From the Inside

Snow falls

from where

 the dog barks

                                             

Body is Faster than Mind

In order for a world to be perceived by our senses and mind, it must already be generated in a non-dualistic modality in what we commonly (and biologically) call "the nervous system." This is the presupposition, and for some experience, underlying all perception and cognition. For this reason, we claim that time is the movement of the whole and particulars are unfolded sequentially.

When perceiving a flying insect, some necessary perceptual conditions for the insect to appear are space and all of the form and colors that are not the insect. At some ulterior level of awareness, what we may call an implicate awareness, all of the conditions necessary for the flying insect to appear--even on the rudimentary level of forms--must somehow reside in our living experience. It would not be possible for a flying insect to appear without that ulterior, implicit awareness; all of the living and dynamic conditions necessary for the appearance of the insect must be present in an ulterior and subtle experience. To illustrate this in more common yogic or even "spiritual" language I have chosen a quotation from a well-known Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda: "God is consciousness. There is essentially nothing in the universe but mind or consciousness."* To put this in language that is more readily accessible, we may recast this quote as follows: "Experience is everything. There is essentially nothing in the universe but experience. The universe is experience." In demystifying the quotation, placing our emphasis on direct experience in a radically phenomenological cast, we have, hopefully, open to the possibility of a direct experience of the "truth" of this incarnate, implicit awareness.

It is in this manner that we can understand, quite directly, the notion of the body being faster than the mind. It is the dynamic openness of the "body" that holds the movement of implicit awareness. This is not the objective or medical body, but the feeling body in a most subtle sense. Sounds and forms move within the various body feelings as the source and home of life's movement, i.e., experience. Sound may be felt as stemming from the heart-center as a seed giving rise to sonorous movement. The bird's song happens in us and the tree to our left. This implicit awareness does not cancel out the objective world but situates it as the dynamic movement of the life of the body. The body makes possible, through its feeling dimension, the objects of perception of the senses. The necessary conditions for the insect's flight such as space, form, and color are an implicit context for an insect's flight to be perceived. The speed of this body openness makes it seem as if the world is independently given from its own side. Objectivity then becomes independence. The world is cast away into a sort of material spatiality that renders it the "natural" world, instead of an incarnate one.  








*Darecki, Y. (2017). Spiritual Path - Yogananda Quotes. [online] Yogananda.com.au. Available at: http://yogananda.com.au/gurus/yoganandaquotes10.html#path [Accessed 23 Jun. 2017].

A thought on "consciousness"

The term "consciousness" is often used not only as an element that is part of experience, but the word is often used as that which may constitute our reality, i.e., what is experienced. In this sense, consciousness becomes a term that has utility in describing how experience is structured. It is often seen as that which is primary and not derivative. Some even use the word consciousness to be some metaphysical reality that all else is derived from and rooted in. It is the fundamental reality. However, there is no need to go that far and posit consciousness as some reality-in-itself. What is truly real to us is our minute-by-minute experience. In this sense, reality is evanescent, dynamic, and elusive. As a phenomenological fact, we rarely if ever experience consciousness in our everyday lives; but we do live with illumined worlds of experience. What we do experience is the structure (relations) and contents of experience. We may learn to discriminate or isolate awareness as an aspect of all experience, but I see little need to make consciousness any sort of metaphysical entity that gives rise to the contents of experience. More to the point, I see no need to use the word "consciousness" in this sense.

A difficulty for some then, seems to be the issue of the type of reality consciousness is. The simple truth, as we formulate it, is that consciousness (awareness) is an aspect of all experience but it is not the contents of experience. It transmutes all contents of the sensorium into experience, but not into consciousness. There is no need to use the word "consciousness" as a sort of fundamental reality. Even the Indian Upanishads don't have to be read that way. Brahman, often viewed as the all-pervasive consciousness, is the totality of that which is illuminated or made manifest in experience; it is the "vision" that is all-inclusive. "Brahman" is used in two senses. First, it is the content of all experience. This is called sa-guna brahman--the brahman with "qualities"--an unfortunate translation. The other sense of the word is called nir-guna brahman--brahman without qualities. If we restrict the concept of Brahman to its nirguna aspect, we may use "consciousness" as the life-granting aspect turning all things (contents, qualities) into experience. We, therefore, give "consciousness" a more narrow use. There is no intrinsic need to do metaphysics in the sense that the word "consciousness" does not have to be used as a fundamental reality at the bottom of all things. Brahman is a phenomenological conceptualization of experience, not some fundamental "reality" that all things are made of. Brahman relates to human experience.

Moving on to our everydayness, awareness (consciousness) is not typically something that is experienced. However, it may reveal itself as that which illuminates all things rendering them experience in a strict phenomenological sense. We may reflect upon lived experience and say that consciousness was an element in experience but not a cause of experience in the sense of it being a reality in itself. Advisedly, when speaking of consciousness, we must be aware that we have left behind our immersion in experience and have reflected upon what has just happened in experience. The past, in a rather limited sense, is then the object of our reflection. But note, awareness is not the object of experience in the act of reflection. Consciousness does not reveal itself in experience; it reveals our manifest worlds. On this basis, we may then use "consciousness" as a tool to interpret our (past) experiences thus providing a way of understanding experience in a purely conceptual manner. Consciousness is a concept, often helpful but frequently a dangerous one.

On "The Universe"

So many of us are held by the belief that "the universe" has little to do with our all too human embodiment. The universe most of us refer to is one constructed of thought and is not the living experience of life as lived. To pray to such a universe, claiming that it will answer your requests, is to pray to an abstraction that has been historically generated by human conceptualizations. What we may advocate is paying delicately focused attention to experience, the keeper of all possible worlds, and yes "my brother." This might be termed "the living universe." Experience is, in the most radical sense, all we ever have. Yet, we also live out of those theories that continue to create and uphold "the universe" in the "scientific" sense. No one is advocating dispensing with such a theoretical universe--with its laws and particles. However, what we are advising is that we do not lose sight of the lived (or living) universe of human experiencing. Unfortunately, "the universe" has become so consensual that few of us can appreciate its conceptual nature and inadvertently substitute the conceptual for the actual.

Body, Memory, and Craving (trsna): Function and Disfunction

To hear the sound of a bird's song it is necessary that we be corporeally conscious in the entirety of all the other sounds and the silence that makes hearing it possible. An ambient consciousness in the aural whole is, therefore, of necessity, to hear a particular sound.    

It is often difficult for us to gain the insight (Skt. vipashyana/Pali vipassana) necessary to observe the functioning of the "subtle" (feeling) body, memory (smrti/sati), and craving (trsna).

The thinker and thoughts...

Many years ago, I came across a truism that many found upsetting at the time and many found quite liberating. What do you think?

"Thoughts* think the thinker; the thinker does not think thoughts."

I have placed an asterisk after "thoughts" because, as written, the saying is grossly incomplete. Our thoughts include so much more than the explicit, conscious thoughts. Things such as history, biology, kinesthetic palpitations, heredity, language, and more form a deep reservoir from which thought gains its evanescent morphology.

All Resides in the Body: Corporeal Panpsychism

Given that all experience takes place in and through our nervous system and brain, and given that what we refer to as "the world" is our experience, there is only one place wherein experience takes place—the body. Most of our experience follows a foreground/background structure. Using a sonic model, when we listen to music we are focused on the notes that operate in the foreground of our attention. However, when looked at a bit more inclusively, we can take note of the attention that encompasses the past notes that have been played, the future notes that are anticipated, and the present notes that embody the past and future of the melody. In a way, the entire sonorous structure is both anticipated and projected. Husserl called this type of structure, when the present is pregnant with the past and the future, retention and protention. We have retained, i.e., our bodies have retained, what has occurred prior to the present note(s) and by doing so we are able to anticipate what is to follow. When an appropriate note follows, the melody is intact. When an inappropriate note follows, we often immediately "know" that the melody has been played incorrectly.Please, give this a moment of reflection.

  

Now, let's add an additional type of perception to the mix. Let's say that we have left out an essential ingredient or aspect of the melody. Yes, the silence! The melody is being played "against" the background of silence. I say "the" background for us to note the universal commonality of silence. It defies specificity of instantiation (sorry). Silence is an equal opportunity presence. It never discriminates. It is always yielding sound, any sound, equally. But, we may ask, where is this silence? Where would or should we localize it? Is it in the melody? Yes and no. It is a necessary component of the melody but it is not identical to the melody. We can discriminate between silence and sound, but never separate them. Saint John of the Cross called the silence the "sonorous silence." It is a sounding silence that includes melody and the silent context in which music or the bird's song is heard. Again, we must ask where this silence is located. There is only one place where it can be, everywhere and nowhere—in our experience. We are the silence that makes sound possible. We are the silent spatiality that is "un-heard" in all sound. What of the sound? Where does the sound take place? Well, if we are the sonorous silence, then we are the sound as well. That is, the experience of the bird song is taking place in the tree in our experience, in us. When a gentle, focused, whole body attention is paid to the silent/sound, one can, with some practice, begin to "feel" the evanescent movement of the sound as we become the silence. It abides in our heart. Try it! 

A visual model of this evanescent movement of sound would be a candle flame. One must admit that the flame of a candle is a movement. As the flame is coming into being, the flame is simultaneously disappearing from being. Without the death of flame, there is no flame. In its coming there is a going; there is a going out. Flame, like sound, has the three "moments" of past, present, and future occurring simultaneously. If it were not for this evanescent movement, flame could not exist. Now, we must take note of a similar structure of fire to sound. Where is the darkness that flame illuminates? There must be an illuminated for there to be an illuminator! The darkness is yielding the light. Darkness and acoustic space are the wombs of light and sound. Yes, darkness also occurs in the body. We are the experience of darkness and light. We are illuminated by light because we abide in the dark. Does not the movement of light give rise to form? What was once obscured by darkness is now revealed by light. It is in this sense that fire gives rise to form. Again, we must take note of the fact that this manifesting of forms takes place, yes, in our experience, i.e., in our bodies. Without our nervous systems coming alive to the forms we see, there can be no forms, whether we take them to be outside of us or inside. In either case, our bodies (prakriti) are taking form as forms. One can feel this movement as it takes place in our (practiced) silent and restful body. Once we can bring about a silent attention, the experience of forms is alive in our bodies; we can feel it. An object can only take form in our experience, therefore in our bodies. Our bodies are alive with the manifestation of all forms. We feel them in silence.  

If You think that I am able to behold Your cosmic form, O my Lord, O master of all mystic power, then kindly show me that universal self. (Bhagavad Gita, 11, 4) 

Now, let's take these models to another level. What about knowledge? What about significance? How is all of my circumstantial experience like the experience of sound and form? Let's move on carefully, please. Let's start by comparing time to the movement of sound. Time, as lived time, is the movement of one circumstance into the next circumstance. Now, let's remember from a prior note in our blog, that circumstances are movements of significance or meaning. We live in meaningful time. The progression of time is the progression of meaning. Meaning, as thoughts and perceptions, is ever moving ahead from within our past to our future, one moment based on prior moments of significance projected into a significant future—movement like sound and fire.  Normally,  there is no halting of experience. We cannot stifle experience, I.e, we cannot stifle meaning from flowing out of our experience to a future which is anticipated. This is what our circumstances are made of.  As with melody, so with experience. We retain the past notes of the melody in anticipation of the notes to come. This is pure process. Time is process (or even "processing"); it is significant and fully humanized in all experience. The humanization comes from the past (think karma) and is protended as the future in the present. What has happened and will happen is present in what is happening. This is why, on an ethical level, we are often exhorted to take only those actions of body, speech, and mind which give rise to happiness in the future. This implies a movement of virtue. Ethical living (now) is a prerequisite for a happy future. Want to be happier in your future? Practice happiness as virtue now. 

So we may now understand that space, time (past, present, and future), and meaning are evanescent movements of experience. We have not exhausted this notion of experience, but we have isolated several of its key aspects. Now we must add another dimension, hinted at above. We must discuss the role of history.

  

The meaningful past, I.e., the past loaded with prior human acts of body, speech, and mind, is—as we have noted—the "stuff" of the present in the meaningful anticipation of a future. (Think the movement of a melody.) This is the only future that lives. All other kinds of future are theoretical and abstract. The living future is shaped in the meaningful present towards an anticipated, meaningful future. (Note this when you get a glass of water.) You will note that there are present those meaningful past acts in the present toward obtaining a glass of water. All three moments of time are evanescent and necessary. They are a sheer and significant process. These moments have been structured and filled out with the acts of body, speech, and mind from the past. What we do now, will structure a present toward a future—all taking place now. I'm not speaking of a moment of abstraction where we believe we can "catch" a now; I use the word "moment" to focus our attention on the movement of life, not an abstract present moment—as if there really were such a thing. Moments exist in our imaginations alone. Time is living experience in the womb of a dynamic and living space giving rise to thoughts, words, and deeds. It goes without saying that each act counts. The universe hinges upon them.