat to cross the river, you know.  So the boat sort of has a secondary significance.  It’s the crossing of the river that you’re trying to achieve.

Jack: Fair enough.

Rick: Okay.

Jack: Yeah.  So, but, you know, I guess I’d say if I try to stay within the framework of TSK,  maybe that’s not so important, but if I do, then I’d say, but, you know, the crossing is what there is,  and this is something you find in various spiritual teachings, too.  You’re not aiming to go anywhere, but in a sense you could say leaving dry land,  that’s the move you make that suddenly opens up a whole new universe.

Rick: That sounds good, and we’ll see where you end up.  Maybe you really don’t know, and maybe there is no ending up.  I mean, I’m convinced more and more that there is no final shore,  but that there’s always a deeper something to unfold, a next horizon,  perhaps even for someone who is considered to have ultimately arrived, like the Buddha.  Who knows?

Jack: Right.  You know, there is language that you see a lot in the Buddhist teachings about crossing to the other shore,  but that may not mean exactly what we think it means,  because when you get to the other shore, it may not look like you’ve made a journey at all.  We just don’t really know how to describe that.  Again, it’s a way of talking about things.

Rick: Yeah.  Now, we’ve been skirting around TSK and alluding to it and so on,  but let’s delve into it now and really understand what it is and discuss that for quite some while.

Jack: Okay, great.  Great.  I’m very happy to do that.  So, do you want to give me a question to start with, or should I just start laying things out?  Oh, let’s see.

Rick: If something comes to mind, you start speaking.  So, TSK again stands for Time-Space Knowledge, right?  And I read a little paragraph about TSK not putting forward any claims regarding an absolute,  and there’s more on your website that’s very interesting that I’d like to discuss,  such as “TSK does not maintain the existence of a creator or creative force responsible for appearance,”  and that paragraph goes on to elaborate.  But just taking that as a springboard, give us an overview of what TSK is,  and I’ll certainly have questions as we go along.

Jack: Sure.  Well, so I have my own take on what — or probably the better way to say it is  there are certain things that I’ve gotten out of working with the TSK vision,  and so that’s what I try to share with people.  And so back in 2000, when I founded the Center for Creative Inquiry,  the intention was to find a way to share with people some of what I found was valuable,  and when I looked — again, looked for the right language to do that,  I really settled on the notion of inquiry.  That seemed to me to be central.  Other people might find different aspects, might want to explore in a completely different way.  But for me, the fundamental notion is this notion of inquiry,  and the link between inquiry and time, space, and knowledge as facets of our being,  which is one of the ways that Tartang Tulku in the books refers to TSK,  the link is that when you go to as deep a level as you can, you might say,  when you ask, “Well, what is there that we can take as basic in our experience?”  Because we’d like to inquire not about superficial things, but about what matters most.  The aspects of our experience that it seems you can’t really do without are time and space and knowledge.  And you could choose different words.  I think for some people it’s probably easier to talk about consciousness instead of knowledge,  but I think one of the reasons the word knowledge is used is our ordinary ways of knowing,  even though we want to be able to go past those, are our representatives of knowledge.  So if you open up the first TSK book, in the first page, the opening paragraph, the first sentence,  says something like, “Wherever we go, whatever we do on this crowded surface of interactions that we call the world,  above us is the sky.”  And the sky, it goes on to say, is a kind of local representative of space,  because the book starts with space.  So I think you could say that in general, for all of the structures that we rely on in our ordinary way of understanding,  and if you focus it in now on time and space and knowledge,  we have a way of understanding space, and it’s not that it’s wrong, it’s that it’s limited.  It’s a local representative of what space is.  And we have an understanding of what time is, and again, it’s not that it’s wrong, but you can open that up.  And we have an understanding of knowledge, and in each case,  the seed of a more expansive vision of what’s possible for human beings is already available there.  So you start with what’s there, and you question the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of knowledge,  and in the course of that, you also wind up questioning the nature of the self as the one who knows  or the one who exists in some sense in space and lives out a life in time.  All of those things are really interconnected.  So it’s the nature of the questioning that you do that is really at the heart of the TSK vision,  and that’s why, for me, focusing on inquiry is central.

Rick: Okay. So a couple of things come to mind.  One, of course, is that the word “inquiry” is very much in vogue these days because of Ramana Maharshi  and his self-inquiry process that many people advocate.  Perhaps you… Go ahead and touch upon that before I bring out some other things.  Just since that word is so popular in spiritual circles, are you using it in a different context or what?

Jack: Well, I’m sure it is a different context because I really don’t know Ramana Maharshi’s work in any significant way.  So if the two overlap, and I imagine they at least overlap, then that’s fine,  but it doesn’t come out of any sense of that kind of inquiry.  Maybe you could tell me a little what comes to your mind when you think about inquiry,  given that context of self-inquiry.

Rick: Well, I too am not an expert in self-inquiry, although I’ve interviewed a number of people who follow that lineage.  But as I understand it, it’s a sort of a continual turning within to try to identify who the self is,  who or what the experiencer is, to get right down to the essence of things,  rather than just be object-directed or outer-directed and utterly neglect the knower.  So anyway, that’s my crude…

Jack: Okay, that’s helpful. That gives me a way to go further, I think.  So on the one hand, I think, yeah, that’s great.  That’s really important because we are ordinarily directed outward,  and it’s really helpful to be able to turn inward.  Tartang Tulku, actually not in the TSK books, but in another book,  uses what I think is a very valuable term.  He talks about two-way sensing.  So whenever you’re experiencing something in the world, there’s also the one who’s experiencing,  and it’s very helpful to be able to look in both directions at once.  So I think there’s definitely an overlap there.  What I would say, given the way you just described it,  and I realize you’re not an expert, but we’ll go with what you said,  is that there’s an assumption, or you start with the idea of saying,  “Well, we have to understand this self as the one who knows.”  And in TSK, because you really are trying to question assumptions,  you’d say, “Well, what’s the evidence?  That’s not really right. It’s not exactly challenging in that sense.”  But you’d say, “What about this self who knows?  Can we clarify what’s involved in making the assumption that there is a self who knows?”  Or that, as I said before, that knowledge does belong to a self.  Now, I realize the word “self,” I’m sure in Ramana Maharshi’s work  and generally in that kind of lineage, doesn’t mean the ordinary self.  But even if you’re talking about self in the deepest possible sense,  you still have this structure of someone knows something,  and that’s worth challenging and questioning.

Rick: Cool. So I guess then an essential element of TSK is that  you just don’t rest on your laurels.  You’re always questioning your assumptions.  And of course, with so many of us, there are so many things that are assumptions  that we don’t even know are assumptions.  So it must be a continual process of identifying things which we’ve been taking for granted  which really aren’t necessarily solid and need to be questioned.

Jack: Yeah, that’s exactly right.  And I think people really generally who have anything to do with the spiritual path  or who practice, have some kind of practice along those lines,  one of the things that you notice very early is that you have an experience  or an insight and it’s very meaningful and profound.  And then it kind of loses its juice after a while.  One day you have this great experience doing a particular practice  and then the next day it’s not so great.  And pretty soon it feels kind of routine and mundane.  And sometimes people feel obliged, I think, to stay with something  because it’s what turned them in a certain direction to begin with,  but really the life is drained out of it.  And I think that’s generally true.  Whatever we look at, the tendency is for it to become routinized.  And one way to be able to work with that is to always be in a kind of a questioning mode,  an inquiry mode, always be looking at experience.  And that doesn’t necessarily mean that you keep questioning the same thing over and over.  It’s just that in everybody’s life, in every moment, there are so many interesting things going on.  And you could direct that kind of sense of wanting to know, of wishing to have access to knowledge.  You could direct that in any direction.  There’s so much going on.  It’s a very rich world that we live in and the world of our experience is even richer than the world of objects.

Rick: It’s a really interesting point.  Because on the one hand, routine is necessary in order to build skills.  We want our airline pilot to have tens of thousands of hours of flying experience.  But on the other hand, routine work tends to narrow one’s awareness into boundaries.  And that tends to, in a way, kill the creative genius by the continual focus habituating us to deep grooves of experience and behavior,  and limiting the field of all possibilities for us.  So how do we reconcile those two things?

Jack: Right.  So the other day I was involved in a conversation.  It was a kind of public event that was set up as a conversation.  And the topic of the conversation was happiness.  I think the theme was, “Is happiness overrated?”  And in the course of it, in the course of the conversation, somebody asked a question about which professions, occupations are the happiest.  And I didn’t know, but I looked it up on my smartphone as we were talking, and I was surprised by the answer.  The group, according to this poll, it was the Gallup poll, I remember, that expresses the most satisfaction or happiness coming out of their job is physicians.  And the reason that I was surprised by that is because I’ve always wondered about being a doctor, because it seems to me that so much of what you do is routine.  You see the same kinds of cases over and over, and yes, every now and then something maybe new, completely puzzling and surprising comes up, and that’s interesting.  But let’s say 90% of the time you’re doing something routine.  But I didn’t think of this at the time of the conversation, but your question makes me think that that’s looking in the wrong place.  I think that the satisfaction, I mean, when they asked doctors why did they feel this great sense of fulfillment, they said, “It’s because I get to utilize a skill that I have, to be of benefit.  I really can accomplish something with this skill that I’ve trained in.  That’s what gives me satisfaction.”  And that makes a lot of sense. But I think maybe I’d push it even a little bit further and say that what brings that practice alive for them, and I’m totally speculating, I’m not a doctor, and I’m sure different people are different,  but let me just continue to speculate, what brings it alive for them is a connection to the people that they’re dealing with, and that changes all the time.  Now, I don’t want to get off into this topic because I really don’t, I’m not a doctor, but I have noticed on the other side of that equation, I guess.  My mother-in-law had cancer, and I would go with her sometimes to her cancer, her oncologist, and one of the things that struck me about the way he worked was that he had to shut down, at least that was my impression,  he had to shut down his connection to her and presumably to his other patients because, I’m assuming, because there’s so much suffering there that you can’t allow yourself to take it all on.  There comes this issue of burnout and people just can’t deal anymore with that level of suffering.  So what I just said, I think, has to be tempered a little, but I suppose the larger point that I’m trying to get at is that what gives us fulfillment is the part that is always new, always alive,  and yes, that comes up in the context of exercising routines, and if we do our job well to talk about that aspect of routine, then that’s satisfying in itself, but there’s something more, there’s something in the moment,  there’s something about the aliveness of the situation and the feel of the situation, and that actually points, I think, toward a certain kind of engagement with time and space and knowledge.  You could really apply all of those to make sense of that.

Rick: What I would say in this context is that the capacity can be cultured to maintain, to use this word again, to maintain oceanic perspective, broad comprehension, cosmic consciousness, if you want, or vastness of awareness,  and in the same context to maintain a completely open, sensitive heart and yet be dealing with tragedy on a regular basis or with suffering.  I mean, this is what presumably some of our greatest saints throughout history have had the capacity to do.  Somebody like Jesus didn’t have to shut down.  He was dealing with a lot of suffering, but he was able to do so in a state of complete openness, and I think we all have that capacity.  In my mind, that’s one of the things that spiritual practice or development should culture or does culture, so that it’s not an either/or situation where you’re either sitting in a cave enjoying the bliss of the self but not dealing with the world,  or lost in the world to the oblivion of the self, or I use the word self in a non-Buddhist context, meaning pure consciousness, but that the two can be cultured and lived simultaneously.

Jack: Yeah, that makes sense to me.  I was just reading last night something about Stoic philosophy, and I think we miss a lot in our own culture.  I think the, you know, I’m particularly interested in the Greeks and Hellenistic culture, and so I was reading something about Stoic culture, and there’s a lot of wisdom in that,  and they were saying that the quality, the way to practice, I guess you could say, the way to live your life is to focus on the things that are in your control, and take responsibility for them.  And that taking responsibility, that’s the practice. And the other side of it is to let go of the things that are not in your control. And the suffering of the world both is and is not in your control depending on where you are in the spiritual path, I suppose.

Rick: Reminds me of that Alcoholics Pledge, you know, that thing about control the things you can and not control the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Jack: Right, right, right. That’s probably, I mean, I don’t know if they took it from the Stoics, but it seems to be a strand of insight in our culture that would be worth exploring.  One interesting thing that I keep coming across, and not too often, but sometimes when I interview people, is that they say that as a result of some awakening they have had, usually a very profound and deep and abiding one,  they get past the point of processing their own stuff, and they begin to feel like they’re a washing machine for the suffering of the world, like they’re processing all kinds of gunk in collective consciousness, and filtering it, and experiencing things, and resolving them.  It’s sort of like they’ve become a tool of the divine, if you will, to help purify collective consciousness.

Jack: That’s interesting. You know, the way that I think about going beyond the self, going beyond my own self, apart from this aspect of knowledge, of a knowing that doesn’t belong to me, is, it really has a lot to do with the particular tradition that I’m in, the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism,  and also I think with this time and space in the world, because for me, the way to serve the world is to help make sure that these teachings get preserved and transmitted and made available in ways that are effective.  And definitely, you know, part of the teachings has to do with a sensitivity and responsibility for the suffering of the world, but in particular, I look at it in terms of what we can do to keep this wisdom tradition, if you want to think of it that way, alive and active in the world.  And you know, I think it’s, for me and probably for most people, it can be a challenge. I mean, it’s always a question. I live in Berkeley, I work in downtown Berkeley, a lot of homeless people on the street in Berkeley, so you’re constantly confronted with the question of people asking for change, you know.  In one way, it’s a small question, it’s not kind of the big issues that you’re facing in your life, but in another way, it’s a question that you have to ask every single time you walk past someone like that. What’s your response going to be?

Rick: Yeah. Back to TSK, I watched Gravity last night, you know, the movie. It was pretty cool. And this Sunday, Neil deGrasse Tyson is going to start the Cosmos series, which Carl Sagan used to do.  And I always love sort of outer space kind of things like that, because to me, it gives me a tool for putting human life in perspective. You know, like I saw this video on YouTube once of the collision of the Andromeda galaxy with our own over the course of the next eight billion years, they had it animated, and the Andromeda galaxy coming in, spinning around, merging with our galaxy, getting distorted.  And you kind of think as that happens, of all the trillions of lives blinking like strobe lights in both those galaxies, and we are one of those lives. And you think, well, we have our human perspective, but it’s really so tiny compared to that perspective.

Jack: Right.

Rick: And we think of time and space and we are speaking then of scales of time and space which make the dramas of our lives less than the snap of a finger. So, is this the kind of inquiry or thought process that people go into when they do TSK in order to broaden their perspective?

Jack: Well, that’s certainly a way of helping, as you say, to widen your perspective. And there are some practices like that. The TSK books mostly are written with a number of exercises. And there are exercises which ask you to take that wider perspective for sure, or just to expand your sense of what’s going on in your life in a variety of ways.  Having said that, though, I think that the fundamental focus when you’re talking about space in the TSK vision is different from that, because we have this sense of space, and it manifests most obviously perhaps when we think about outer space.  But in general, we have this sense of space as what objects, physical objects, appear in. And then we do our best maybe to expand our sense of what that means. But the vision of space that TSK really aims to put in place, not because it says this is the right vision of what space is, but because it’s a variation on our usual understanding.  And it opens up new possibilities. So the vision of space in TSK is not so much of subjects in empty space, because when you think of it that way, then what you’ve really done is shut out space.  Space is what’s going on when nothing’s going on, or space is nothing at all, or space is just the sort of irritating barrier between us and that thing over there that we’d like to be able to collapse.  And so much of our technology actually has to do with reducing the barrier that space and time impose on the things we want to connect with. This conversation we’re having being an example, and it’s a great example. Technology makes this possible.  But all of that is based on a version of space which is very much centered on objects. And in the TSK vision, you really want to ask the question, what if space were something other than that or something more than that?  And again, as I said a little while ago, the version of space, the understanding of space that we have is just kind of a local representative. So space has this sense of vastness, and physical space does.  And that’s very helpful. That’s a really good direction to go in, it seems like, and it turns out for most people. But to go beyond that, a simple way to think about it and explore it is just to ask about mental space.  Most people will readily accept that space, we can talk about space in the mental realm, the easiest place to look is in dreams. When you’re involved in a dream, you are moving in a space. Now it’s a space that the mind has created, you could say.  But it’s still a space. And some people will say, well, that’s just a metaphor. It’s not real space. Real space is the outside stuff. But that’s just an assumption you make. You say, I’m going to privilege physical space.  But there’s no particular reason to do that. You say, what if you don’t? What if space is just this capacity to accommodate a range of possibilities? Sometimes it’s physical objects, sometimes it’s events or experiences in a dream, for instance, or in a daydream, or a thought, or in a memory.  There’s many, many different ways in which we engage the world that don’t just have to do with our being situated in this physical world. So space turns out to be something that has a much more experiential dimension to it. And that’s one of the first key elements in, I think, working with space in the TSK vision.

Rick: Do you find that the discussions with modern physicists who have a sort of a spiritual bent to be interesting and relevant to TSK? I mean, you go to conferences like the Science and Non-Duality Conference and you have all these physicists talking about time and space and what they really are and what their relationship is to consciousness and so on. Is that all very germane to TSK?  You know, I haven’t found that it works that well. And that may just be me because I’m not a scientist. But when TSK first came out, the first book was published in 1977, and again, that was a time when a lot of these ideas were in the air. And there was a lot of interest, I’d say, in the scientific community as well.  And actually, I think about 1980 or ’81, there was a conference that our organizations co-hosted with the physics department at the University of California at Berkeley. And it had to do with this vision on the one hand and with some of the very cool ideas that people were coming up with about multiple universes and realities and things like that.  On the other hand, I don’t think very much came out of it. And I think one of the reasons is that physicists are very committed to a theoretical understanding of the universe. And TSK is not really about theory. It’s not about explanations.  It’s not about ontology, to use a kind of philosophical term. It’s not about the way things are. It’s about our experience. So let me give you an interesting example of something I’ve been working with lately and using in my teaching a little bit.  So in the early 20th century, there was a school of philosophy in Germany, still active today, of course, called phenomenology. It was developed by Edmund Husserl. And basically, Husserl emphasized the idea that you need to ground reality in your own experience.  And that the assumption that what’s really real is the physical world is a kind of a prejudice. What’s really real for us in terms of what we know is our own experience. So Husserl’s very difficult to read. I don’t really recommend that people rush out and buy one of his books.  But he did write a really nice article one time that I found useful to talk about. And it’s called “The Earth Does Not Move.” And the point that he makes in that article, the fundamental point can be stated very simply.  He says, from a scientific perspective, we know all about all these things, all the ways that the Earth moves in space. It rotates on its axis, it revolves around the sun, and the sun is traveling through the galaxy.  All these different kinds of movements, and you can say that’s what the Earth is like as an object in space. But in terms of our experience, the Earth is the most solid thing of all. There is no possibility of the Earth moving.  Of course, you have earthquakes, but that’s exactly why earthquakes are very upsetting, because this thing that you thought was absolutely solid suddenly shifts and moves. And he actually says something that is rather subtle and worth thinking about.  Because when I first read that, I thought, “Well, that’s true. The Earth is absolutely solid. It’s at rest in our experience. There’s no way it could move.” But he says the Earth is also not at rest.  And I think the reason he says that is because it just goes beyond those categories. You can’t talk about, if you say something can be moving or at rest, the Earth doesn’t fit into those categories. It’s more fundamental.  The experiential dimension is so central to understanding what space and time and knowledge are about, and that makes it a little difficult to get into dialogue with scientists.

Rick: You probably know Hamid Ali, A.H. Amas, who lives there in Berkeley. I interviewed him a couple of weeks ago, and of course, he was a physicist. He was studying to be a physicist. He went to the cafeteria one day and saw all these eggheads sitting around.  He thought, “I don’t want to end up like that. It’s so conceptual, so theoretical. I want experience,” which is just what you were saying. I think some of the … probably the vast majority of physicists would fit that caricature,  but there’s a certain core group of them who are managing to straddle the world of physics and spirituality quite nicely, and who would say that conceptuality isn’t going to cut it for us as human beings,  that really these deeper realities that they’re trying to probe through physics have a correlation or a correspondence that can be explored in a different way through human experience.  For instance, is consciousness the unified field? Okay, we can talk as a physicist about whether that may be true, but there’s a lot of interesting correlations and parallels in the descriptions of the two.

Jack: Right.

Rick: In looking to the mystics and what they’ve experienced, looking to the physicists and what they’re describing. Anyway, the whole idea of physics came up because of the very name, TSK, Time, Space, Knowledge, which you say time, space, and you think of physics.

Jack: Sure.

Rick:That’s why we’re discussing this. I appreciate that you’re saying that TSK is not really interested so much in theory and concept. It’s interested in experience.  I guess the reason I’m dwelling on this is just that the same could be said of some of the more avant-garde physicists, that they’re ultimately interested in the experience of enlightenment or mystical experience, and they’re kind of using physics as an interesting way of discussing that.

Jack: Right. I think, as I say, I’m not a physicist. I’ll be delighted if it goes in that direction. I do have a good friend who’s an astrophysicist who has studied TSK for many years, and a couple of years ago I asked him, I said, “Do you think that there’s a possibility of dialogue there?”  Because in his own work, he’s published in both arenas, and he’s published in the field of consciousness studies, but he hasn’t brought them together in any way that I’ve seen. So I asked him, “Do you think it’s going to be possible to bring them together?”  And he said, “I think it is possible, but it’s going to take a lot of work.” That’s kind of a safe agnostic line to take, I think, and especially for me, because my ignorance in physics outshines the sun. That’s as much as I can say.

Rick: Well, I think it sort of depends on what we consider the human being capable of, or what the human nervous system is capable of. For instance, on your page here, you say some things like, “TSK does not put forward claims regarding an absolute,” or, “TSK does not maintain the existence of a creator or creative responsible for appearance.”  Now, there are some mystics, and I use the word “mystic” just to mean someone who is experientially oriented in a very deep way, who would say, “Well, sure, those can be mere claims, but my personal experience is that there is an absolute. There is a creator or creative force. I know that because I experience it viscerally and continuously.”  Anyway, any response to that?

Jack: Well, one of the things that Tartang Tuku says in the preface to one of these books is, he says, “Anybody can work with TSK, and anybody from any religious tradition or philosophical tradition can work with TSK.  If you’re committed to the idea of an absolute, there’s still a whole lot that TSK has to offer. It’s not as though if you start working with a time-space knowledge vision, you have to give up your religious commitments or spiritual commitments or commitments that are grounded in your own experience.  It’s that you’re going to have ways of looking at those commitments in new ways, and ideally, you’re going to be open to the possibility that what you are now most committed to might change.”  There’s a nice line in one of the books that says, “To say I know is to say I stop here.”

Rick: That’s good. I’m not suggesting that anybody should be committed to the idea of an absolute or a creator or anything.  I think that being committed to ideas only goes so far and can be and usually is, as you say, a limitation or it puts on the brakes.  I’m just saying that pretty much any idea which can be conceived of can be experientially investigated, and one can determine whether it holds water or not.  Again, as you just said, there’s probably no final word on any of this. There’s always the possibility of some new unfoldment in experience which would cause one to change one’s ideas.  Again, there are many, many things which religions all allude to and philosophies and so on, which for some people aren’t matters of belief or philosophy.  They’re matters of personal, direct living experience.

Jack: Right. I don’t think there’s any need to go take somebody and shake them and say, “No, you’re not looking closely enough.  You’ve got to examine your commitments.” That’s fine. Stay with what gives your life meaning and value. Just look for ways to question, to open up.

Rick: Sure.

Jack: It does lead me to a point that I think is really important to, that seems to me important about TSK, and that is so many of the spiritual traditions ask people to make a really strong commitment to a particular form of practice or a particular way of life.  I think in the West, we have a tendency to underestimate how strong that commitment, and I’m using the word commitment in a little bit different sense, but we have a tendency to underestimate how strong that commitment is.  In Buddhism, for instance, most of the teachings will say again and again, “You’ve got to let go of your ordinary life. You’ve got to turn your back on what most people think is important and valuable and really turn to a different way of being, turning around in the seat of your being,” as it’s said in some of the texts in Buddhism.  I think that’s true in a lot of different traditions. I think one of the ways you could think about TSK, why would you bother? I’m going to digress a little. My wife was just teasing me the other day that I digress on my digressions, but usually I manage to find my way back.  So you might ask the question, “Tartang Togu is a trained Tibetan Lama. He’s very committed to the preservation of the Buddhist tradition. Why would he bother to present this other approach, this approach which he specifically says is not Buddhist? Why not just stay committed, stay within the Buddhist tradition?”  I think the answer to that, and I haven’t heard him say this exactly, but I think the answer to that is a lot of people are just not going to be able to engage in a traditional spiritual path.  It requires too great an uprooting of the way we live our lives. It calls on you to make a transformation growing out of a kind of faith, if you want to say that, or at least growing out of some kind of conversion, you might say, that most people are not going to be ready to make.  TSK is really a kind of an everyday teaching. I’m teaching a course right now, and this is language I’ve been developing in the last year or so. I already mentioned the idea of variations rather than practices.  The idea of a variation is something you do just over a few minutes. Take three minutes and see what it’s like to look at things this way. What does that suggest to you?  The other aspect that I’ve been using in addition to variations is what I’m calling walkabouts, which means when you’re walking down the street or sitting in a subway or whatever, there are practices you can do without really saying, “Oh, now I’m setting aside time to practice.”  Again, it’s just asking yourself, “What’s actually going on here? What if I looked at it differently?” I think that that style of practice is very natural to TSK, although it does have also other more formal kinds of practices.  I think it fits really well with the way we live our lives. I think sometimes people, when they are committed to a particular religious practice, come to this difficult point of decision.  Do I engage it wholeheartedly, which means maybe I turn away from a lot of other things in my life, or do I just kind of try to do it on the side and hope that’s going to be good enough? TSK doesn’t quite put you in that quandary.

Rick: That’s interesting. Christ recruited most of his disciples by telling them to just drop everything and follow him. Buddha certainly dropped everything to pursue his course. Maybe for some people that works, just radical departure from life as you knew it.  But obviously for the vast majority of people, that’s not going to work. You’re not going to just leave your kids to starve or something. You have responsibilities, and you have a dharma. Everybody has their own dharma.  I gather that you’re saying that TSK is something that can fit comfortably into anybody’s dharma without requiring radical departures from their responsibilities or their norms.

Jack: That’s right. It has to do with the lifestyle we live, and it also has to do with some of the basic assumptions that we make about what the world is all about, how it works. It can be consistent with all of those.  I see the potential of TSK in that sense as really great. I have to say that the original TSK books, and as I say, there have been six of them, people find them challenging because sometimes the language is unusual, but certainly the ideas are sort of packed with ideas and possibilities.  That’s not for everybody, but one of the things that I’m constantly trying to do, especially over the last 10 years or so, is find ways to help expand the range of TSK as an approach or a teaching that people can connect to.

Rick: If I were a student of TSK and if I were engaging with the Center for Creative Inquiry, what sort of things would I be learning? What sort of things would I be practicing on a daily basis, typically?

Jack: Well, there’s actually, I think, a transition going on, which is to say that I’m trying to create a transition. I have to take responsibility for this. The way that people have typically worked with the TSK vision is through the books.  The first book was called Time, Space, and Knowledge, and then there’s a series of other books. The second one was called Love of Knowledge. They’re all kind of in that range, knowledge of time and space and dynamics of time and space and visions of knowledge.  There are many, many books, thousands of pages at this point, 2,000 or 3,000 pages maybe. Traditionally, insofar as TSK has a tradition, I suppose, people have worked with the books and most people find it very helpful to be in study groups or to take classes.  There’s a possibility of retreat, so you read the books and see where that leads you, the kind of stimulation that that gives you, and at the same time, you work with the exercises. The first book in particular had a series of 35 exercises and was actually set up in a very structured way so that you went through and did the exercises in sequence.  The later books are a little bit less structured about that, but they also offer exercises. It’s interesting, some people who love TSK, and there are a lot of people, a relatively small group, but still a lot of people who do love TSK and have been studying and working with it for years, and they fall into three categories.  One category says, “I love the exercises, they’re so liberating, but I can’t read the books. I just don’t get it.” And then other people say, “I’ve never actually done the exercises, but the books are so mind-blowing.” And then there are some people who balance the two.  I’m not saying that necessarily, that that last way is the right way to do it, but there’s a lot on offer, and you can work with it in different ways. Now, more recently, I’m really trying to develop some ways in which people can activate the vision without having to read the books, because that has been a stumbling block for a number of people.

Rick: Okay, so I guess one size does not fit all with TSK. You have different varieties of participants.

Jack: That’s right.

Rick: But, you know, typical participant. Let’s say I’m one. I get up in the morning, I brush my teeth, what do I do? How does TSK come into my day?

Jack: Right. Okay, so right now I’m teaching a course in which the focus is space, so it’s just natural for me to think about that. So one of the first things I ask people to do in the course, something to be aware of, as you say, during the day, is just become aware of space in a way that we usually aren’t, because we’re always focused on objects, and space itself just disappears.  So become aware of space, look at the edges of objects, for instance, and then you can start to think about the space inside objects, and not just think about it conceptually, but just say, okay, this toothbrush that I’m holding in my hand, it’s pervaded by space, and what’s the difference between the space that the toothbrush occupies and the space around it?  You know, those kinds of questions you could definitely ask yourself. And then maybe the next step you could go to beyond that, or another step, and these things can always go in lots of different directions, but I’m thinking about the course I’m teaching right now, so another step would be to say, well, what about the space that I occupy?  In what sense do I occupy space? Is it different from the way that toothbrushes occupy space? Is the space that I occupy connected to the space of the toothbrush? Is there a kind of an intimacy between toothbrush space and Jack space? Those would be the kinds of questions you might ask yourself.

Rick: Okay, and let’s say you were teaching a course about time right now, which presumably you do, since this is time-space knowledge.

Jack: Sure.

Rick: Then how would I be moving through my day?

Jack: Right, so it’s interesting that, maybe this is just the way my mind works, but when I’m teaching space, I’m thinking about space. I’m not thinking so much about time, so I have to kind of–

Rick: Change hats.

Jack: Change hats, right. So one of the things you could certainly say about time is you ask yourself, well, okay, I’m going to rely on a set of exercises, actually. In the same way that you’d become aware of space by looking, say, at the edges of objects and the distances that separate objects, you become aware of time by noticing how we relate to the past and the present and the future, and you’d say, how much of the time are we actually in the present?  How much of the time are we in the past? How much of the time are we in the future?  And then you might want to question the relationship among past and present and future and say, okay, the past is always behind us, the future is always up ahead, we have this linear conception.  What if I started to play with that? What if I introduced some variations? What if I imagined that I was in the past looking at the present, for instance?  Would that be interesting?  What if time ran backwards? What if I ran the last two hours of my day backwards and saw where that went?  I think you can see it’s meant to be playful.

Rick: Yeah. So I get the sense that it’s a method of jogging people out of their habitual ways of living, of thinking, and just shaking things up a bit.

Jack: That’s right.

Rick: Yeah, getting you to, as we said earlier in the conversation, to challenge assumptions, to question assumptions, and not to take things for granted, but to live each moment afresh with a more creative, fluid perspective.

Jack: Right. And that’s exactly right. And I think what you want to add to that is the sense that what the books, I think, help you to see is how thoroughly we’re invested in certain assumptions that we don’t ordinarily question at all.

Rick: Yeah. Can you name a couple, just for kicks? Some of the more common and deep ones?

Jack: Sure. The one that we’ve already talked about a little bit is that the subject is the one who knows, that in any situation, the source of the knowledge is me, or is I, we really would have to say.  And can you find ways to question that, to let knowledge be pervasive? That would be one key thing to look at.  And then we were just talking about the past, present, future structure, and we break experience down in terms of moments. That’s how we think about things.  There’s one moment succeeds the next. There is an analysis in one of the TSK books, which would remind some people of certain strands of Western philosophy, but also Buddhist thought, that says, you know, it doesn’t make sense.  You actually try to figure out how can one moment connect to the next? You need another moment between the two to connect them.  So then you need a moment to connect those. You have an infinite regress.  And so you say, well, that’s just kind of a conceptual problem.  But one of the points that comes up in TSK is to say there’s no such thing as just a conceptual problem.  If you are living your life on the basis of a certain set of assumptions, and those assumptions don’t make sense, you have to look and see, but what if I tried to do it differently?  So that assumption that time unfolds from moment to moment, from past to present to future, is another example.  And then the assumption that we’ve talked about also, that space is what separates objects and is really nothing at all.

Rick: I’d say a really fundamental assumption that almost everyone labors under is that they are a separate, discrete, isolated unit, you know, that is not fundamentally connected with all other such units,  and that is encased within this physical frame, and that will, some people will believe otherwise, but it’s not necessarily their experience, that will die when this physical frame dies, that will cease to exist.  I mean, those are some really fundamental assumptions which have all kinds of ramifications in terms of how one lives one’s life, and whether one is comfortable or fearful or compassionate or greedy, or all those sort of social implications.  I guess you probably dig into some of that stuff, right?

Jack: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that’s interesting about the TSK vision that Tartang Chokhu says explicitly is TSK doesn’t set out to attack the self or challenge the self or break down the self,  which, again, for a lot of people I think is very helpful because even though if you’re studying a spiritual tradition you may agree on a certain level that you need to be able to break out of this shell of the self,  still at a certain level we hold on to it very, very, very deeply. We cling to it. We grasp at it.  TSK says the self, the model that gives you a self in a world really grows out of some more fundamental assumptions that have to do with the way space and time and knowledge operate in the world or the way they show up in the world.  So if you start to question those, then your commitment to a self will in fact loosen.  The self is part of the content of reality. It’s very central. It takes up most of the available space, you could say, but it’s still part of the content of reality.  It’s not so much interested in the content, although you have to start there and you have to be willing to look at it.  It’s more interested in the processes and the underlying dynamics and structures that give rise to a particular kind of content.  So what are the dynamics and structures that give rise to the self?  But yes, it very naturally goes in that direction, and that’s just because we are so committed to a self. It’s the thing we’re most sure of.

Rick: Yeah. I would say, and maybe TSK says this, just using a metaphor, that don’t try to stop being a wave.  Waves are natural, and you are a wave, but realize that more fundamentally you’re the ocean.

Jack: Right.

Rick: Yeah, and that sort of removes the vulnerability of merely being a wave and nothing else.

Jack: Right, right. No, it’s a really nice image because you could say ultimately it’s all water.  I think we were at the oceanic at the beginning of this conversation, and now we’re back there. Okay.

Rick: Yeah. Okay. So I’ve probably only scratched the surface in terms of what TSK is and does.  How many participants are there? How many people are actually involved in it?

Jack: Oh, you know, we’re always surprised. People will write us, because the books are out there after all.  And so people will write us sometimes that we’ve never met or heard of and say, “I’ve been studying these books for 20, 25 years.”  I remember talking to a philosopher one time at these consciousness conferences that are held at Tucson every other year,  and I remember talking to this fellow, and TSK came up, and he’s actually a William James scholar, but he said, “Oh, TSK.”  He said, “That’s my Desert Island book. That’s the one I’d take.”

Rick: Oh, cool.

Jack: Yeah. So that’s my non-answer to your question, but my answer to your question is the number of people who are actively studying TSK  that we’re aware of is probably, I don’t know, fewer than 100, but out there in the world, well, maybe that’s a little too low.  There are a lot of people who have been touched by the TSK vision, hundreds and hundreds who have, I think, actively pursued it.  But the books are difficult. Again, that’s one of the reasons that I’m trying to come at this in a different way with this focus on creative inquiry.  Years ago —

Jack: You didn’t write the books, right? The Tibetan guy wrote them?  Right. Tartang Tulku wrote them. So I wrote “When It Rains,” that book, and I have plans.  I hope to be able to write another book about space, actually, in the next year, but I have a lot of plans and a lot of other things that get in the way of those plans, so we’ll see.  But I remember years ago, I actually — one of the things I’ve done over the years is I’ve been an editor at Dharma Publishing,  which has published those books and a lot of books on Buddhism, and years ago, I did a kind of a sales trip.  It was a class adoptions trip. I went around to universities just in the state of California,  but there’s a lot of universities in California, and talked to people about adopting our books.  So it was basically a sales trip.  And so I would go into the school, and I’d figure out who were the guys who were likely to be interested.  And invariably, when I went into the philosophy department and wanted to talk to people — well, not invariably, but very often,  I’d be sitting there talking to them and looking at the books they had in their office, and I’d see TSK on the shelf.  And I’d say, “Oh, Time-Space Knowledge, that’s one of the books we have.”  And almost always, they’d say, “Oh, I bought that book, but, you know, I could never get into it.”  And I have to tell you, I don’t think it’s because what’s in those books is not interesting or not worthwhile.  It’s because it does require a kind of a commitment, unless it just grabs you.  Sometimes people pick them up.  You know, I’ve also had people say, “I went into a bookstore, and this book kind of fell off the shelf into my hands.  It was just the right thing for me.”  But it can be a little bit challenging.

Rick: Oh, sure.  Yeah, I’m reading a book about non-locality right now written by a physicist whom I’m going to interview next week,  and I’m holding on for dear life trying to understand what he’s talking about.  But it feels like a healthy exercise trying to stretch my capacity to understand.

Jack: That’s right.  Yeah, very often in one of the phrases that recurs in the exercises that you find in most of the books will be some variant on the idea,  “Do this exercise, and don’t worry if you don’t understand what you’re doing.  Just go ahead.  Keep trying.”  You know, and that’s kind of how it is with the books, too.  But that’s not how people are used to reading, after all.  It’s not how they’re used to engaging a new set of possibilities.  So in a sense, TSK is very rigorous.  One of the things people have said to me is that most people are looking for a teaching that can engage their interests and concerns,  and of course that has to be the case on one level.  But people have pointed out, they say, “But TSK doesn’t do that.  TSK says, ‘This is really valuable, but don’t expect it to fit in with the things that you take for granted or accept as being ultimately valid,'” because it may not.

Rick: Well, the whole point of TSK is to challenge the things you take for granted.

Jack: Exactly.  But you know, people don’t always really like to be challenged.  It’s easy to talk a good game there, but it is challenging.  What I think we can offer that kind of helps balance that out is that it’s also just tremendous good fun.  It really is very stimulating to do this kind of inquiry, and the world comes alive in a different way.

Rick: Cool.  I change mouse hands every few months just to keep my brain agile and to prevent repetitive motion injury.  It’s interesting.  Now that I’ve been doing that for quite some time, it’s like it only takes me a few minutes to get used to changing mouse hands.  Right.

Jack: So you’ll have to come up with something else.

Rick: Yeah, right.

Jack: Yeah, I was actually, when you said that, it occurred to me, you know, I actually, you said before you didn’t speak German, and so that’s on my mind or in the back of my mind somewhere.  So I actually do, I grew up until the age of three speaking German.  So my German’s quite good.  And it just occurred to me that if I were going to do that kind of inquiry, it would be great fun to spend half the year in Germany and teach TSK in German because it would be a very different experience.  I mean, I have done that some, and it is a different experience.  And then come back and teach it in English.  That would be a great way of kind of opening things up, you know.

Rick: And you know, I mean, they have these things that you see ads for all the time now, like I think there’s one called luminosity where you’re supposed to challenge your brain.  They give you these games and exercises, and they say it’s really good at preventing any sort of degradation as you age and so on.  So it kind of almost sounds like this is a sort of a spiritual or philosophical luminosity that you’ve got going here where you’re just keeping people on their toes, you know, just keeping them from calcifying.

Jack: Right, well, luminosity is a great word.  I know of that, but I haven’t looked at the site or anything.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that because I haven’t seen it, that the approach that they offer is probably going to stay very firmly rooted in a certain set of assumptions.

Rick: Oh, I wasn’t saying that your thing is in any way similar to that.  I was just using that as a case in point for, you know, yours is more to keep one’s spiritual and philosophical muscles from atrophying as opposed to, you know, doing new crossword puzzles or something.

Jack: That’s right.  Yeah, I guess I’d just say, you know, it’s kind of difficult to try to use the right metaphor for how deep you’d like for this inquiry to go.

Rick: Yeah.  So it doesn’t really matter if a person lives in the Bay Area, right?  I mean, you do this stuff online, and obviously there’s the books.  So if a person is living in Paris or something and they’re interested in this discussion, they could engage with you just about as well as if they were living in the Bay Area, yeah?

Jack: Yeah, we do online classes on a regular basis.  I’m also doing a teacher training program right now.  There are other people who teach it besides me, but not very many.  We just have a handful of people, but we’re trying to develop a new set of teachers.  And we do programs here and there from time to time.  I’m going to be doing a retreat in — I actually prefer to call them intensives, but I’m going to be doing an intensive in England in August.  And then we have centers in Holland and Germany and in Brazil where TSK or at least study groups in TSK are offered.  And we have other people who teach in different countries.  So, yeah, the possibilities are there, but I suppose the right way to find out about them is through the Creative Inquiry website or just through contacting us.

Rick: So you’ll have to learn Portuguese, too, so you can go do that one in Brazil, huh?

Jack: You know, one of the things I’ve found that’s interesting is when I’m teaching and I’m being translated into another language,  I always find that a fascinating experience because if you know at least a little of the language —  so I studied Spanish in high school, so I can kind of follow along with Portuguese.  I mean, I couldn’t say a complete sentence, but you say something, and then you hear somebody else say it in another language.  And it’s so interesting to hear what you’ve just said. It kind of gives you another channel of information.  It’s especially true — I’ve actually stopped mostly teaching in German when I go to Germany because I just find it so interesting to hear.  And in that case, I really know what they’re saying.  But to hear how it’s coming through and have a chance to kind of reflect on it, it’s like, you know, it’s really like operating in stereo.

Rick: Cool. So is there anything else that we should bring up before we conclude?  Anything that I haven’t thought to ask you or that you consider important?

Jack: No, I think — I mean, let me think about that for a moment.  It seems to me that, you know, discussions on TSK can go in any old direction, and what we’ve talked about is just fine.  I’m glad you got to a few of the somewhat practical things at the end there of how can people work with this and study it.  That’s good.

Rick: Yeah, and obviously they can go to your website, creativeinquiry.org, and I’ll be linking to that from my website in case somebody happens to be driving the car  and they don’t want to stop and write it down or anything.

Jack: Sure.  And there’s some interesting stuff to read on your website.  I’ve been poking around in there.

Jack: Good.

Rick: And, you know, obviously ways to get in touch with you and just look more deeply into this if one is interested.

Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  I hope that happens.  We’re very eager to work with people who’d like to know more about this.

Rick: Great.  Let me make a few concluding remarks.  I’ve been talking with Jack Petranker, who is a teacher of TSK, Time, Space, Knowledge, at the Center for Creative Inquiry.  This interview has been one — is one in an ongoing series.  There are about, I don’t know, 215 of them now or something with all sorts of people.  So you can find them all archived at batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, where you’ll find both an alphabetical index and a chronological index.  You’ll also find a discussion group that crops up around each interview, a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking if they feel inclined,  a place to sign up to be notified by e-mail each time a new interview is posted,  and a link to an audio podcast so that you can subscribe through iTunes and listen to this, you know, while you’re cutting the grass or something.  So thanks for listening or watching.  Thanks again, Jack.

Jack: Thank you.  Yeah.  And we’ll see you all next week.  Next week I’ll be interviewing Menas Kafatos, who is a physicist.  I’ve alluded to him a couple times during this interview.  So we’ll see you then.