How to Be More Fully Alive
Learning to Surf the Dynamic of Time
With Jack Petranker
TSK Retreat, Neu Plaue Germany, September 20 – 26 2026
At the edge of the future, time sparkles; in the richness of feeling and energy, time glows. When we find such special places and learn to let them expand or deepen, we discover time coursing through our bodies and illuminating our minds: a dimension wholly inseparable from our own being.
Tarthang Tulku, Dynamics of Time and Space
We know that our lives unfold in time, but that is a limited way of seeing. We are not in time—we are time.
Because we do not see this, we lose the opportunity to be free. We tell a story that unfolds in time, and that story becomes our identity. Now we are trapped by the past—a frozen, rigid way to live.
[Identity does not have to be tied to the future. There can be a living past, and there can also be shared destiny. Identity can be alive. But it often turns into a definition.]
In this retreat, we will ask what it means to be time. We will explore how the past takes over our lives, and how to break free of the limits it sets. Working with passages from Chapters 10 and 11 of Dynamics of Time and Space, we will experiment in our moment-to-moment experience with ways to base our lives on a future that is never shaped in advance—a realm of perfect freedom.
Instructor
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Jack PetrankerInstructor
Jack Petranker (he/him) is the founder of CCI and regularly offers courses and retreats. He is the author of When It Rains, Does Space Get Wet? (Dharma Publishing 2006), and has written numerous academic articles in consciousness studies, organizational change, political transformation, and the value of work as a spiritual practice. Jack holds an MA in political theory from UC Berkeley, and a JD from Yale Law School. He is also the Director of Mangalam Research Center in Berkeley, CA.
