Center for Creative Inquiry

Not my summer reading TSK

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Sometimes I’m struck with how unable I would ever have been to appreciate recent readings in “Dynamics of Time and Space” without the support of Jack Petranker and the online TSK class.

Imagining myself reclining at the beach and dozing off over another “interesting” alternative view of life as I know it, I realize that I would not on my own have let myself sink slowly down the shaft into this Alice’s Wonderland. For instance, Dynamics of Time and Space, pages 156–159, envisions a strange, for me unprecedented, way of looking at the three times. Nested spheres all sharing the same “nuclear time” at their core, each immersed in a mysterious aura of an energetic, going nowhere, nuclear time. What I find wonderful about this vision of nuclear time is that it corroborates the truth of the three times in our lives. At the same time this vision reveals that there is also an unbounded time, which we can contact knowingly and which runs deeper and is more alive than the limited linear version we ordinarily accept as the final word. The painful constriction and lack of freedom we experience when we accept a linear connection among the three times, does not mean that we have to reject the presence of memory (past), engagement (present), and hope (future) as we live our daily lives. Quite the contrary, the nucleus of a living time animates and joins these three faces of our journey.  This insight feels parallel to the insight that we do not have to reject the role of a self in our personal perspective of inner and outer realms in space and time. In fact, appreciating the gift of a foothold in the “universal unique,” we may well also appreciate our own individual uniqueness as we look around.