A. Consider all of your subject-object oriented experience. Carefully observe the knowing subject and the difference in quality that distinguishes it from the known object. Observe how the knowing is outward-directed and the objects are 'away' from you.
After you have thoroughly studied the qualities of this familiar subject-object polarization, try to reverse it. Let the object pole 'over there' be the knower, knowing you here as the thing known. Let all given aspects of the situation, however insignificant, abstract, or 'metalevel’ they might seem, be 'knowing' in this way.
Try to incorporate the insight of 'no intervening distance' of the Object-Glow Exercise into this practice. Do this exercise for some time. You can practice it wherever you go, whatever is happening.
B. After sustained practice of Exercise 30A, do the same 'reversal', but with your thoughts and your experience (rather than just with the contents or objects of experience). Examine all your thinking, seeing, and knowing. Instead of you doing them, let them do you. On a more subtle level, take your ordinary experience, where you seem to be 'doing' the thoughts, knowing, etc., and without changing that quality, let those very situations also be examples of 'the experience knowing you'.
C. Finally, after working extensively with these reversals and subtle shifts in emphasis, notice that you have been preserving a constant identity of 'me here' when indexing thoughts, and so on, back to the 'self'. Let go of this self-image, of the assumption that it is the ‘you’, the same position, in the course of the reversals.
Commentary 27-30
The preceding exercises help de-emphasize the notion of a knowing self. They also begin to show 'knowing' as coming from a different level, which (unlike our ordinary model of 'knowing') does not impose so many limits on what and how things can be known. Exercise 30 in particular is a very direct challenging of ordinary presuppositions about knowing, although it is still structured somewhat in terms of such presuppositions. It still makes a concession to our idea that knowing is a two-term relation, something done by something, to or regarding something else. It is a tentative, transition-level attempt to introduce 'knowing'—in a different way than is usual—into the situation.
At first it will be just a foreground-background reversal. Later, the situation will change a bit, because the ordinary structuring of situations simply ignores the less prominent features (the ones not overtly engaged in the 'knowing subject/known-object' pair). But in reversing the usual 'knowing self' emphasis, we also overturn all the evaluations and priorities of the self. Everything, however subtle or secondary, must be allowed to know 'us'. In general, Exercise 30 will be found very complementary to all the exercises of Part Two on Time. (pp.l 258-9, TSK)
After you have thoroughly studied the qualities of this familiar subject-object polarization, try to reverse it. Let the object pole 'over there' be the knower, knowing you here as the thing known. Let all given aspects of the situation, however insignificant, abstract, or 'metalevel’ they might seem, be 'knowing' in this way.
Try to incorporate the insight of 'no intervening distance' of the Object-Glow Exercise into this practice. Do this exercise for some time. You can practice it wherever you go, whatever is happening.
B. After sustained practice of Exercise 30A, do the same 'reversal', but with your thoughts and your experience (rather than just with the contents or objects of experience). Examine all your thinking, seeing, and knowing. Instead of you doing them, let them do you. On a more subtle level, take your ordinary experience, where you seem to be 'doing' the thoughts, knowing, etc., and without changing that quality, let those very situations also be examples of 'the experience knowing you'.
C. Finally, after working extensively with these reversals and subtle shifts in emphasis, notice that you have been preserving a constant identity of 'me here' when indexing thoughts, and so on, back to the 'self'. Let go of this self-image, of the assumption that it is the ‘you’, the same position, in the course of the reversals.
Commentary 27-30
The preceding exercises help de-emphasize the notion of a knowing self. They also begin to show 'knowing' as coming from a different level, which (unlike our ordinary model of 'knowing') does not impose so many limits on what and how things can be known. Exercise 30 in particular is a very direct challenging of ordinary presuppositions about knowing, although it is still structured somewhat in terms of such presuppositions. It still makes a concession to our idea that knowing is a two-term relation, something done by something, to or regarding something else. It is a tentative, transition-level attempt to introduce 'knowing'—in a different way than is usual—into the situation.
At first it will be just a foreground-background reversal. Later, the situation will change a bit, because the ordinary structuring of situations simply ignores the less prominent features (the ones not overtly engaged in the 'knowing subject/known-object' pair). But in reversing the usual 'knowing self' emphasis, we also overturn all the evaluations and priorities of the self. Everything, however subtle or secondary, must be allowed to know 'us'. In general, Exercise 30 will be found very complementary to all the exercises of Part Two on Time. (pp.l 258-9, TSK)
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