About TAE process

You already sense that there is something at the Edge of your "knowing" and "not knowing yet". This often happens in the area of your expertise: your job, hobby, or keen interest of any kind. There is a delicate sense of excitement about it. You want it to be said so you try to articulate it. It may be disorganized.

What you sense has tremendous value because it has not been said or experienced the same way by anyone else. You know about it because you have memory of a unique actual experience. It has a value because you know it is true.
TAE steps will help you to work through a process that will engage you for some time - it might be a few days, weeks or even years. What you get at the end is a concept for saying what you now know - a theory that became bigger, stronger and more potent than you realized before you fostered its development. You will think, experiment, and construct, always relying on your Felt Sense.

To develop such a "thing" will be of value for yourself, but it will also become communicable to your family, friends, community, workplace and others. It already exists in an intrinsic form, because YOU already know something about it. At the beginning it is known to you only implicitly, when you develop it, it achieves credibility and potential to transform the world around you.

Thinking at the Edge

Grassroots Introduction to TAE

Manual Book One
By Nada Lou

This Manual is designed to provide guidance for working on your own TAE projects. It follows closely material presented on the "TAE in 14 Steps" video tapes. Part one Steps 1-9 of the Manual are analogous to tape one.

This manual combines theory, stories, personal experiences, videotape references and practical work. Each Step is included in print, explained, modeled and demonstrated. There are number of articles that lead you gently into many of Dr. Gendlin's Philosophical Concepts so that your TAE work will be embraced by and built on this tradition. There are also instructions about TAE Partnership, various experiential exercises, diagrams, and few other supportive surprises.

There are 14 steps in the TAE process. Each step has a particular function to help move the process forward. They are ingredients that pulsate through the process rather than follow a circuit. The process unfolds in phases that do not necessarily conform to the prescribed format.

 

The first phase (Steps 1-5) is designed in such a way that it will help you formulate that what you care about in words, phrases, and sentences, constantly returning to the felt sense and ensuring that you stay close to that edge of knowing and not knowing yet -Thinking at the Edge. Your instance is your limitless source from which you draw implicit complexity of available details.

By the end of this phase, you will be able to say what you want to express in adequate language, with deeper meaning, understanding and ability to communicate it for yourself and to others. Often, just going through this first phase of the process is already a solid foundation to take your ideas to a meeting, write a letter of some importance, resolve a conflict, prepare a speech or give guidance to a child. This is also a procedure that you can easily guide other people to learn. People get very excited when they realize that by doing TAE they would be saying things that had never been said before - and have tremendous value.

The next phase (Steps 6-9) is the collection of facets; you look for examples, memories, other instances. These facets give you a clue to say: "I know about this because I experienced it," You will find that insights come to you in many different ways. Patterns will begin to emerge. You will be able to notice and explicate some detailed structures from those. You will notice how your project is gaining new qualities. Your material is denser, there is more precision to it, it starts to become accessible from many different directions, it is beginning to form some kind of nucleus that you have a much tighter hold of.
Thinking at the Edge