Wesenmystik - 'mysticism of being'

On June 1, 1310, a woman called Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris, charged with heresy and refusing to recant her work, 'Le Mirouer des simples ames anientes et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d'amour' (The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and Those Who Remain in Will and Desire of Love). Somewhere, there is a call, in me, repeated, to her spirituality, to her story.

Her story, simply, will not let me go.

This is the first in a series of posts that reflects my utter absorption with, and in, her work - her explication of nient - nothingness - and of a radical, to me somewhat nondual, path, the path of annihilation of the soul, and the self, in love.

I've found a profound article by Patrick Wright, called 'Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and the Subject of Annihilation'. I'm enamoured with this article because it attempts to undo Porete via Lacan and Kristeva, and then reverses the speculum. Postmodernism is thoroughly run through, via the lens of a premodern text, which is reflexively & necessarily explicated, in a postmodern frame. This article has given me hours of material to contemplate:

'Porete's inquisitors branded her a pseudo-mulier ('fake woman') which was also later said of Joan of Arc. The precise meaning of this phrase is ambiguous, but it suggests the importance of gender in the trial, for one may assume the label names an anxiety provoked by a woman who is morethan/less than a woman in the traditional medieval sense. Porete's assertions of innate nobility, her erudition in theological matters, the boldness of her mystical assertions...and her widespread sharing of ideas would have been transgressive even fro a man. But Porete's stance is more unruly, as she is a woman writing in the vernacular, her approval [from clergy - TN] complicating her semi-religious role between ecclesiastical and lay communities. And nowhere is this observed better than by Gilbert of Tournai, a Franciscan, who writes, betraying anxiety over the unclassifiable, 'There are among us women whom we have no idea what to call, ordinary women or nuns, for they live neither in the world nor out of it'.

'...Wesenmystik suggests a resistance to identity. She was not a nun, nor cloistered or attached to a specific house; she shared the beguines' liminal status, but was a solitary, a peripatetic without earthly ties. Moreover, though her book imbibed broader influences, such as courtly lyric and Neoplatonism, it calls for annihilation of the self in order to attain total fusion with God: "It is fitting, says Love, that this Soul be similar to the Godhead, for she is transformed into God". This idea is more grandiose than that of the beguines, who, by and large, strove modestly for imitatio Christi, or the identification with the humanity rather than the divinity of Christ.'

Next post: The dialogic of the decentered subject of postmodernism, and how this can be related to Porete's mirror symbolism.

Yum. :)

Ref:
Wright, P. (2009). 'Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and the Subject of Annihilation'. Mystics Quarterly, 35, 3-4, 63 - 100.

Raido

He's altered since the spring

I thought you should know
We can get the implications

And these sentiments outgrown 
But nobody needs to worry

On this little red book I am sold
I am a space suit in a heart-shaped continent now 
Equal to Shiva then

I began to prostitute myself
I've turned a rainbow on

To shift back to consequence
I need not understand it

He's altered since I took him

From my museum wall
Fell over on a train

Talking to my sentiments outgrown
I do not harm myself

Over his beauty anymore
It's just a space suit in a heart-shaped continent now
Equal to Jesus when

We all began to prostitute ourselves 
I've turned to Raido

For a shift back to consequence
Who need understand it?

From all other worlds I refuse to withdraw
But I'm clutching, anointing, little boys made of...
Who do I need to tell?
Why do I care who knows?
Who need understand?
I believe I have changed
Who need understand 

The error in my way?

It's always the voices

I choose to ignore
Brazen indifference

Or a peach-coloured squall
No love, it never came
But in great affection

I hold him in a space suit
Equal to Jesus

But he'd rather prostitute himself
I've turned to Raido
You need not understand it
You need not understand 

Andromeda

Allowing the Moment to Sing

'Language, on the other hand, has a specificity that no other system based on differences possesses: it divides (signifier/signified) and joins (modifier/modified = sentence); it is sign-communicating-sociality, "musicating" this dividing-joining movement involves exploding rhythm into division, of course, but also into juncture: into the metaphoric-metonymic slippage that corrugates lexemic items and lifts even the signifier/signified censorship; but especially, into the juncture of logic and sentence where socio-symbolic order is rebuilt and ignores anything to do with the previous, underlying (semic, morphemic, phonic, instinctual) explosion. Intervening at the level where syntactic order renders opaque the outlay underlying the signifying practice; intervening at the point where sociality constitutes itself by killing, by throttling the outlay that keeps it alive - that means intervening precisely when the sentence pulls itself together and stops. The problem is to raise and transform this very moment, to allow it to sing'. (p 168)

'Networks of alliteration establish trans-sentence paths that are superimposed over the linear sequence of clauses and introduce into the logical-syntactic memory of the text a phonic-instinctual memory. They set up associative chains that crisscross the text from the beginning to end in every direction'. (p 169)

Ref:

Kristeva, J. (1941). Desire in language. New York: Columbia University Press.

Natural Therapy

There are some books that, once I invest in the words, and engage in the text, deeply, I end up in dialogue with the book, with my whole body. These are goosebump books. There's goosebumps, there's back of the neck hackle-raises, there's realising that I'm holding the book like the book has become part of my body - where it ends, and I begin, whither I know not, as I sail through pedestrian crossing, through parkland, into the cafe where I don't have to look up, to place my order. I do not have the book, the book has me, I'm completely in it's thrall. The world becomes vivified, deeply, through the lens of these words, this hardcover.

Thus it is for Robert Kegan's "The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development". I am enamored with this book. I think it's last chapter should be required reading for every psychotherapist, every psychology undergraduate.

This is an extract that explores the nature of the 'holding environment', or 'culture of embeddedness' relevant to the different psychosocial development stages, for those that Kegan deigns as 'evolutionary guests' (I love this re-frame of the psychology office client). It's worth reading for the call that it places, to psychologists, to take an active role in attending to the presence of these cultures outside of the practice, if not leading the way, in establishing deeper social engagement with them, at a community level. These cultures are the basis for what he calls 'psychological amniocentesis', or, more simply, 'natural therapy'.


'Does the mothering culture attend to the newborn; does it provide a warm, close, comforting physical presence, does it accept the infant's utter dependence upon and merger with it? And does the mothering context, at the appropriate time, recognise and promote the toddler's emergence from this embeddedness; does it resist trying to meet the child's every need; does it stop nursing and reduce carrying; does it acknowledge the child's displays of independence and willful refusal; can it tolerate becoming 'other' to the child? And does it remain in some way that permits the child to recover it as other; does it avoid prolonged separation or psychological abandonment during the period of transition?

Does the parenting culture acknowledge and nurture the child's capacity for fantasy; does it accept the child's intense attachments and rivalries within  the family, can it accept the child's psychological dependence on, and merger with, the interior workings of the parents. Does the parenting context, at the appropriate time, recognise and promote the child's emergence from embeddedness; does it begin to hold the child responsible for her behaviours; locate and designate the source of the child's thoughts and feelings in the child; does it exclude the child from the inner workings of the marriage, from the marriage bed, from the home during school hours; does it acknowledge the child's displays of self-sufficiency and self-possessedness; can it tolerate becoming 'other' to the child? And does it remain in some way that permits the child to recover it as other; does it avoid falling apart at just that time as the child is differentiating from it?

Does the role-recognising culture support and acknowledge the child's tests and exercises of self-sufficiency, competence, and role differentiation; does the family or school give the child and opportunity to speak and be listened to in the public life of that institution, especially in it's decisions; is there an opportunity for personal responsibility, definition, control? Does the family or school seek to discover and support at least one involvement in which the child might have a continuing opportunity for successful self-display? Can it tolerate the child's confusion of it with the maintenance of the child's competence, the prosecution of the child's own needs? And does the culture recognise and promote the adolescent's emergence from embeddedness; does it contradict the validity or acceptability of a self-sufficiency that will not take others into account; does it insist that the adolescent hold up her end in trusts and agreements; does it look for the report of interior states rather than exterior dispositions, can it accept becoming relativised on behalf of a new identity and a new identification? And does the role-recognising culture remain in some way that permits the growing person not only to repudiate it, but to recover it?

Does the culture of mutuality acknowledge and support the person's capacity for collaborative, self-sacrificing, closely attuned, idealised interpersonal relationships? Does it share the person's internal subjective states, moods, feelings, innermost thoughts? Can it tolerate the person's confusion of it with herself? Does it recognise and promote the person's emergence from embeddedness in interpersonalism; does it resist being fused with, insist on recognising the person as distinct while still acknowledging the possibility and value of closeness; does it require the person to assume responsibility for her own initiatives and preferences, for her own psychological self-definition; and can it permit itself to be relativised on behalf of this emerging personal authority? Are  there at least some interpersonal partners who remain during the process of transition to take some role in the new psychological landscape?

Doe the culture of self-authorship acknowledge and support the person's exercises of psychological self-definition; does it confirm the person's gathering sense of herself as the origin of her meanings and purposes; does it recognise her as a player in a public arena in which she can exercise her personal powers, need for achievement and self-enhancement; does it give him work that allows him to exercise influence, wield power, assume responsibility; does it offer the opportunity for loyalty to, and investment in, some system of belief; can it accept the person's identification of its shared meaning with himself or herself?  Does it recognise and promote the person's emergence from embeddedness in independent self-definiton; does it insist on some relationship to the person who is running the psychic administration, refusing to accept mediated, nonintimate, form-subordinated relationships? Does the culture of ideology allow itself to be relativised on behalf of the bigger context which roots and co-regulates forms, systems, organisations? And do the ideological supports remain at the very time the person is separating from this identification with them?

And does the culture of intimacy acknowledge and support the exercise of interdependence (even interdependent self-definition), the surrender of (and play with) the form bound autonomous self, the counterpointing of identities?'


 The italics are mostly mine - it's been interesting to watch my hands, as I've typed this - to watch where I was agitated, where energised, where empassioned. The body, in dialogue.

The ego, to continue to transcend, this in all things, is mine, too. :)

Ref:

Kegan, R. (1982). The Evolving Self. Harvard: University Press.

Rumination

I go back over,

things I could have said differently, ways I could have been, differently, situations I would rather have seen as being, differently.

I go back over,

Six weeks of a sort of half-starved, half-baked madness, all halves, no wholes. Blackness lacking of billow, consuming dark fire from within, here. Movement not dared, nor scream, nor gasp.

A pulse, and a cough.

I go back over,

Six months of an irresolute leaning, into neither grace nor definition, barely human, bared teeth, baring animal. Curled up within, some self sense, there must be some, sleeps tightly, not dressed. A motion mechanical, a movement not engaged, just borne. Pay me not, beautiful lover, I know not from which lens you see, nor the goods which you reap, open mouthed, closed eyed.

Belong not, to me.

I go back over,

Six seasons, not undone by time nor tempest, just bare of self-sense, bare of me. Absorbed in my little square screen of escape, reality harsh-edged and narrow, when I stretch up off the seat, through her portal. Too hard & heavy to pick up, too soft and unmalleable to be bothered, eating.

A tree, and a glimmer.

Too long forgotten.

I go back over,

A life cobbled together out of bare strings of selfhood, of six years, since I lost my family, punishment borne of losing them, for the difference, had it but been. A blank, cold, void, office hours unchecked, black suit and severe hair adorned, no self esteem, no sarcasm, no wit. Death wish, revisited. Breathing less each year, skin more translucent, scrabbling with fingernails against sandstone, for a sense of purpose, give me teaching, give me psychology, give me connection. Six years not unaccompanied by my beloved birth family, but not rested for understanding, for the difference, either.

I wake now as rarely, before, the cold sunlight of dawn slips her appearance under my eyelids, controlled crying unabated, next door.  I pad about in the back garden of her chill welcome, arms wrapped about, sniffing for life again, drawing grass, dirt and weed up, between my toes. Let me breathe. I know not all the means by which circumstance flung me against you, dear morning.  

I suffer under your weight no more.

 Let me breathe.

A subject is hostage - via Levinas

Walking in and sitting down,
And I am stunned that you are here;

Bare cheek catches lamplight, shone from above,
Bare heart caught, watchfulness, of person.

Stretching to infinity, this sense
of Other, in the third, apportioned
in time, in responsibility, in justice.

You do not do, you do not do,
and here I
am,
otherwise,

not me, not this, not you, not mine, not us, not ours,
and yet here,
again,
not over.

'Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding, passivity more passive than all patience, passivity of the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for others; all this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the ego's identity. And this, pushed to the limit, is sensibility, sensibility as the subjectivity of the subject. It is a substitution for another, one in place of another, expiation'. ~ Levinas, Otherwise than Being

Psychological Stepping Stones - Word and Meaning Empowerment

The name of this empowerment has a much deeper significance than the literal understanding of it. It is an empowerment where the student encounters the subject that is none other than herself, through the words spoken to her by her teacher. There is a rich array of symbols, illustrative images and allegory used as a means of self-discovery, and the student is presented these in the form of a question. It is:

'the empowerment that the ecstatic intensity, on this level where the last trace of duality has been dissolved by the progressive intensification of the four lighting up phases in Being's sheer lucency, on it's way to recover and display it's dynamics. Having reached it's final destiny, and firmly occupied in it's rightful place, the ecstatic intensity rests in it's envelope of precious spontaneous thereness, in it's own bed.'

Guenther, p69.

I sort of smile at this point. This is all we are given, regarding this empowerment.

As a conclusion though, it is noted by Gunther that there is an internal logic to the four empowerments, such that each one deconstructs the traps built into a person's cybernetic existence, and aids the person in seeing the world anew, rather than seeing what she usually sees in a confirmatory manner.

As noted by Klongschen rab'byamspa:

'If a person who is so fortunate as to embark on these empowerments as steps in his mental-spiritual growth does not, right at the beginning, on the level of exteriority, cut off the conceptual-propositional thought patterns, the fictions concerning the phenomenal, and the cognitive operation will not be stopped in their proliferations; if, on the level of his interiority, he does not gather them up into the non-conceptual-nonpropositional dimension of thought, his psychic potential will not set out on it's path of enhanced integration and intensified awareness; if, on the level of the arcane dimension, he does not cut off all that went before but what is still more nonconceptual and nonpropositional, the lamps will not come up to be the path; and if, on the level of unsurpassable reality, he does not encounter Being's beingness in himself by what is utterly nonconceptual-nonpropositional, his visionary path will not be bright.'

Part of what I love about this Dzogchen material is that I get to make up half the meanings thus attributed to the descriptive words. Alive in spontaneous Being-ness, with question marks after the meaning-ness. :)

Guenther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

The Body at Death

There are two ways that the body can disappear at the time of death: The Body of Illusion and the rainbow body. For the Body of Illusion, luminosity and prana are united in ye shes (wisdom), and while the being is still in the defiled karmic body, this body can perform many kinds of miracles for the good of others. Finally at the moment of death the subtle prana of wisdom joins again with luminosity, and the vajra body is achieved.

At this point, the karmic body, made of gross elements, disappears and the corpse disappears into what might be called 'cosmic particles'. The rainbow body, on the other hand, is accomplished by the means of the 'great transference'.

The practices of trekcho followed by thogyal, precede this transference. At the fourth and ultimate stage of thogyal, the substance of the body, which is a combination of the elements, is refined and transferred into the subtle form of these elements, which is luminous coloured light. Only the hair and fingernails, which are the impurities of the body, remain behind. However, the person does not actually die, but transfers into a body of light, or rainbow form. This body is active and can only be seen by those with clarity of vision.

- adapted from pg 210, Notes, 'Women of Wisdom' by Tsultrim Allione.

I have been reading Western accounts of the choices and final acts that we take and make, or are given, in a 'good' death. I'm deeply drawn to working with age and death, with our human experience as we encounter both inevitabilities, with the ways that suffering can be alleviated, perhaps somewhat dispelled, through care.
Persistently, in the Vajrayana tradition, I am encouraged to look deeply into the luminosity and suchness, that permeates, even here, at death. I encounter my own death, the decay of the body, I learn to play a part of release, anicca anatta, dukkha, here in every moment and projected, into that one time, too. I learn the means by which palliative care may be extended to others - with a little polemic raised by those nearby to me lately about the word, I hesitate to use it, but compassion, in informed action, applies here, as nowhere.

My imagination has returned to life, in a way, by virtue of this book 'Women of Wisdom' by Lama Tsultrim - the Kagyu school of which she is a more than able teacher speaks to the part of my heart that makes my decisions grounded on dreams, visions, and the space of dharmas.

Even in death, even in death.

The Sign and the Symbol

An incredibly beautiful photo of Julia Kristeva graces her book, ‘Desire in Language’. A feminist, literary theorist, turned psychoanalyst, turned philosopher, in this book she reviews literary works and incredible art by Giotto and Bellini, to bring us a semiotic understanding of expression and post-Heideggerian dialectic.

I’ve extracted these paragraphs below from Kristeva’s essay on ‘The Bounded Text’ for a few reasons:

1.  She discusses the Western cultural shift between sign and symbol, which, as a 21^st century member of an Order grounded on a spirituality birthed within Catharism, there is a historio-geographical link that I think is pertinent to understanding our initiation prayers;

2. There’s a paper by Susanne Cook-Greuter and Beena Sharma that is being presented this weekend at the Integral Theory Conference, called ‘Polarities and Ego Development’. I see a parallel-to-progression in what is charted as culturally historical by Kristeva, of the Mediaeval Period in this chapter, with developments that are available to us in this age, individually in adult development, as proposed by Cook-Greuter and Sharma. Core to understanding each trope (and they’re not from the same fields) is grasping an initiating dualism – an energetic rift, of a sort, birthing distinction, polarity, birthing language. We’re given to turn from symbol to sign, and from sign to nonlinear map, a healing of tensions, which shift to become unbounded from a given, finite hierarchy.

I think, far, far too much.

Inspired by Kristeva’s paragraphs: 

‘The second half of the Middle Ages (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) was a period of transition for European culture: thought based on sign replaced that of symbol. A semiotics of the symbol characterised European society until the thirteenth century, as clearly manifested in this period’s literature and painting. It is, as such, a semiotic practice of cosmogony; these elements (symbols) refer back to one (or several) unrepresentable and unknowable universal transcendences; univocal connections link these transcendences to the units evoking them; the symbol does not resemble the object it symbolises; the two spaces (symbolised and syboliser) are separate and do not communicate.

The symbol assumes the symbolised (universals) as irreducible to the symboliser (it’s markings).

Mythical thought operates within the sphere of the symbol through symbolic units (units of restriction) in relation to the symbolised universals. The symbol’s function, in it’s vertical dimension, is thus one of restriction. The symbol’s function, in it’s horizontal dimension (the articulation of signifying units among themselves) is one of escaping paradox; one could even say that the symbol is horizontally antiparadoxical; within it’s logic, two opposing units are exclusive. The good and the bad are incompatible – as are the raw and the cooked, the honey and the ashes, et cetera. The contradiction, one it appears, immediately demands resolution. It is thus concealed, ‘resolved’ and therefore put aside.

The key to a symbolic semiotic practice is given from the very beginning of a symbolic discourse, the course of a semiotic development is circular since the end is programmed, given in embryo, from the beginning (whose end is the beginning) because the symbol’s function (ideologeme) antedates the symbolic utterance itself. Thus are implied the general characteristics of a symbolic semiotic practice: the quantitative limitation of symbols, their repetition, limitation and general nature.

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, the transcendental unity supporting the symbol, it’s otherworldly casing, it’s transmitting focus – was put into question. Until the end of the fifteenth century, theatrical representations of Christ’s life were based on both the canonical and apocryphal Gospels or the Golden legend (I need to look up ‘The Mysteries’ dated c. 1400 published by Achille Jubinal in 1837. Hmm.) By the fifteenth century, scenes devoted to Christs public life – the transcendental foundation evoked by the symbol appeared to capsize. This heralds a new signifying relation, between the real and the concrete. In thirteenth century art, prophets were contrasted with the apostles, whereas by the fifteenth century, the four evangelists were no longer set against the four prophets, but against the four fathers of the Latin Church (Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory). The miniature replaced the cathedral, and the serenity of the symbol was replaced by the strained ambivalence of the sign’s connection, which lays claim to a resemblance and identification of the elements it holds together, while first postulating their radical difference. Whence the obsessive insistence on the theme of dialogue between two irreducible but similar elements (dialogue – generator of the pathetic and psychological) in this period of transition. For example, the fourteenth century abounds in dialogues between God and the human soul; the Dialogue of the Crucifix and the Pilgrim as one example. Through this movement the Bible was moralised.

The sign that was thus outlined retained the fundamental characteristic of the symbol – irreducibility of terms, of the referent to the signified, of the signified to the signifier, and of all the units of the signifying structure, itself. The ideologeme of the sign is like that of the symbol – it is dualist, hierarchical and hierarchising. A difference between sign and symbol can be seen horizontally as well as vertically – within vertical function, the sign refers back to entities both of a lesser scope and more concretised than that of the symbol. They are reified universals become objects. Put into a relationship within the structure of a sign, the entity under consideration is transcendentalised and elevated to the level of theological unity. The semiotic practice of the sign assimilates the metaphysics of the symbol and projects it onto the ‘immediately perceptible’. Valorised in this way, the ‘immediately perceptible’ is transformed into an objectivity – [I love this sentence, TN] the reigning law of discourse in the civilisation of the sign.

In horizontal function, the units in a signs semiotic practice are articulated as metonymical concatenation of deviations from the norm, signifying progressive creation of metaphor. Oppositional terms, always exclusive, are caught within a network of multiple deviations (surprises in narrative) giving an illusion of open structure, with arbitrary ending.

Art is thus programmed by a closed, dyadic process, whereby the referent-signified-signifier hierarchy is instituted and the oppositional dyads are interiorised. The articulation of the terms resolves the contradiction.‘

Kristeva, J. (1941) Desire in Language. New York: Columbia University Press

Phenomenology via Kupers per Merleau Ponty

With Merleau Ponty, per Kupers in the paper listed below, phenomenology undergoes a radical return to the body and to embodiment as the basic nexus of human living, where we always already are situated in meaningful inter-relationship.

Merleau-Ponty’s overall ambition was to disclose the roots of rationality and Being, through extending Husserl’s account of the ‘lived body’ to include a body that experiences and is experienced, thus overcoming Cartesian dualism. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is already lived, meaningful, relational and intentional.  He not only rejects referentialist-representationalism, following Heidegger, he builds an anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, non-reductive ‘open media’ account of embodiment, rearticulating the relationship between subject and object.

Returning to the life-world and things themselves, for Merleau-Ponty, is going back to the way we experience before we begin to theorise. We are embodied as subjects into an inter-subjective and inter-objective continuum, an embedded existence. Interestingly, Kupers proposes that as unruly and unpredictable realities, per Merleau-Ponty, bodies themselves are de-centering, providing a less-than-perfect means of boundary building, for subjectivity.

We learn to move our bodies pre-reflectively, and thus there is a level of intentionality below our explicit acts, manifesting itself in bodily engagement that is our primary rapport with the world.

‘A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated itself into its world, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it, it is to allow oneself to respond to their call’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962)

An operative intentionality establishes and utilises secret bonds of correspondence and interdependency, which constitute our reciprocal involvements. The interaction thus inferred within an ever-present world frame opens up an orientation to a post-dualistic ontology in Merleau-Ponty’s late works. Seeing the pre-personal, the personal and the interpersonal as chiasmic, intertwined and reversible, we are allowed the possibility of understanding phenomena with greater profundity. The patterns of meaningful being and action exist neither in the mind nor in the external world, they are ‘in-between’, an inter-relationality of individual, social and trans-subjective practices.

‘Within this fleshly being the in-between is as ‘fullness of void’ understood as a creative and fulfilling emptiness.’

It is via this in-between, which is the birth place of intertwined individual identity, that we encounter social and inter-objective knowledge, realities and creative relationships. With this kind of relational ontology, a proto-integral interpretation becomes available, of phenomenology as precipitating a birth into an awareness easily identified as 'Integral'.

Kupers, W. (2009). The Status and Relevance of Phenomenology for Integral Research: Or Why Phenomenology Is More and Different than an ‘Upper Left’ or Zone #1 Affair. Integral Review, 5(1), 51 – 95. 

The Aim of Attention

'The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle. We can begin to watch our thoughts and emotions without necessarily being affected by them quite as powerfully or vividly as we’re used to. We can still feel our feelings, think our thoughts, but slowly our identity shifts from a person who defines him- or herself as lonely, ashamed, frightened, or hobbled by low self-esteem to a person who can look at loneliness, shame, and low self-esteem as movements of the mind.'

-Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Aim of Attention (Summer 2009)

http://www.tricycle.com/dharma-talk/the-aim-attention

The whole article was really worth it's easy reading....

Psychological Stepping Stones - Knowledge Through Appreciation Empowerment

This empowerment aims at assisting the student to feelingly envision, and envision feelingly, the dynamics of Being as the masculine-feminine ‘polarity’, as occuring in their rapturous lovemaking. She is given to understand the varying degrees of delight as they are blended within the body, as a multi-levelled system. The vision occurs between between rapture in ecstatic intensity, and the everyday-'I', and the idea is to give a tangible sensuous form through the vision, where the masculine and feminine address and disclose to each other their embodied sexuality:

‘Being’s coming to presence and being interpreted as world is the reification of it’s being in a supramundane world, where bliss reigns supreme, and in it

Being’s amorously frolicking pristine awareness triumphs as bliss supreme.

By engaging n the passionate desire between ‘activity’ and ‘appreciation’ emancipation is won; therefore you too

Engage and participate in this ceaseless amorous frolicking!

Therein lies bliss supreme.’

Both Being’s coming-to-presence and interpretation as an environing world and it’s organismic life forms in it’s totality, since time before time, are understood to have endured in what is it’s linear transformation of deiform energies, that presences itself in men and women. Their bonding in ‘activity' and 'appreciation’ expresses itself in bliss. By this bliss do we come to know the superthought-intentionality of the Victorious One (one’s own ecstatic intensity, identifiable as bliss supreme).

There is a symmetry break that marks Being’s open state coming-to-presence and actual radiant closed state, the envelope into which Being wraps itself as itself, it’s ‘ownmostness’. Because of it’s dynamics inherited from the virtual state, a further bifurcation takes place, into the realm of gods and goddesses. Any symmetry break implies an increase in complexity that carries with it the challenge to ‘get to the source or origin of it’. The feminine here plays a vital role (and here I had been trying to steer clear of feminist discourse, huh).

In her capacity of expressing and Being the expression of Being’s openness/nothingness, a spaciousness and a mystery, she is able to open up the unformed with it’s immense wealth of open possibilities or to offer value perception or appreciative awareness that is active as an inspiration and is revered in its role as ‘heroine’. The rousing of masculine activity in response, that is made to express itself in the four dynamic regimes of psychic energy interchange results in self-transcendence, in bliss supreme. Bliss supreme goes beyond the four postulates of existence and nonexistence, eternalism and nihilism, and thus is known as four delights (I love this!)

Through this empowerment the student is made to move not simply from one aspect ‘appreciative’ to another one ‘pristine awareness’ as if one was higher, but they learn to live, harmoniously, with both at the same time.

Perhaps showing either his own stripes or the stripes of the tradition he describes, Gunther here has identified ‘women’ (actually – I’ve interposed the term 'feminine' and stripped out the comment that is sort of chauvinistic) approximately as sex objects. In some way this is meant to be reconciled by a quote that he gives from the Klong-gsal (a Dzogchen text) which, is actually a quote I need to apply to my own self, objectified:

Despising a woman is tantamount to denigrating Being’s spaciousness,  and

Withdrawing yourself from pleasure you court the deepest hell.

With what value, and how deep goes, a commitment, to the self?

Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

Being's Holomovement

(Being having risen in it’s wholeness as a presence out of Being)

Because of it’s thereness as if it were some resonance
samsara and nirvana are an unbroken whole;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were light frequencies

everything that is going to come-to-presence is an inner lucency;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were some gestalt

the cognitive capacity does not lose itself in the extraneous;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were a pristine awareness everything

that is coming-to-presence is of an insubstantial-dissipative nature;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were non-dual

one’s cognitive capacity abides in it’s focusedness.

Because of it’s thereness as if it were free from perimeters

 it does not abide in any of the confines;

Because of it’s thereness as an impure gate
the emergence of an interpreted world never stops.

Because of it’s thereness as a pure pristine awareness gate, Being’s possibilising dynamics

expresses itself in the connectedness of a mother with her child.

Rin-chen spungs-pa - from 'The Sun's Life Giving Force' - Padma Legs-grub, 1608

Full title: 'The sun's life giving force or the explanation of the intrinsic meaning of the indestructible light that is the sublime and most mysterious and unsurpassable message of all spiritual pursuits.'

Who could walk past that tome on a bookshelf? :)

Psychological Stepping Stones - The Mystery Empowerment

For anyone reading this who might be familiar with Integral discourse on masculine and feminine ‘types’, I actually propose that the association between the masculine and feminine and emptiness and form identified in this empowerment, is orthogonal to the relationship as formed in Integral parlance.  It’s been mind-bending and beneficial, for me to spend time with this ‘upside-down’ version of the masculine feminine relationship – it feels similar to comparing the Hindu masculine passive feminine active divinities with the Western mythology’s masculine agency and feminine’s communion, for my money.

Using a skull filled with the ‘elixir of immortality’, this ritual uses the same four dynamic regimes of the body as the first, and aims at making the student experience the mystery of the creative forces that shape both her biological existence plus the existence of the universe.

Overflowing bliss supreme, self-existent, this skull is

Brimful  with the mutual passion rinsed of the pseudoconcrete.

My dear child of the highest life form, empowered by it

May you come to possess the power over these same forces as they organise themselves into their breeze like movement in a coherent web of chreods.

The bliss supreme is given to arise in the downward flow of creative fluids that are purer than pure in the masculine and feminine aspects of Being’s self existent pristine awareness.  The description by Gunther includes a sense that the power that ‘organises itself’ is genetic material, and it is a component of the lucency of Being’s ownmostness. This has an enduring vibration that represents a paradox - colourlessness versus the full-colour spectrum, one virtual, the other actual. Thus Being becomes, through vibrations. Becoming is directionless, having no endpoint beyond it's own expression. This spectrum is felt in the heart, the ‘tsitta’ palace.

The projective character of Being’s ownmostness sets up a boundary of vibrationary patterns which may be understood as a kind of spatialisation. It is referred to as the self-informing, self organising dynamics of Being’s ownmostness as pure light. Immense and rare beauty radiates from here.

While space-and-time binding here are non-linear, the phase is referred to as the self-organising dynamics of Being’s luminescence into the complementarity and inseparability of masculine and feminine. It is intensely felt as a cognitive dynamic in the immediacy of experience, as a complementarity/inseparability of Being’s openness/nothingness with it’s lighting up/coming to presence. Lighting up is seen as a masculine intensity, and openness-nothingness is the feminine intensity. Precisely because the feminine is spacious like the sky, openness-nothingness is the very possibilising dynamic of Being. The masculine lighting up in all it’s bright brilliance adorns the possibilising dynamic (the feminine) which would literally otherwise be nothing.

The mutualising passion in the intimate embrace antedates any materialisation in any other phase of the system’s dynamics. In Dzogchen it is so clear, here, there is no rigid separation between the psychic and the physical, and there is no Western battle, between them – rather they give themselves to each other, in imaginative, total, playful abandonment.

The masculine and feminine creative dynamics may be conceived of as an instability phase, where the system is about to undergo a symmetry ‘break’ that becomes the way of self-actualisation. This way composes of two information carriers, called:

‘information carrier in the service of building up one’s commonly accepted physical reality’ and 

‘information carrier in the service of maintaining one’s spiritual heritage’.

The latter resides in the light chreods, as an effulgence that by virtue of it’s own motility evolves into a web of pristine awareness modes fed by ‘the sea of bliss supreme’ as the ultimate organising principle.

Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

Psychological Stepping Stones - The Flask Empowerment

Five flasks are used to symbolise the washing away of dross that has accumulated to make an individual blind to her own potential.  There is the evolution of the mandala, or a spiral movement involved in the empowerment process, where the starting point is identical with the ending result – each flask illustrates the interdependence or correspondence with the structure and function of the flask.

To start, the flask in the center is lifted above the initiate’s head and a drop of water serves to cleanse the dynamic regime. The first utterance is pronounced at the same time:

This flask of Being’s possibilising dynamics in it’s field-like expanse

Is filled with the natural water of Being’s openness/nothingness radiance

My dear child, being empowered by it

May you understand the abidingness of the field-like expanse.

The field-like expanse is the source of all meanings.

The next, eastern-point flask is raised to the initiate’s heart, representing the mental/spiritual dimension, with the words:

This flask of Being’s vitalising core intensity that is something not born, thus that will not die

It is filled with the natural substance of it’s incessantness.

My dear child, being empowered by it

May you understand Being’s reality in not posing any danger.

This is the dynamic of the mirror-like pristine awareness mode.  The vibrant dimension of pure experience that is without birth and open like the sky, an ecstatic intensity that does never cease, this is the presencing of Being’s pure actuality. This complementarity and indivisibility of the field and it’s excitation as experience is what is meant and is illustrated by the flask and the water in it. Gunther highlights that via the establishing of a relationship between subjective, inner reality and objective, outer reality, access to a holistic and self-consistent reality is gained.

The next, southern-point flask is lifted to the throat, symbolising the dynamic regime of the linguistic, symbolic:

This flask of Being’s self-existing pristine awareness in action

Is filled with the natural substances of objects and sensuous pleasures.

My dear child empowered by it

May you come to possess the power of your thoughts, becoming spontaneously realised.

This empowerment consists in exploring the wealth of qualities the world holds, a venturing into what has always been there, but has been un-noticed, in being there. From this vantage point, all that we ever need is available to us, and everything that comes into existence must be consistent with itself and everything else.

Gunther notes here the sheer ecstasy that intensifies, with each level of the initiation.

At which point I must admit - I’m so easily carried, on words.  :-)

The next western-point flask is raised to the navel – for the dynamic regime of the person’s physical/physiological dimension, which has been set acourse by the sexual act in excitement, plateau, climax and resolution, the whole of which has a physical and a spiritual dimension.

This flask, of Being’s impassibility, that is not something that has been born,

Is filled with the streaming profusion of bliss supreme

My dear child, being empowered by this

May you come to possess the power of a passion that is not subjectively appropriated.

This empowerment takes us to bliss supreme, which is the impassibility of pure experience that is without birth but has been so since time before time.  The fundmental forces moving through the hierarchically organised dynamic regimes shifts energy, from descending into details, to ascending into enriched meaningfulness, as well as damming up the psychospiritual potential, which is the bliss supreme.

The process ends in pure creativity at the northern-most point, extending over all levels and establishing it’s own dynamic dimension, with the words:

This flask symbolising Being’s pristine awareness in its insubstantiality

Is filled with the substances of the five kinds of motility that never stop.

My dear child being empowered by it

May you come to possess the power of Being’s superb creativity, in all it’s completeness.

What is meant here is illustrated in the complementarity/indivisibility of the flask and the water, the vibrant dimension of the in-substantiability of Being’s pristine awareness as a function of it’s ecstatic intensity, that acts in ultimate emancipation, since time before time.

There is a subtle distinction, threaded through here, between understanding and possessing. The possibilising dynamics of the whole mirrors itself in us, and we are now called upon to act out the possibilities of what we see, so that they become our assets in the true sense of the word. The power which is our attention is drawn by the empowerments, and roused into self-realisation we possess and then understand, in, and of, ourselves.

Outwardly, by having acquired and possessing the power of experiencing, this enables us to symbolically recreate the presencing of the condition of dissolving into supramundane reals;

Inwardly, by having acquired and possessing the power of experiencing the ‘phantasmal’ body, the material concretisation of beliefs about one’s body dissolve into sheer lucency;

Arcanely, by having acquired and possessing the power of oneself as Being’s vastness and ecstatic intensity, the trend of being divided against oneself and slipping into mistaken identifications stops by itself.

The empowerment seeks to effect a transition from the narrowly circumscribed, nonimaginative discursive mind to a place of lowering of conceptual restraints, releasing into emancipatory dynamics. Imagination is indispensible for coming to an understanding of the self, in the perception of a gestalt structure, embodying a meaningfully organised experience. The cognitive principle is immanent, not in a solid spatial structure, but in the way the system organises, renews and resolves. The meaning rich gestalt, in own-space, ends us where we started.

In Being’s core intensity that is Being’s superdiaphaneity that has no name

There is neither possession nor non-possession.

Non-understanding gives rise to duality.

Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

Psychological Stepping Stones - Introduction

There are a series of subtle-body noticings that come with working through the four Dzogchen empowerments, as translated here by Herbert Gunther in Chapter 5 of 'Meditation Differently'.

I have no claim, whatsoever, on any Dzogchen lineage. I have this book, a reverence, and some attention that I'm training my will upon. This book has helped deepen my appreciation for exactly what initiation, or empowerment, can liberate. I do not claim in any way that there is a spiritual athleticism, to be practiced, in working through these four stages of empowerment, simply by reading these words, strengthening visualisation processes, and spacing out the stages, across time. I only have the record of what went on, for me, when I worked through this material.

Gunther highlights the empowerment journey as progressing from the external to the internal, and from the arcane to the super-arcane. Linearity, however, definitely doesn't apply, in this work.

The purpose of the empowerments is to mobilise the individual's inner potential and have it mature into what is best described as that individual's autonomy as an expression and a measure of their relations with their environment. There is a liberation, in the growth of cognitive capacity in emancipation from organismic and representational restrictions. It's highest expression would then be what has been termed the ec-static intensity as it becomes experienced in it's pristine awareness modes [italics mine].

'the river of the empowering force that is nothing else but
    the beingness of Being;
the river of the empowering force that is
     self existing resonance;
the river of the empowering force that is
      the five pristine awareness modes;
the river of the empowering force that is the five gnosemes
      the dominant figures in the prototypes of conscious life.' p 50.

These rivers are associated with developmental lines that constitute the dynamic body image, ranging from the affective-organismic to the spiritual and ecstatic.

An individual finds themselves always already in a social context. In this place, interaction and communication are constitutive of the individual, and evoke corresponding processes, when shared. Ritual is a kind of social language that serves to symbolise social communication.

In the first of the the initiatory processes, a flask of water is used, to symbolise purification, a restoration and recognition of an individual's highest potential. The Dzogchen thinker's realm is Being's abidingness. This endogenous pristine awareness has central dynamics that are already 'on the move' - a mandala or spiral movement that starts from the whole, of Being's spontaneity. In it's movement it forms a socio-human reality that is itself a process of uncovering a universe in which the human individual is being disclosed to an understanding of her being.

'The outer is but inner, raised to a state of mystery' - Novalis

The formative outer phase is the activity configurational setting, that is a reflection as the way [italics mine]. The empowerments are imaged as occurring in the mandala of the process structure that is the self presentation of Being to itself, by way of symbolic re-creation, in the uniquely singled out cognitive space of the experiencer's whole multi-levelled body awareness. This self sensing process reflexively instantiates itself via:

1) Sense-perceptions - iterative feedback between outer and inner world where we continously re-cast and re-mold our experience of reality;
2) intensification of the sense-perception process.

Before initiation it is vital that the student learn to see themselves fresh, with new eyes. To see things as meanings. Transformative vision applies equally to household utensils as it does to the conch, a mirror, a lute, fruits and a scarf (symbols of sensuous pleasures). Transformative vision applies also to fellow household members. Five flasks with five scarves symbolising the complementarity of male/female aspects of the protopatterns of synergetic consciousness are arranged at the five expected points. Learning to see household members on the energetic level sees these scarves become vital identifiers, the territory of gods and goddesses.

The gate opens, the sweat begins. :)


Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

'Monks, one thing, if practiced and made much of, conduces to great thrill, great profit, great security after the toil, to mindfulness and self-possession, to the winning of knowledge and insight, to pleasant living in this very life, to the realization of the fruit of release by knowledge. What is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered on the body.'

The Buddha, Anguttara Nikaya

Phenomenology - a Mahamudra followup

I'm listening my way through some old Integral Naked/Integral Life recordings at the moment. One of these recordings is of Ken Wilber and Patrick Sweeney, discussing the Fourth Turning of the Dharma Wheel.


Patrick Sweeney is the lineage holder of the Karma Kagyü lineage, given by the Vidyadhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He is also the head of Satdharma—meaning "genuine dharma"—a Buddhist organization created with the purpose of propagating Chögyam Trungpa's unique transmission.

What does this have to do with phenomenology? I hear you, my beloved reader, mutter.

Patrick describes the Trikaya (three bodies) of Mahamudra in a way that I find a little more convincing than the parallel to the Christian Trinity that Wilber constructed in this conversation. (This is likely to be completely my own contraction - I have trouble identifying the Christian Father, an active creator principle, with, or as, the Ground of Being, which is the way that Wilber frames the Dharmakaya, here).

Patrick gives a different version of the essences of the trikaya. He describes that in the buddhadharma our human condition is fundamentally sane, and fundamentally, always already, pristine. Consciousness is always already open, spacious in dharmakaya, it is luminous and clear in cognitive lucidity as the sambhogakaya,  and is endlessly responsive and contactable in the nirmanakaya. 

What intrigued me about the interview was the 'veils' that he talks about, operating over the dharmakaya to create a subject, and the sambhogakaya to create an object, which then creates action, in the nirmanakaya. This is a contraction of our fundamental, open, spacious state, identified as a great tragedy in the Mahamudra tradition. We're considered to be stuck in a bad habit - continuously ignoring the lucidity, the pristine state, of our own minds, and we get caught thus in the 84,000 conflicting emotions.

I was struck by how antithetical this was to the use of the terms subject and object in my phenomenology readings of earlier today - how the subject and object in phenomenology actually operate as a clarifier at the level of second order reflexive experience, allowing the differentiation of this-that. Definitely not a veil.

Neither abject in spirituality, nor absorbed within transcendental philosophy, she moves in a forgotten soul.

Phenomenology via Kupers (Definitions)

Transcendental  - in the Kantian sense means an investigation concerned with the ways objects are experienced, as well as the a priori conditions for the possibility for such experience and knowledge. Transcendental phenomenology focuses on the way things are given. For Husserl this means focusing on phenomena and the meanings that they have for us, and asking how these meanings are constituted. Constituted does not mean fabricated – the mind does not fabricate the world. To constitute means to bring to awareness, to disclose. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to reconstruct the structures that are underlying and making possible these constitutive achievements.

Epoche – (literally astention) is borrowed from the Greek skeptics to refer to the questioning of assumptions in order to fully examine a phenomenon. By suspending our beliefs, we are open to new experiences, we allow the object of our experience to present itself to us in new form.

Bracketing –the differential setting aside of a portion of an inquiry, so as to look to the whole. Natural attitude is set aside so that the researcher may begin with the things themselves.

Phenomenological reduction – the consideration of the basic elements of an enquiry, without concern for what is accidental or trivial. The idea of ‘Ruckfuhrung’ –drawing back from what appears to how it shows itself re-flects the inquiry from a straightforward orientation, towards consciousness. The aim of reduction is to re-achieve a direct and primitive contact with the world rather than conceptualise it. What is left over is pure transcendental ego as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. The reduction to the sphere of immanence can then be followed in heuristic, hermeneutic reduction. Methodologically this is the movement from fact to essence via eidetic reduction.

Eidetic reduction – a shift to consider things not as realities but as instances of realities, as pure possibilities rather than actualities. It is proposed that in this way essences – universal and unchangeable structures- can be determined. For Husserl, this second reduction was necessary to meet the demands of empirical, rigorous, science.

Husserlian transcendental phenomenological reduction therefore follows the Kantian notion of transcendental consciousness, the creation of time awareness through protention and retention, insomuch as self-constitution. Only based on realisation of this process of sedimentation through time can a person make their comportment transparent.

Eidos – there is free variation or imagined variation of a reduced thing to a common eidos, or variation that changes. These variations can be put into the service of analysis – seeing aesthetic forms, manifesting empathy, improvisation through now-ness and so on. It is through these multiple variations that an ‘Aha!’ arises, a vision which connects the structures and that carries the force of conviction.

Lebenswelt (life world) – the world as it is lived and experienced by conscious subjects – the world where we share knowledge which is useful for our ‘daily practices’ and our ‘daily circumstantial truths’.

Ref:

Kupers, W. (2009). The Status and Relevance of Phenomenology for Integral Research, Integral Review, 5 (1), 51-95. 

Phenomenology via Kupers (1)

Because I’m but a novice in both phenomenology and Integral Theory, these series of posts will present more of a summary than a critical analysis of Wendlin Kupers’ paper (reference below).

 This post summarises the first part of the paper, up to reviewing Husserlian phenomenology.

In this paper Kupers distinguishes a role for phenomenology that is broader than the role typically ascribed to phenomenology in the AQAL (all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types) models developed by Ken Wilber. Typcially, in describing the ‘domains of knowing’ that are the ground of the AQAL approach  to human consciousness, Wilber presents subjective, objective, intersubjective and interobjective means of discourse as the four critical, and valid perspectives that must be considered in an all-encompassing framework of consciousness. Phenomenology is located in the subjective, or upper-left quadrant, in these models.

Kupers begins with an examination of Husserlian phenomenology, to move onto examining phenomenology via an inter-subjective lens.  The work of Merleau-Ponty is reviewed to assess the possibilities for remedy for not only limitations to earlier models of phenomenology, but also for remedy of limitations with respect to integral theory, itself. Finally, Kupers offers an approach called ‘pheno-practice’ which seeks to enhance integral research in an empirical way.

Phenomenology is introduced by Kupers as per Merleau-Ponty’s definition as a flexible and vivid way of inquiry, which consistently explores new ways of reasoning.  Phenomenology deals with the appearances of things, specifically ‘things that appear in human experience’.  This is not only a realism, it is a reasoned enquiry as to the appearances in consciousness that humans encounter. Phenomenon means ‘that which reveals itself’ – and as per Heidegger, phenomenologists typically seek to let a thing speak for itself.

Phenomenology therefore examines the content of our consciousness (it’s meaning) and also the way that we perceive things (how we know). Phenomena in this way are not located in a theoretical nexus, but an embedded personal and cultural context. As personal, a phenomenological account is also a subjective account.

Husserl introduced a process called ‘bracketing’ in an attempt to overcome the Cartesian divide between subject and object, and to set aside psychologism, historicism and scientism to explore the subjective  position. In this way the objective world is ‘proved’ through subjective account – ontology becomes epistemology.

Per Kupers, Husserl tried to investigate the formal qualities of reality which human beings become aware of in experience. He was searching for a way to uncover the experiencing of phenomena in their most primordial roots of pre-reflective consciousness to their exemplification in science. Correspondingly, a phenomenologist distinguishes between how phenomena are experienced (noesis) from how they appear in a subject’s awareness (noemata), distinguishing structures of consciousness from essences. Thus does phenomenology examine objects, and how we relate to these objects, as a content of consciousness.

Following Brentano, Husserl explored intentionality as the notion that consciousness is always oriented to things in the world – consciousness always being of or about something or someone. The mode of directing our consciousness to something is distinct from what is represented – consciousness reaches out beyond it’s own acts to the phenomena (otherwise known as the anti-representationalist stance).  In this way, objectivity of things is co-constituted by structures that have meaning value.

What we observe in phenomenology is not the object itself, but how it is given in intentional acts.

Transcendental phenomenology becomes the study of the basic components of the meanings that are made possible by intentionality – as accomplished by transcendental subjectivity. In phenomenology, we are not concerned with situating consciousness within a naturalistic framework – rather consciousness arises within an overarching transcendental dimension, with non-psychological reflection. There is no otherworldly homunculus – the empirical subject and the transcendental subject are but two ways of conceiving the same subjectivity. In the first one is aware of oneself as causally determined known object, in the other we are aware of ourselves as knowing subjects, at the limit of the world.

For phenomenology, to know essences, all assumptions about the existence of the external world must be suspended. We do this by bracketing – framing out the ubiquitous background of everyday life. A personally or socially significant phenomena is investigated as an experience, not as a conceptualisation.

Phenomenological methodology includes techniques of epoche, bracketing, reduction and free variation (see ‘Phenomenology Definitions’ post, to follow). These become the cornerstones of suspended judgement, necessary for phenomenological inquiry. For Husserl a methodological freeing from culturally prevalent habits of thought brought a ‘new universal direction for our interest’, which he compared to spiritual conversion.

‘By consciously investigating the phenomena of life that we habitually take for granted, the world changes before our eyes and reveals the mysterious lining of the all embracing world horizon and the entwining of each thing with universal being. The world then becomes the universal field into which all our experiencing, understanding and doing are directed. To investigate the relational structure of consciousness and meaning of this plenum of the world as they reveal themselves to reflective consciousness became the task of phenomenology ever since Husserl.’ (p. 58)

Naive unexamined experience is thus transformed into a reflexive or second-order one, a one made more vivid in highlighting consciousness to itself.

As a transcendental philosophy, Husserlian phenomenology is interested in possibility conditions and foundations for knowledge moreso than psychological process. It tries to uncover the invariant formal principles by which consciousness operates in order to be constitutive. After investigation, the intuited object is communicated beyond private ascertainment, usually via language or symbolic inscription. The description however is a constitutive part of the phenomenological approach and is accepted to shape experience as much as the experience shapes the distinction. We are not talking about an ‘encoding’, rather an ‘embodiment’ that incarnates precisely what we experience. For Husserl, the objective truths of science must be recognised as grounded in living acts of human consciousness in relation to worldly phenomena. Man and world are first and foremost in relation – only at the second level, the reflective level of logic do we divide subject and object into separate entities.

The life-world is the ground of established scientific activity, the place where common-sense phenomena become the object of investigation.  Modern science to an extent conceals the life world under scientific representations. Life-worldly phenomena has intersubjective and socio-cultural relationship, and in this way can be seen to extend outside of Wilber’s upper left quadrant in the AQAL framework.

Ref:

Kupers, W. (2009). The Status and Relevance of Phenomenology for Integral Research, Integral Review, 5 (1), 51-95.  

Re-thinking the Enlightenment - Susan Neiman

Listening to Philosophy Bites recently, I was intrigued by an interview with Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, who proposes that we have yet to fully and deeply appreciate and reconcile the values introduced to our culture, apropos The Enlightenment.

She uses much 'we' language in the interview - I like this, in this context, because by virtue of it she hands us back the responsibility, as Westerners, to examine how, and why, Fundamentalism becomes attractive to some people in a liberal culture. She asks us to examine what we of progressive Western values have done to provoke conservative response - to consider is it possible that part of what is sought in Fundamental movements is an attempt retrieve something more than what materialistic late capitalism provides. By establishing that this is the case, we can start to review what might be sought in terms of values by those that orient to conservative modes of being and dialectic.

She then prods and pokes the Enlightenment, to reveal four robust values that may have self-transformative potential, and thus may have been undervalued, in our rush away from the perceived emphasis on reason, to the exclusion of all other modes of knowing, in unfortunate by-products of the aftermath (ha!) of the Age of Rationalism.

Firstly, Neiman proposes we re-visit happiness - to look at the relativism with which it might be considered, but to not capitulate to that relativism. By this means, we can know that 'money does not but happiness', and we can be prevented from projecting happiness into a Golden Age in the past or the Heavenly future. Self-criticism may ask that we intervene on behalf of others, to fully express our own happiness - happiness is not an end-state passive consumption, but an active principle of giving back to the world.

The second Enlightenment value she asks that we look at is reason - not the caricatured emotionless, passionless version of reason, rather the opposition to blind authority that reason can represent. The Enlightenment asks in the public sphere that we jsutify and argue about our reasons in a transparent way.

The third value is reverence - the Enlightenment may have been against institutionalised religion, but the demand to ethically think for yourself is at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, and Neiman leans on this to present a reverence through the principle of understanding - a seeking to engage, in awe of, and in gratitude extended to, that which we seek to know. Whatever the world is, we know that we did not make it, and Neiman proposes that this recognition may indeed be a reconciling factor between the secular and the religious.

The final value is hope. In necessary industrial progress, no century was more concerned with the existence of evil - they made fun of optimism (as per Voltaire's Candide) but they did believe that human beings could lend effort to improve the world. 300 years ago it was standard for people to be drawn and quartered in the centre of town, with tickets sold. Torture, in this form, was abolished, and intriguingly, we have it back now. The Enlightenment offered regression, at the same time as progress, and the existence of both of these principles, simultaneously, is something worthwhile to consider in light of Cheney and Rumsfeld and the power of certain individuals in power. She comes out as rejecting pessimism as cowardly, and proposes that in light of the chance for human action to make a difference, we become responsible for ourselves, and others.

The interview was more interesting to listen to than I seem to have made it sound here. I think, partly, I'm a little bit in love with the reactionary idea, that the Enlightenment has more crunchy goodness in it than we've extracted from our historical Caesar Salad, yet.

Intercept of Time and Timelessness

From TS Elliot's 'Dry Salvages':

'Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint--

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time.'

Connectedness

'It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is a part of what composes who 'I' am as well. I think I have lost 'you' only to discover 'I' have gone missing as well. There is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but it is to be conceived as the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related.'

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

Love is as strong as death

Love is strong as death,
jealousy as relentless as Sheol.
The flash of it is a flash of fire,
a flame of the Lord himself.
Love no floods can quench,
no torrents drown.

Song of Songs 8:6-7




I'm a little early for None, today. Studying has this incredible effect, of making my eye rove, ahead. Today's readings for the Hours work incredibly well through the three levels of spirit, for my mind:



At the level of the body:

Terce (Morning Prayer)

Your body, you know, is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you since you received him from God. You are not your own property; you have been bought and paid for. That is why you should use your body for the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20



At the level of mind/soul:

Sext (Midday Prayer)

And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only this: to fear the Lord your God, to follow all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul. Deuteronomy 10:12



And the Song of Songs above, for None (afternoon prayer) at the level of spirit. Love is as strong as death.


Ref: http://www.universalis.com/20100620/today.htm

Vulnerability and performative contradictions

'But perhaps there is some other way to live such that one becomes neither affectively dead nor mimetically violent, a way out of the circle of violence altogether. This possibility has to do with demanding a world in which the bodily vulnerability is protected without therefore being eradicated and with insisting on the line that must be walked between the two.

By insisting on a "common" corporeal vulnerability, I may seem to be positing a new basis for humanism. That might be true, but I am prone to consider this differently. A vulnerability must be perceived and recognised in order to come into play in an ethical encounter, and there is no guarantee that this will happen. Not only is there always a possibility that a vulnerability will not be recognised and that it will be constituted as the "unrecognisable", but when that vulnerability is recognised it has the power to change the meaning and structure of the vulnerability itself. In this sense, if vulnerability is one precondition of humanisation, and humanisation takes place differently through variable norms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject.

So when we say that every infant is surely vulnerable, that is clearly true; but it is true, in part, precisely because our utterance enacts the very recognition of vulnerability and shows the importance of recognition itself for sustaining vulnerability [Italics mine]. We perform the recognition by making the claim, and that is surely a very good ethical reason to make the claim. We make the claim, however, precisely because it is not meant to be taken for granted, precisely because it is not, in every instance, honoured. Vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognised, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability. We cannot posit this vulnerability prior to recognition without performing the very thesis that we oppose (our positing is itself a form of recognition and so manifests the constitutive power of the discourse). This framework, by which norms of recognition are essential to the constitution of vulnerability as a precondition of the human is important precisely for this reason, namely, that we need and want those norms in place, that we struggle for their establishment, and that we value their continuing and expanded operation.'

I'm praying that Doris asks a phenomenology question in the Psychoanalysis exam, next week. Some means by which I can connect the corporeal vulnerability of the human body, that which connects us, to my three-pages-in-less-than-half-an-hour essay. She is a teacher in the school of 'go deeply into that which fascinates you', and I, merely a girl-serpent, hypnotised. :)

Epistemological distance, methodological variety, ontological pluralism (from Integral Theory, link to come) - would these but constitute the building blocks for the framework for recognition Butler so passionately describes, here?

Ref:

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

Violence, Mourning, Politics - excerpt from Judith Butler

'I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself, is paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others...I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control'.

I need to come back to this paper - Butler posits that the disorientation of grief posits the 'I' in the mode of unknowingness, where mourning and grief furnish a politic, a sense of community of complex order. Loss makes a tenuous we of us all. Loss is a change that de-constitutes choice, it forces us to undergo a transformation the outcomes of which we cannot know in advance, something larger than our own cognitive plans, our own projects, our own knowings.

After exams.

Ref:

Butler, J. (2003). Violence, Mourning, Politics. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4, 9-37.

Exquisite Reception

'Attunement reveals the receptive elaboration of the intensity, shape and timing of affective expressiveness, and occurs largely out of awareness and almost automatically, while empathy requires conscious cognitive mediation. Attunement involves emotional resonance which is recast into another form of expression - a distinct form of affective transaction in it's own right, which relates to the intensity, timing and shape of behaviour. Stern's lovely example is illustrative:

'A 9-month-old girl becomes very excited about a toy and reaches for it. As she grabs for it she lets out an exuberant 'aaah!' and looks at her mother. Her mother looks back and scrunches up her shoulders and performs a terrific shimmy with her upper body, like a go-go dancer. The shimmy lasts about as long as her daughter's 'aaah!' but is equally excited, joyful and intense'.

Many things are happening in this moment. The expressive tendrils of a child's bodily experiences are recognised, held in a sharing moment by another's body, in another register, and that transformed expression is returned to the child. This is contingency for beginners. Something of the child's experience, which is outside of words, has a material effect on the interpersonal world-her mother-and that reception is conveyed to the child in a different key. The child learns not merely 'What I do makes a difference' (behavioural contingency) but 'What I experience, express, am-for-a-moment makes a difference' (experiential, receptive contingency). And the proof of that is that not only its visible, expressive reception, but it's translation into another register, which permits the child to see it again, to see it in a new way, from another's perspective. [Italics mine]. This provides for the child a non-specular reflective experience of her own bodily experience. She has the opportunity to know the reality of her own bodily and mental experience intersubjectively as much by the senses of proprioception and kinaesthesia. The child in this moment has the possibility of realizing that her experience can be detected and received, of realizing there is a mutual mentality. Not to put too fine a point on it, perhaps this experience is an affective prototype of moving towards a theory of mind; the pleasure of other minds'.

Ref:

McIlwain, D. (2007). Rezoning Pleasure: Drives and Affects in Personality Theory, Theory & Personality, 17(4), 529-561.