The intelligent quality of space I

The first step or skandha, the birth of ego, is called “form” or basic ignorance. We ignore the open, fluid, and intelligent quality of space.

Amazing. This is a theory where the acts that posit categorical beings work by means of privation. By categorical beings I mean the few special ones that cannot be thought away. These beings correspond to highest-type concepts (including two that are not universals, space and time) that are not detectable as empirical presentations but which enable them and which cannot be thought away (and so are necessary to perceptual cognition, being essential to the resting attitude of the epistemic subject). So Trungpa here reminds us that the root of the subject/object distinction is the interface with space. Space is the transcendental object, and the transcendental subject is awareness of space. The subject is just that thing that exists but is not in space. We make the “category mistake” of using spatial metaphors because every existent is real only in space and time, except the pure awareness of the subject. This bare and unqualified (except for being counter to space) subjectivity is also the Witness.

To make a self, make space a dead other. What is not-self, not part of volitional impulse, the ever self-surpassing force of self-being, is object. It is the making and snipping of an umbilical cord. Something gets rejected, and is e-jected to provide a terminus for pro-jection. Thanks to the readiness of the quale of counterforce, we create space as an outer. This outerness is borrowed from our kinesthetic sense, which coordinates counter-force to our voluntary motion, which includes proprioception, into a duration-separated lattice of stable counter-forces (massive solids) that anchor the lattice where duration-separation becomes translated into simultaneity—which we are familiar with as space.

The self qua unity has only a nominal existence; the unity lies in the designator (and in the intentionality of the epistemic subject that it guides), not in the existent. The unity of the self is the reciprocal of all of space. All that is not-subject is (if it exists in the lawful realm of sense-making counterforces) as if it were in space-outside-self.

Note that this generation through negation is not unlike that in Lurianic Kabbalah, where God, the protagonist of ontological generation, negates himself in order to create fecund dualism, whose complexification acts as a emergent Neoplatonic cosmogenesis.