Soul-Science and Soul-Schooling
The Purpose of my Philosophy
A genuinely
scientific psychology, as a true knowledge ‘of’ or ‘about’ the
soul or psyche, can only arise from the soul – it
can only arise from inner knowing or gnosis. Such a
psychology would not merely be one science among countless
others – a mere scientific ‘field’, academic subject or
professional specialism. As a science of the soul it would
constitute the very essence of all the sciences – understood in
a new way as soul-sciences. To speak in modern terms of
‘educational psychology’ as one sub-division of ‘psychology’ is
no less misleading than to speak of psychology itself as one
specialist field or sub-division of science. For what is
‘education’ if it does not cultivate our souls, drawing out (e-ducare)
the inner knowing within each of us? The essence not only of
esoteric teaching but of all education is the education of the
soul. The essence of education is soul-schooling, just as
the essence of all ‘psychotherapy’ is soul-therapy, a
tending and attending (therapuein) to the soul.
What passes today
as ‘education’ on the other hand, is simply the imparting of
abstract knowledge designed to be ‘applied’ in the form of
skilled practices and vocations – whether plumbing or corporate
management, political activism or academic philosophising.
Soul-schooling, by contrast, does not have as its purpose
the cultivation of such practical skills, whether arithmetic or
aesthetic, manual or intellectual, technical or linguistic.
Instead it understands all such ‘skills’ as the expression of
latent soul powers or potentials. This is what makes the
difference. For a complex weapon or computer can be operated,
complex calculations made or complex intellectual or political
argument constructed in a completely soul-less way – a way that
does not expand but instead limits or even constricts the latent
soul-knowledge and soul powers of the individual. It requires no
skillful activity or powers of soul to operate and activate the
most powerful weapons, computers or machines in the world. What
is thereby released and realised is their power — not the
soul potentials and soul powers of the operator or employee. Nor
does the knowledge applied in releasing such powers or
capabilities flow from the soul of the operator or employee,
from their inner knowing.
Like different
traditional schools of esoteric teaching, both Steinerian
spiritual science and Freudian psychoanalysis had an
educational as well as scientific purpose. That is to say,
they both constituted forms of soul-education or
soul-schooling. Indeed most people know of Rudolf Steiner
only through the specific approach to education cultivated
worldwide in ‘Waldorf schools’ — schools in which not just the
body and brain but the soul of the child is recognised
and cultivated. My teachings and practices also have an
educational as well as a scientific character, constituting a
new form of soul-schooling. But whereas Rudolf Steiner’s
scientific and educational philosophy both laid particular
emphasis on the ensoulment of the senses, my teachings
and practices lay equal emphasis on the sensualisation of the
soul and through it, the cultivation of inner soul-senses.
The skills I employ and impart are ‘soul-skills’. These are
sensory skills through which our souls may be sensualised,
our soul-senses opened, our soul-knowledge
awakened and our soul-powers embodied.
We can see a colour
as a mere sensory sign – a red traffic light for example. We can
see it only as an already signified sense – the sense
signified by the word ‘red’. We see the rose as ‘red’ and no
more. In doing so we ignore the unique tonality of
this rose’s redness – seen here and now, in this
light and in this space and time. If however, we attend and
attune to the unique quality of a particular object’s colour, we
begin to ensoul our sensory awareness – attuning to the
underlying soul tone manifest in that sensory quality. If we
then allow that soul tone to resonate within us — attending to
it as a tonality of our own awareness – it begins to permeate
and colour that awareness. What began as a sensory quality that
we were aware of, now begins to transform into a soul quality –
a sensual quality of awareness as such. Through our second
attention – attention to our awareness of sensory qualities
as such – we not only ensoul our awareness but also begin to
sensualise our soul. In doing so we also sensitise our
soul, cultivating our ability to sense the manifold soul
qualities of things and of other people – the inwardly felt
colourations and configurations, patterns and tones of their
awareness. We develop our soul-senses and with them, our
capacity for soul-sensing other beings.
The key to
cultivating our soul-senses and our capacity for soul-sensing is
our capacity for resonant attunement or ‘resonation’ with the
unique, underlying feeling tone of a particular sensory quality
or form. For soul-qualities are essentially tonal qualities,
comparable to the sensed shape and texture, brightness or
darkness, lightness or heaviness, warmth or coolness of a
musical or vocal tone. Just as we can look at a colour and see
in it only a sign or a signified sense such as ‘red’, so we can
see the look in a person’s eyes and take it only as a sign
of something — for example as a sign of ‘sadness’ or ‘anger’.
‘Sadness’ and ‘anger’, like ‘redness’, are examples of already
signified senses. Alternatively we can seek to attune to
the unique tone of this rose’s redness or this
person’s sadness — in this situation, here and now.
Attending to our awareness of this unique tonality of ‘sadness’
not only brings us into resonance with it. It allows us to
directly sense within ourselves those inner soul qualities of a
person that appear from the outside to be merely familiar signs
with a familiar sense or signification – in this case the
emotional signification of ‘sadness’. These soul qualities are
characterised above by their sensual nature – they are
felt in a similar way to the soul qualities that manifest as
spatial and sensory qualities such as shape and colour. That is
why when we talk of someone as ‘warm’ or as ‘cold’ and
‘distant’, as being in a ‘dark mood’ or ‘radiant’ with joy, as
withdrawn and closed off, or open and receptive, we are not
talking metaphorically but describing sensed and sensual
qualities of their soul and its bodily field-boundary – their
soul body. Soul-sensing and resonation are the principle skills
cultivated by soul-schooling. They are also the principle medium
of communication in the soul-world we inhabit after death. For
this body is also the very language of the soul, being composed
of soul-qualities which can be combined, like letters and
sounds, into sensual ‘words’ and ‘sentences’ of the soul. Our
physical body is also a language, being the outwardly perceived
form of our inner soul body – its ‘word’ become ‘flesh’. But we
do not need to die or have ‘out of body’ experiences to enter
our soul body, for it is nothing more or less than the sensed
and sensual body of our awareness.
It is after death
however, that the sensual form and qualities of an individual’s
soul-body become directly sensible. It is also after death that
individuals discover that soul-schools and soul-education are a
reality and a necessary one. They exist in order to help them
learn what they have not yet learned in their physical life but
need to learn in the afterlife — to freely shape-shift
their soul body, and to use its own soul tones and qualities as
a medium of sensual communication with other souls. The
soul-body and its senses is the organon or instrument with which
we give sensual form to inner feeling tones. It is also the
medium through which we can sense and resonate with the soul
qualities and soul-tones of others, to the point of merging and
melding our soul-bodies with theirs.
Soul-schooling in
this life has the value of preparing people for the afterlife by
reminding them of their soul-bodies and of soul-communication.
But the soul-body is also the very inwardness of our fleshly
body, just as soul-communication is the inwardness of
communication in all its forms. That is why soul-sensing and
resonation are just as valuable in life as in the afterlife.
That is also why soul-schools and soul-schooling are just as
necessary on the earth plane as on other planes of awareness.
Its aim is the expansion of awareness and identity through
exercising and expanding the shape-shifting and sensory powers
of our soul-body. In this sense soul-schooling is ‘yoga’ – not a
yoga of the physical body but a yoga of the soul-body. Its
disciplines are not disciplines of ‘mind, body and spirit’ but
of the soul and its body. Soul-schooling is awakening to the
innate sensuality of the soul — something quite distinct
from both biological sexuality and sensory experiencing.
Soul-schooling on
the earth plane has, since Gurdjieff, been described simply as
‘The Work’. Specifically, it is soul-work, aimed at the
awakening, cultivation and embodiment of our inner soul senses
and soul powers. The foundation of this work is the second
attention. The second attention is attention to one’s
sensory awareness of self and world and thereby also
to the sensual qualities of that awareness – the soul
qualities or qualia that find expression in sensory
phenomena. The second attention is the link between the
ensoulment of our bodily senses and the embodiment or
sensualisation of our soul senses. Through it one awakens one’s
soul-senses: soul-sight, soul-hearing, soul-touch,
soul-scenting, and soul-tasting. Soul-sight is sensitivity to
soul-light and soul-colours; soul-hearing is sensitivity to soul
sounds and tones; soul-touch is direct soul-to-soul contact via
the soul-body and its centres of awareness. Soul-scenting and
tasting allow one to sense the qualitative essence or
quintessence of another person’s soul, its essential ‘flavour’
or ‘scent’. The awakening of the soul-senses allows the practice
of soul-sensing, one of the principal soul-powers cultivated
through soul-schooling. The experience of sensing another soul
is like experiencing their soul in our body and our soul in
theirs. At night we slip or sleep into the depths of our own
body soul (the collective awareness of our cells and organs).
Those depths which lead us into our soul-body and into
the soul-world. Dreaming is a sensory and sensual recollection
of the soul qualities that make up our soul body and those we
have sensed with it.
Soul-sensing in
waking life is a capacity to allow one’s soul to slip or sleep
into the body of another. In this way we can begin to sense the
spatial configuration and qualities of their soul-body, and can
also ‘dream’ these soul-qualities in the form of sensory
qualities – shapes and colours, sounds and tones,
proprioceptive, kinaesthetic and synaesthetic sensations.
Soul-sensing is a form of “dreaming awake” (Mindell), the
wakeful aspect of it being the second attention – attention to
the sensory and sensual dimensions of our awareness. Attention,
including the second attention is a function of the ego
which normally falls asleep when we sleep and dream. Maintaining
the second attention is the ego-activity which allows us to
dream awake. Applying the second attention, the ego attends to
sensory awareness and its sensed significance – the soul
qualities that find expression in it. In contrast, ordinary ego
awareness — the ‘first attention’ — is attention only to the
signified sense of things, their place in an already established
pattern of significance. Using the first attention, we see an
object as ‘a yellow kettle’. But ‘yellow’ and ‘kettle’ are not
direct sense perceptions but sense conceptions. To perceive
something with the first attention is not to sense it directly
but to sense it as this or that. This means to sense it
conceptually – as ‘a kettle’ for example. But as Heidegger
recognised, there simply is no ‘kettle’ there, already
“present-to-hand” in space before we pick it up or use it.
Instead we only perceive the object that is there as ‘a
kettle’ because of its place in a potential project or sequence
of actions in time — for example the project of making a cup of
coffee. Perceiving something with the first attention — ‘as’
this or that — means sensing it only as part of such an already
established pattern of significance that takes the form of a
project or sequence of actions in time. Thus the physician makes
no attempt to use the second attention and directly sense the
significance of a patient’s symptoms. Instead he perceives them
only as diagnostic signs of a standard disease pathology – a
perception shaped by the overall project of diagnosis, treatment
and ‘cure’. The first attention is a mode of perception entirely
determined by pre-established patterns of significance and
sequences of action in time. Only with the second attention
could the physician achieve true dia-gnosis – using
soul-sensing to come to a direct and immediate knowledge (gnosis)
of the soul dis-ease expressing itself through (dia-)
the patient’s symptoms. The physical body is a sensory image of
the soul. The soul-body, unlike the physical body, does not have
localised sense organs. But our soul-body as a whole is the
psychical instrument or organon with which we can use our
sensory image of another to directly sense their soul– seeing
and feeling its unique physiognomy and physiology. Because of
this, soul-sensing is the most important medium of
soul-diagnosis and healing - as well as being the basic
instrument of soul-scientific research, enabling us to explores
the aware inwardness or soul of all bodies, human and non-human.
Its Basic
Principles and Practice
The most fundamental scientific ‘fact’ is not the objective
existence of a universe of bodies in space-time but our
subjective awareness of this universe.
This awareness can no more be regarded as a product of any
objective phenomena than can our awareness of dreaming be
regarded as a product of any phenomena we dream of.
‘Soul-science’ defines ‘soul’ as the non-local or field
character of awareness. ‘Soul’, quite simply is
field-awareness as opposed to ordinary ego-consciousness or
focal awareness.
By
virtue of its field character, human awareness cannot be a
property or product of any localised phenomena (e.g. the human
body or brain) that we perceive within our own awareness
field.
Fundamental reality consists of awareness fields, not
matter or energy fields.
Non-local fields of awareness are the very condition of
perception of any localised ‘object’ by a localised centre or
‘subject’ of consciousness.
The ‘body’ of a phenomenon is its bounded outwardness. The
‘soul’ of a phenomenon is its aware inwardness, an inwardness
that has an unbounded or field character.
Awareness has its own innate sensual field-qualities of shape
and substantiality, mass and density, light and gravity, warmth
and coolness, colour and tone.
These soul qualities form themselves into those
field-patterns or gestalts of sensory qualities that make
up our perceptual world or ‘camouflage reality’ (Seth).
We can only truly
understand a specific sensory phenomenon such as warmth by
learning to experience it as the physical expression of a soul
quality – in this case the quality of soul warmth.
We
can only truly understand ‘objective’ physical phenomena such as
warmth, light and gravity, space and time, mass and density
etc., through the soul qualities that lie behind them – by
subjectively exploring the sensed lightness and gravity,
spatiality and temporality, shape and substantiality of our own
awareness.
Every soul perceives reality according to its own specific
field-pattern of awareness, which shapes its own perceptual
world or patterned field of awareness.
Physical-scientific models of the structure and dynamics
of phenomena are metaphors of the psychical structure and
dynamics of the soul – they attempt to give verbal, diagrammatic
or mathematical expression to underlying field-patterns and
dynamics of awareness.
Evolving scientific models of the atom, cell, planet and
solar system are evolving scientific metaphors of the structure
and dynamics of the soul as a ‘self’ – a psychical structure
with its own central nucleus, core, or stellar centre.
The phenomena investigated by physical-scientific research are
‘camouflage’ realities shaped by our own current human
field-patterns of awareness. These field-patterns of awareness
have evolved - they are not shared by other species and were not
shared by
earlier civilisations, both of which quite literally perceive(d)
the earth and cosmos in ways we no longer experience or
understand.
It
is the current, limited field-patterns of human awareness that
find expression in both our perceptual world and in the
scientific and mathematical concepts used to understand that
world.
Mathematics, as we know, cannot prove itself – for it has a
subjective or intuitive basis. But the more intuitively close a
physical-scientific or mathematical model is to the psychical
reality it represents, the more effective it will prove in
accounting for and technologically manipulating the camouflage
reality it describes.
Technologies developed from the physical sciences do not ‘prove’
the truth of those sciences, for these very technologies are
manipulations of camouflage realities.
When a so-called ‘Mars lander’ lands on the planet Mars, what is
happening is that a camouflage technical instrument is landing
on a camouflage planet and probing its camouflage reality.
Direct psychic exploration of different planes of awareness will
give rise to new, more accurate scientific models of the
physical phenomena they find expression in, and allow the birth
of new technologies.
‘Soul’ – awareness – has its own sub-atomic, atomic, molecular,
cellular, inorganic, organic, planetary, stellar and cosmic
dimensions.
The human soul not
only has the dimensions of a cellular body – the human physical
body. It also has trans-human and trans-physical dimensions –
the dimensions of a planetary, stellar and cosmic body.
‘The body is an awareness’ (Castaneda). The physical body is the
soul as a cellular body of sensory awareness. The soul body is
the soul as a body of sensual awareness – made up not of cells
but of sensual qualities of awareness as such.
The soul body has the characteristics of a warmth body or body
of soul warmth, a light body or body of soul light and colour,
an electromagnetic body or body of soul electricity and
magnetism, and a gravitational body or body of soul gravity.
The physical body is the soul body perceived from without, as a
bounded sensory object in space. The soul is unbounded
inwardness of the physical body, connecting us to the aware
inwardness of every other body and leading into countless inner
spaces and planes of awareness.
Physical-scientific research makes use of the physical body of
the scientist and extends this body through technical
instruments. The principal ‘instrument’ (Greek organon)
of research that is employed in soul-scientific research is not
the physical body or technical instruments but the psychical
organism or ‘soul body’ of the researcher.
The geophysical planet is a camouflage reality concealing
countless planes of reality. Soul-science alone allows
us to explore all those inner planes of awareness that form part
of our planetary soul body. It will allow us to discover
countless hitherto unexplored continents, civilisations, species
and sciences of soul.
Basic Principles
and Practice
We
are only aware of our self as a whole to the extent that we are
aware of our body as a whole.
Without feeling our own self and body as a whole, we cannot feel
the whole-body – and whole self – of another person.
Without being in touch with our self and body as a whole, we
cannot touch the whole-body – and whole self – of the other with
our feeling awareness.
Whole-body awareness is a healing principle because all disease
arises from the ‘dis-ease’ of ‘not feeling ourselves’ – not
feeling our selves and body as a whole.
Disease takes the form of localised symptoms (mental,
emotional or physical) because its arises from the dis-ease of
not feeling our self and body as a whole - not feeling
our soul.
The dis-ease of ‘not feeling oneself’ is a first step towards
‘feeling another self’, another part of our self, letting it
become part of our self as a whole.
Healing means once again feeling our self and body as a whole –
feeling our soul.
Our body as a whole is a sense organ of the soul.
Whole-body awareness is therefore soul-body awareness.
Through whole-body awareness we experience our whole-body as a
sense organ of our soul – as all eye, all ear, all heart, and
as an all-sensitive skin of awareness.
Through whole-body awareness we can also experience the
whole-body of the other as a sensory image of their soul.
Soul-body sensing begins with whole-body sensing.
Soul-sensing means sensing the body of the other as a sensory
image of their soul, and feeling all of its sensory qualities as
the embodiment of inner soul-qualities.
Soul-qualities are those underlying qualities of awareness that
make up a person’s sense of self.
The inner connection between self and body lies in the
connection between the sensory qualities of a person’s body and
the basic qualities of awareness that shape their sense of self.
Like moods, qualities of awareness are what colour our entire
experience of ourselves, other people and the world.
What we call the ‘self’ is a combination of those particular
qualities of awareness that shape a person’s entire sense of
self.
What we call the ‘body’ is the field-boundary of awareness
through which we distinguish qualities of awareness that we
associate with ‘self’ from those we experience as ‘not-self’ or
‘other’.
Sensory awareness of another person’s body as a whole is
what allows us to sense those underlying qualities of awareness
- soul-qualities - that make up their current sense of self.
To the extent to
which they are identified with these qualities, they experience
other soul-qualities within themselves as ‘not self’ –
identifying them with others.
The dis-ease of
‘not feeling oneself’, since it arises from feeling
soul-qualities previously identified as ‘not self’ brings people
to an ‘edge’ or ‘threshold’ of identity.
Healing means crossing this threshold of identity and expanding
one’s sense of self to embrace new, and hitherto foreign or
dissociated soul-qualities.
Soul-qualities are the qualities of awareness that shape both
our self-experience and our experience of the world and other
people.
Since soul-qualities are qualities of awareness, the key
to sensing them is awareness.
Our awareness of any element of our experiencing –
whether a sensation or emotion, thought or perception, dream or
memory, impulse or expectation - is not that sensation or
emotion, thought or perception, dream or memory, impulse or
expectation.
Since our awareness of felt dis-ease or disease symptom is
not that dis-ease or symptom, the key to healing is also
awareness.
If
we experience a sensation such as a headache, we can treat is as
a ‘thing’ that we have (‘I have a headache’) and dis-identify
from it - regarding it as an intrusive sensation coming from our
body. Alternatively, we can identify with it (‘I always get
headaches’).
If
we are experiencing an emotion such as anger we can think ‘I am
angry’ and thus identify ourselves with the anger. Alternatively
we can dis-identify from the anger and experience it as
‘not-self’ – caused by others and disturbing our sense of self.
Through awareness of any element of our experiencing we
neither identify with it, accepting it without question
as part of our ‘self’, nor do we dis-identity from it, treating
it as ‘not-self’.
There is a difference between thinking ‘I am angry’ and thinking
‘I am aware of a feeling of anger’. There is a difference
between thinking ‘I have a headache’ and thinking ‘I am aware of
a painful tension in my head’.
All experiencing has a sensory quality.
Even a train of abstract thought or state of mind has a sensory
quality and is a sensory experience.
On the other hand,
the awareness of a sensory experience, whether we identify with
it or not, is not that experience. But awareness itself also has
what I call a sensual quality.
Soul-sensing is based on a fundamental distinction between
sensory experiences we are aware of, and sensual qualities
of awareness itself.
Bodily temperature
(feeling hot or cold) is a sensory experience we are aware of.
Feeling warm or cold towards someone is a sensual quality of
awareness.
Behind all sensory
qualities we are aware of are sensual qualities of awareness –
soul-qualities.
Soul-sensing means
directly experiencing the sensual qualities of awareness that
find expression in our sensory experience of ourselves, other
people and the world.
The key to
soul-sensing lies in what I call The Three Attentions.
The First Attention
is attention to all or anything that we are currently
experiencing – different regions of our bodies, the space around
us and the objects within it, the way we are lying, sitting or
standing; moving, breathing or speaking; our emotions, trains or
thoughts or mental images; our needs, desires and impulses etc.
Applied to another person, it is attention to all the elements
that make up their experience or our experience of them.
The Second Attention
is attention not just to what we are experiencing in
ourselves or others but to exactly how we are
experiencing it in a bodily way – its specific sensory
qualities. The important principle to remember is that there
is no element of our experience that do not have a specific
sensory quality – even thoughts and purely mental processes
are something we sense in a specific way in our heads. The same
applies to emotions. Thus we may for example, sense an emotion
of ‘vulnerability’ in ourselves or others. To enter the second
attention means focussing our attention of how exactly we sense
this ‘vulnerability’ in ourselves or others – its specific
sensory qualities or signs.
‘Feelings’ are something people ‘have’ - that they
‘experience’ or seek to express in words. But ‘to feel’ is a
verb, and ‘feeling’ is something we do. The
second attention shifts our focus from the feelings that
we or others are experiencing to how we are feeling them
– the specific way we sense them in our bodies and/or the bodily
signs through which we sense them in others.
The second attention allows us to use our whole-body sensing of
another person’s body not only to pick up ‘signs’ of particular
feelings they might be experiencing but to feel them.
What that means is that we ourselves begin to feel and
sense the way another person is currently feeling and sensing
themselves.
The movement from the first attention to the second attentions
takes us from what we feel to how we sense it –
its sensory qualities.
The movement from the second attention to the third attention
takes us from how we feel or sense and experience it to
how is makes us feel – how it affects our overall sense
of who we are.
First Attention: what we are experiencing.
Second Attention: how we experience it in a bodily and
sensory way.
Third Attention: the effect of our sensory bodily experiencing
on who we experience ourselves to be – our bodily
sense of self.
The Third Attention
is not attention to any localised sensory experience of
ourselves of others. Instead is attention to our own or other
people’s overall sense of self – the way we are feeling
ourselves as a whole, or others are feeling themselves as a
whole. The way we or others feel themselves is not
characterised by any localised thoughts, emotional feelings or
sensations but by an overall ‘mood’ or ‘feeling tone’.
A mood no localised
feeling or sensation but rather a basic tone of
feeling that permeates our awareness as whole, colouring our
entire experience of ourselves, other people and the world. A
particular sensory experience might put us into a certain mood.
Alternatively it can be seen as the localised experience of that
overall mood or feeling tone.
The Third Attention
is the key to sensing soul-qualities through sensory
qualities.
We
can experience voice tones as having many different
sensory qualities - warmth or coolness, brightness or
darkness, sharpness or dullness, lightness or heaviness or
roughness or smoothness, hardness or softness, flatness or
depth, speed or slowness.
Similarly, we can experience our own or other people’s overall
feeling tone as having different qualities. These are not
sensory qualities but they are still sensual qualities.
The felt tone – not only of someone’s voice but of their
thoughts and emotions, their movements and gestures, facial
expressions and looks – even the way they dress – is the bridge
between sensory qualities and soul-qualities.
Feeling tone is the bridge between our own or other people’s
sensory experiencing and the sensual qualities of
awareness that find expression in it.
We cannot sense the
soul of another and its qualities unless we can sense our own
soul and its qualities.
If
we cannot feel our own warmth or coolness of soul we cannot
sense another person’s warmth or coolness of soul. If we cannot
feel our own lightness or heaviness of mood in a sensual way we
cannot sense the lightness of heaviness of another person’s
mood.
We
cannot sense our own soul and its qualities of awareness except
in a sensual way – as qualities of warmth or coolness,
brightness or darkness, lightness of heaviness, density or
diffuseness, sharpness or dullness etc.
All sensual soul-qualities have a spatial dimension.
Thus soul warmth or coolness goes together with a sense of
closeness or distance to others. Brightness of mood goes
together with a sense of expansion. Darkness with a sense of
‘introversion’ – of awareness being inwardly rather than
outwardly focussed. Lightness of soul is an upward movement of
awareness. Heaviness a downward movement.
All ‘e-motions’ are ultimately the expression of ‘in-motions’ –
spatial motions of awareness. Hence we speak of
the ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ of our emotional life, of feeling elevated
or de-pressed, being dragged down or pulled up, feeling
‘withdrawn’ or ‘expansive’, ‘centred’ or ‘grounded’, ‘beside
ourselves’ or ‘spaced out’.
Awareness does not only have its own innate sensual qualities.
In particular, it also has its own sensed shape and
substantiality. Together these give the soul its own innate
bodily character.
That is why, aside from the Three Attentions, and the Third
Attention in particular, it is the experience of the soul as
a body in its own right - one with its own changing spatial
dimensions and substantiality - that is of most importance in
soul-sensing.
The soul-body is essentially an awareness body – a body
shaped by the spatiality of our own awareness and made up of
sensual qualities of awareness, including the sensed
substantiality of our awareness – its elemental qualities of
airiness, fluidity or solidity, density or diffuseness,
compactness or expansion.
The physical body can be seen not just as a cellular body, but
as a neuro-electrical body, a chemical body, a molecular and
genetic body, a sub-atomic or quantum body, so does our soul
have many different bodily dimensions or ‘bodies’.
The physical body is the soul as a sensory body - the body of
our outer sensory awareness. But the soul also exists as a body
of spatial awareness that includes the spaces of awareness we
feel inside our physical body. Similarly, the soul exists as a
body of inner soul warmth or soul light – the warmth or light of
our awareness. It also exists as a body of inner colour and
sound – soul sounds and soul colours.
Only through
familiarisation with all these bodily dimensions and qualities
of our own soul can we use them as means of sensing, resonating
with and healing the soul-bodies of others.
The body as a whole is both a sensory image of the soul, and a
sense organ of the soul - allowing us to sense the souls of
others through the sensory image or after-image we have of their
bodies.
‘Scientific Socialism’ as Soul-Science
Marxism
beyond Materialism
The Marxist
philosophy of ‘scientific socialism’ is usually thought of as a
form of crude, materialist philosophy, as suggested by terms
such as ‘dialectical materialism’ and ‘historical materialism’.
That Marx’s understanding of both ‘materialism’ and ‘science’
was in fact completely at odds with that of modern materialist
science was made clear in his Theses on Feuerbach, where he
writes:
The chief defect of all previous materialism … is that the
object, actuality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form
of the object of perception, but not as sensuous
human activity … not subjectively.
The most basic scientific ‘fact’ of all – ignored in all modern
sciences - is not the existence of a universe of
perceptual objects, but rather the fact of our immediate
subjective and sensuous awareness of such a universe. The
problem is that
‘subjectivity’, ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ has hitherto only
been conceived as the property of a point-like human ‘subject’
or ‘ego’, bounded by the body or even mysteriously localised in
the brain. Modern science is precisely a materialism of the sort
that reduces even the human body and brain to mere perceptual
objects, and then finds itself in the impossible situation
of having to explain how such objects can miraculously
give rise to subjective awareness. In this science of the human
body there is no place for the human being, who is reduced to a
phantom of the brain, a homunculus looking out at the world
through the peepholes of the senses.
But what if all seemingly localised and point-like centres or
‘subjects’ of awareness are the expression of non-local
fields of awareness or subjectivity? What if subjective
awareness is not a blank sheet on which we passively register
sensory impressions coming from perceptual objects – but has its
own innate sensuous qualities and patterns – for example the
subjectively sensed lightness or darkness, colour and tone,
levity or gravity of our moods, the subjectively sensed dullness
or clarity of minds, the subjectively sensed size and weight,
solidity or fragility of our bodies, or our subjectively sensed
closeness or distance, warmth or coolness towards other beings?
What if such sensed qualities and patterns of subjective
awareness as such are the source of all ‘objective’
energetic and perceptual patterns or ‘gestalts’? What if ‘the
soul’ is nothing suprasensible, insubstantial or disembodied,
but is instead the bodily shape and form taken by such innate
field-patterns and field-qualities of awareness? What if the
very substantiality of our bodies themselves is the sensed and
sensual substantiality not of some material body object of
perception but of subjectivity as such? What if all the
sensory qualities of nature are the expression of soul
qualities - innate qualities of subjective awareness? What
if these sensual qualities of the human being’s soul or inner
nature can link us directly with the very inwardness or
soul of nature itself? Then and only then, could we begin to
comprehend Marx’s concept of a natural science of man
that is at the same time a human science of nature.
This will not be a crudely objectifying, materialist science of
the sort we see today, but a ‘subjective’ or ‘phenomenological’
science – a science of immediate subjective awareness and
experiencing. More precisely, it will be a
field-phenomenology of the sort articulated by the Marxist
physicist and phenomenologist Michael Kosok in his seminal essay
entitled Dialectics of Nature. For as he writes:
Subjectivity,
phenomenologically, simply refers to a field of presence, i.e.,
an immediate non-localised gestalt, ‘opening’ or ‘awareness’
whose content is constituted by events of mediation of
determination – by ‘objects’ of awareness … Subjectivity, as a
non-localised field of presence is nothing but concrete
immediacy, i.e., experience as an on-going process, in which the
events or event-complexes present are any objects, products or
structures appearing out of the field … be they symbolic
systems, physical objects or egos.
It is precisely
this PHENOMENOLOGY of awareness between field and events which
at the same time expresses itself as a DIALECTIC of inseparable
distinctions, or what in modern science is called a NON-linear
field of relations. In a dialectic relation, all elements are
grasped as elements OF relation and never simply as elements IN
relation.
For Marx,
revolution was intrinsically connected with the liberation of
the human senses and of human subjectivity – the soul -
understood sensuously. This means the liberation of subjective
experiencing as an on-going process from its domination
by any and all of its products – whether these take the
form of scientific models and mathematical abstractions,
religious myths and symbols, perceptual objects or material
commodities.
The function of
myth or abstraction – in science as well as society – which
alienates a product from the process of experience is … to
delimit all actual and conceivable experiences as expressions of
that product.
Growth and genuine transcendence come only when one can re-grasp
the relationship that exists between the process of experience
and its products, realizing that products and results are
neither ends (positive or posited goals), nor something to be
denied (negative goals) but are rather the vehicles and means
through which experience can enrich its self-mediated state of
concrete immediacy and express itself in visible forms.
Degeneracy, however, sets in when the reverse takes place and
man defines and delimits experience…in terms of its products and
results. Such is the paradoxical challenge of existence – not to
be ‘done in’ by the very products of its process!
So-called ‘false’ or ‘inauthentic’ consciousness is simply the
product of ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ consciousness, instead of being
the process.
Michael Kosok
Dialectics of Nature
This is not
‘psychologism’ or ‘subjectivism’ in the narrow sense. For as
Michael Kosok points out:
Emotional
reactions, thoughts and object modifications are NOT examples of
experience, but rather PRODUCTS of experience …
Ibid.
Such ‘psychical’
phenomena, like ‘physical’ phenomena all emerge or arise (Greek
physis) from non-local fields of awareness. ‘Dialectic
phenomenology’, with its recognition of the field character of
awareness or subjectivity, is a subjectivism which avoids all
solipsism and with it the false philosophical question of how
much reality we can attribute to the subjective awareness of
others – the question of ‘other minds’.
The so-called
problem of the ‘other’ or of ‘other minds’ only appears if you
think (Laing notwithstanding) that experience is private and in
need of being communicated, i.e., that experience can be ‘owned’
like a commodity’.
Ibid.
The way we
‘privately’ experience others is automatically sensed by the
other and automatically communicates to the other - just as does
the way they experience us. Subjectivity or awareness is in
essence reciprocal or ‘inter-subjective’. ‘Scientific Socialism’
is a new science of ‘soul’ understood as a social field of
inter-subjective relationality – uniting the soul inwardness of
human beings not only with that of others but with the aware
inwardness or soul of all apparent ‘objects’ of perception.
Understood in this way, ‘Scientific Socialism’ is
‘Soul-Science’, a revolutionary science that stands in radical
opposition to all current forms of social and scientific
reductionism – the reduction of the human senses to the single
sense of ‘having’ that Marx wrote of, and the reduction of all
immeasurable qualitative dimensions of human subjective
experience to ‘objectively’ measurable quantities.
Soul-Science and Social Change
Social-Revolutionary Aims of Soul-Science
The soul dimension
of socialism has to do with the intrinsically social character
of the individual soul as such. We have not one personal
identity but many. Our soul identity is itself a group identity.
The soul is itself a family group or community of selves. The
personal self we know and identify with is but one part and one
expression of this inner society of selves. As souls we are
multi-persons.
In the social
world, each person is the hub of a wheel of dyadic
relationships with others. Part of the meaning of these
relationships lies in the way in which each person we relate to
in our social world symbolises and links us to another self of
our own – to a specific part of that group or society of selves
that makes up our whole self or soul. In the social world, we
are taught to feel our personal identity as the private property
of our ego. In the soul world on the other hand,
personal identities can mix, merge, meld and overlap with those
of others, without any loss of essential spiritual
individuality, which has to do with the group nature of our
whole self or soul.
If two individuals
linked in a dyadic relationship can sense the specific aspects
of their own souls linking them with the other, and feel the
ways in which their own identity overlaps with that of the
other, then that relationship becomes a link to their whole self
or soul. It ceases to be a mere ‘interpersonal relationship’ -
one in which each person treats their own identity as private
property, and rigidifies the boundary of identity separating
them from the other person. Instead they become conscious of
their interpersonal relationship as a soul relationship, and
become aware of its reality in the soul world.
A social group
is a group of persons. A soul group is a group of souls.
But since each individual, as a soul, is themselves a group or
society of selves, a soul group has a ‘holarchical’ character.
It is a group of groups in which each member is part of every
other, and is linked to each other member through a
particular aspect of their own soul. If each member of a
social group is able to feel the specific inner
soul-connection uniting them with each other member of the
group, then the social group can come to consciousness of
itself as a soul group, and become aware of its own
living reality in the soul world. It is only through a highly
specific sense of our inner soul connection with a specific
other that both interpersonal and group relationships can be
transformed into soul relationships - awakening a social
consciousness of our own whole self or soul, of soul groups and
communities, and of the soul world as such.
Most accounts of
society and social history are based purely on studies of social
practices and the social world as such. They entirely
ignore the social influence and reality of soul
relationships, soul groups and the soul world.
The natural world is a world that surrounds us all the
time. It is not ‘another world’ but one we are a part of, even
though, as urban dwellers, we may only be conscious of it
through changes in the weather. The same is true of the soul
world. We are part of that world too and have never left it.
It surrounds us all the time and in the same way that the
natural world does, making its influence felt through constant
changes in the psychical atmosphere, mood or climate that
permeates social groups and the social world as a whole.
We know what it
feels like when the atmosphere in an interpersonal relationship
or social gathering cools or gets overheated. Soul relationships
and soul group do not necessarily find expression in
interpersonal relationships and social groups. Yet individuals
who do form part of the same soul group can feel changes in the
climate or atmosphere of that group even though they may rarely
or never meet as a social group, or live thousands of miles from
one another in totally different natural climates. Because of
the hold exerted by the notion of personal identity as
private property however, individuals tend to both
personalise and privatise their experience of changes
occurring in the psychical climate and atmosphere of their soul
group and soul world – often to the extent that they treat them
only as the result of their own unpredictable personal ‘mood
swings’.
Natural weather
patterns and climatic changes are only ‘unpredictable’ in a
conventional scientific sense. From a soul-scientific
perspective they are themselves a manifestations of local,
regional and global changes in the psychic atmosphere of the
mass psyche. Dangerous and life-threatening global climate
changes are a result of humanity adopting a soul-less and purely
practical relation to nature – turning the planet into a
stock of exploitable mineral, vegetative and animal resources.
It is because
social relationships, social groups and the social world are
primarily formed on the basis of common practical relations
and purposes rather than shared inner soul connections that the
whole climate of the soul world can also be damaged, affecting
every soul group within it and each of the individuals within
those groups.
The foundation of
religious groups and communities, religious cults and cultures,
was driven by the ideal of giving social and communal reality to
the soul world - to soul groups and communities. What unites
religion and socialism however, is the ‘utopian’ spiritual ideal
of creating ‘heaven on earth’, realising the innate
soul-brotherhood and soul-sisterhood of all humanity in a way
free of distortions and inequalities created by human practical
relations. Unfortunately, like political groups and
organisations, religious groups and communities too, have
themselves built up solely on the basis of purely practical
relations between their members. For whilst emphasizing the
ethical importance of relational practices they have tended to
reduce such practices to a body of moral commandments or a set
of symbolic rites.
The spiritual and
political essence of ‘socialism’ is not collectivism but
individualism fulfilled through relational practices that free
human relations from the alienation created by their practical
social relations. Only such practices can create conditions for
a communist society as Marx defined it – one in which
“the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all.” The ideal of a communist society will
forever remain a utopian one however, unless soul is put
back into ‘socialism’. Only by recognising the reality of the
soul world (‘in heaven’), can soul communities attain
reality in the social world (‘on earth’) as social
communities. The sole means by which this can happen is through
a relational revolution which shows each individual how
to sense and realise their inner soul relationships with
others through bodily relational practices – practices which
break down the illusory bodily boundaries of personal identity
itself.
We know that in
reality all social groups, organisations and communities
flounder or fragment through breakdowns in the interpersonal
relationships among their members – the basic dyadic units of
relation on which they are built. We know too, that the basic
reason why individuals join or leave political and religious
groups, organisations and communities has to do with the degree
of inner soul connection they feel with them and the degree of
relational fulfilment that they do or do not find within them.
This in turn has to
do not only with the practical relations that govern
those groups, organisations and communities but rather with the
relational practices that do or do not flourish within
them – practices necessary in order to not only nourish the
interpersonal relations that are their very life, but to
transform those relations into intimate soul relationships. It
is through such relational practices that individuals can change
their world, the world of others, and the social world as we
know it. How? By overthrowing the foundations of capitalist
social relations in their own souls. To do so means ceasing to
experience their own personal identity as private property,
recognising instead that their true spiritual individuality –
their whole self or soul - is itself an inner society of
selves. None of these selves is the private property of the
ego. Rather each of them is a bridge of identity linking them
with others in soul families, groups and communities.
Soul-sensing
is a bodily relational practice that brings with it a
bodily experience of soul-communion. Only through such bodily
relational practices will it be possible to truly re-ensoul
our social world – to form social groups and communities
‘on earth’ which know themselves as soul groups and
communities, not just as aggregates of atomised and otherwise
isolated individuals.
The essential reality of the human being is a complex of
relationships. How they experience their reality is determined
by the inner bearing they adopt to and within those
relationships – their way of being in the ‘world’ that these
relationships constitute. Any break in the normal pattern of
relating, dominated as it is by everyday practical relations,
brings about a break with normal consensual reality - but by no
means with reality as such. For the ‘normal’ person their
practical relations and purposes are all that constitute
their world they take as real - however superficial or unreal
the relationships that make up that world. Soul-science is a
break with the entire non-relational concept of reality
that underlies the world of normality, and the ‘normal’ modes of
relating that maintain and reinforce it. Other realities –
different planes and spheres of the soul words - do exist than
the consensual reality reinforced by human social relations.
Soul-science is also a doorway into those realities, but one we
can only open and enter through a revolutionary transformation
of our own relation to the sensory world around us. That
relation must cease to be one in which thinking turns all
sensory phenomena of that world into intellectual abstractions.
Instead it must become a relation in which we think with our
bodies themselves, using them to sense the aware inwardness
or ‘soul’ of all natural bodies – not least the human body
itself, which is both a sense organ of the soul, and as
Wittgenstein recognized, a sensory image of the soul – its “best
picture”.
If the practice of
medicine were understood as a relational practice, the
physician would indeed take time to listen to the
patient. If it were understood as a bodily relational
practice, the physician would not simply rest content with
observing or examining the body of the patient from the outside
– they would listen not just with their medical mind but with
their whole body - using it to sense the patient’s own inwardly
felt body and inwardly felt dis-ease. The world of medicine and
the physician-patient relation is but one example of the way in
which what we call ‘the world’ is shaped by practical
relations which leave no room for relational practices.
Just as the
physician-patient relationship is approached only with the
practical purpose of producing a diagnosis and recommending a
treatment plan, so can the teacher-student relationship be
dominated entirely by the project of setting and completing
assignments and passing exams. Study itself ceases to be
experienced as an activity by which the student deepens their
inner relationship to a subject matter, but is reduced
instead to the purely practical project of exam preparation or
the production of passable essays.
We live in a world
of practices – scientific and technical practices, professional
and vocational practices, commercial and economic practices,
medical and therapeutic practices, spiritual and meditational
practices, political and religious practices. All these
practices are also relational practices, yet how many
understand themselves as such? Anyone can transform their
ordinary practical relations with other human beings and with
the entire sensory world into aware and bodily relational
practices. In this way they ‘change the world’ in a
revolutionary manner, subverting a consensual reality or world
in which practical relations have hitherto squeezed the life out
of human relations, and breathing fresh life into those
relations through their relational practices.
Back to Top
Bodily Sensing and the Sensed Body
From ‘Felt Sense’
to the Felt Body and Felt Self
Peter Wilberg
From a physical-scientific point
of view it seems clear that what we call ‘bodies’ possess
measurable properties of material mass and density, speed and
distance, temporal duration and spatial extension in three
dimensions. The human body too is thought of as a physical body
in this sense, a complex material structure of atoms, molecules,
cells and organs. Our understanding of the human body reflects a
general scientific understanding of the nature of physical
bodies as such, whether in the form of particles or galaxies.
According to this understanding, perceived sensory qualities of
bodies such as colour and taste are secondary expressions of
‘primary’ qualities such as mass, motion, momentum and spatial
extension – all of which were not essentially qualities so much
as quantities.
In contrast, the classical
pre-modern science of the Greek natural philosophers was, as
Ronchi points out, closer to a “physiology of the senses” than a
mathematical physics of mass and energy. Rather than reducing
phenomena such as ‘light’, ‘heat’, ‘gravity’ and ‘sound’ to
quantitative instrumental measurements and mathematical
functions, the point of departure of pre-modern science was our
body’s own sensory awareness of the qualities of other bodies.
Such qualities included brightness and darkness, warmth and
coolness, dryness and wetness, weight and lightness, hardness
and softness, and particularly the elemental qualities of
solidity (earth), fluidity (water), airiness or fieriness.
Dreams made it self-evident to the ancients that sensory
awareness or sentience in all its forms had an intrinsically
subjective character, independent of our bodily sense organs.
Modern science, on the other hand, sought the objective
counterparts and objective foundation of these subjective
sensory qualities of bodies in measurable ‘primary’ quantities
and their functional relationships – in particular measurable
quantitative extension. Only with the advent of a
‘post-modern’ physics of energetic quanta and with it the
indeterminacy principle — the recognition that absolute or
infinitely precise quantitative measurements are impossible in
principle — did scientists begin to reflect on this dichotomy of
primary and secondary ‘qualities’.
“It is as though the programme
of Galileo and Locke, which involved discarding secondary
qualities (colour, taste etc.) for primary ones (the quantities
of classical mechanics), had been carried a stage further and
those primary qualities had themselves become secondary to the
properties of potentia in which they lay latent.”
Heisenberg
What is the fundamental nature
of these potentia or potencies. They are currently
conceived as energetic field-potentials which can take the form
of ‘virtual’ or even ‘massless’ particles — immaterial bodies
lacking any field-independent dimensions. But the idea of such
immaterial bodies makes no sense if bodyhood is identified with
material substantiality and measurable extension. It can make
sense only if we understand bodyhood itself – not just the human
body but all bodies, from sub-atomic particles to atoms,
molecules and cells, in a fundamentally new way. The new
understanding of bodies is that they are outwardly detectable or
sense-perceptible forms or figurations of sub-atomic, atomic,
molecular and cellular awareness, emerging within fields
of awareness and giving expression to immanent field-potentials,
field-qualities, field-patterns of awareness. That the
latter possess their own intrinsic dimensions of spatiality and
temporality, to do not with distances between extensional bodies
but degrees, densities, durations and distances of particular
qualitative intensities of awareness.
The mistake of both modern and
pre-modern philosophy lay in treating awareness or subjectivity
as the property of a localised subject of consciousness
or perception. The mistake is compounded by the modern
scientific world-view, which treats the subject as something
localised in a particular object of perception — the brain as we
perceive it. The result is an inescapable contradiction – the
subject of perception is seen as a product or epiphenomenon of
its own localised objects of perception!
In contrast, the starting point
of what I call field-phenomenological science is a recognition
of the fundamentally non-local or field character of awareness
or subjectivity itself. Its foundation is the understanding that
non-local fields of awareness are the condition of emergence not
only of any localised objects of perception but any localised
subjects of perception or ‘centres’ of awareness.
The foundational thesis of
field-phenemonological science is a radical one. It is that
awareness or subjectivity not only has a field character but
also its own sensual qualities, its own sensed shape and
substantiality, its own qualitative extensionality in
space and time, its own dimensions of motion. I call these
intrinsic sensual qualities of awareness qualia.
Awarenes, in other words, s is not merely a consciousness of
some thing or other – of material bodies and their sensual
qualities. Rather it has itself an intrinsically bodily
character, being composed of sensual shapes and patterns, tones
and textures, qualities and intensities of awareness.
This thesis, and this thesis alone, undermines all dualisms of
‘mind’ and ‘body’, psyche and soma. In particular
it challenges Descartes’ distinction between res extensa
(extensional reality) and res cogitans (the thinking
subject). It does this by challenging the identification of
substance (res extensa) with quantitative extension in
space, and of subjectivity with a non-extensional subject of
awareness.
Cartesian mind-body dualism has
many variations (psycho-physical parallelism, mind-body
interactionism, epiphenomenalism, and monistic ‘dual-aspectism’
– seeing mind and body as two aspects of the same thing. It has
its historic roots in Greek philosophy, in particular in the
development of a way of thinking rooted in the sense of sight
and visual perception. This is most evident in the very word
‘idea’ coming from the Greek idein – ‘to see’. From this
arose the idea of the world as a collection of perceived things,
of extensional bodies in space, some of which, like the human
body, were also perceiving things. The visual perception of
bodies in space became the model for the human being’s entire
relation to the world. Other and earlier directions in Greek
thinking did not prioritise the sense of sight, with its locus
in the human head, but focused more on the sense of touch or
rather on bodily sensations of wetness or dryness, warmth or
coolness, of the sort which we experience with the body as a
whole and not just the head. Elemental qualities of sensation
such as solidity (earth), fluidity (water), airiness and warmth
(air and fire) were taken as the basis of natural philosophy –
different bodies being considered as different combinations of
these elements, which in turn were combinations of the basic
sensual polarities such as warmth and coldness, dryness
and wetness, light and darkness, lightness and heaviness etc.
The entire history of Western
philosophy and science is rooted in a failure to distinguish
bodily sense, bodily sensation and sense-perception – the five
senses. Our entire modern concept of reality is based on a
mechanics of sense-perception, visual perception in particular.
But as Gendlin points out, “Our bodies don’t lurk in isolation
behind the five peepholes of perception.” Nor do we even possess
five discrete bodily senses. Instead, all perception is a
‘synaesthetic’ blending of the senses – when we look at a rose,
we do not just perceive its shape and colour, we sense its
texture and weight, the way it would feel to touch. When we look
at a metallic object we have a sense of the way it would sound
if struck. Similarly, looking at a person’s facial expression we
can ‘hear’ it as a sound they might make. A wide-eyed, open- or
round-mouthed look of wonder, delight or astonishment we hear as
a potential “Ah” or “Oh”.
However, even recognising the
innate synaesthesia of the senses does not go far enough in
transcending the idea of the body as a perceiving thing looking
out through its “five peepholes of perception”. For as we have
seen, bodily sensation and bodily sense-perception are not the
same thing. The ‘percepts’ of the senses are localised. Bodily
sensation can have a non-local or field character – an all-round
sense of lightness or darkness, warmth or coolness. We do not
just ‘hear’ a lorry rumbling by on the street. We sense its
vibration throughout our whole body. An infant lying in its cot
does not hear the sound of ‘a lorry’ at all – for it may not
have a visual image of the thing it hears, let alone a word for
it. It does not, to begin with, ‘hear’ or even ‘see’, ‘taste’,
‘smell’ or ‘touch’ recognisable things – recognisable objects of
sense-perception to which it can attach a concept or verbal
label. For the baby these things are no more than
synaesthetically blended sights, sounds, tastes and smells all
of which touch them – are felt in a certain way with their whole
body.
The distinction between
sense-perception and sensation reflects another more fundamental
distinction – that between the bodily senses and what Gendlin
calls bodily sense. For this is something that, as Gendlin
points out, transcends the five senses. Is the space we sense
behind our backs for example, something we ‘see’, ‘hear’,
‘touch’, ‘taste’ or ‘smell’? What is the bodily sense of
‘danger’ behind us that we might feel walking down a dark
street, or the sense of constriction we might feel in a lift.
What is a bodily sense of excitement or anticipation?
This is where it becomes
important to acknowledge that felt bodily sense is not just felt
bodily sensation but felt ‘sense’ in another ‘sense’ — felt
meaning or intent. When we sense a person’s look or posture as
‘menacing’ are we simply attaching some significance to it, or
are we sensing its significance? Here again, we are led to
another fundamental distinction. This is the distinction between
what I call ‘sensed significance’ or ‘sentience’, on the one
hand, and what I term ‘signified sense’ or ‘signification’ on
the other. To talk of a person’s look as ‘menacing’ is to
signify its meaning or sense. But signifying sense is not the
same thing as sensing significance. The poet, for example, can
only use words to signify their felt sense of a landscape, for
example, because they already sense meaning or significance in
it. What Gendlin calls “felt sense” or “bodily sensing” is
immanently sensed meaning or significance of the sort that
always transcends formal or outward signification. The sign
function of a phenomenon is its place in an already established
pattern of signification. But its immanent, and directly felt
sense always transcends such patterns, containing dimensions
of as yet unsignified sense which conceal still latent, implicit
or unmanifest patterns of significance. An animal’s ‘sense’ of
danger is not an interpretation of signs in the form of
sensory stimuli, but a direct sense of their as-yet unmanifest
or potential significance – the possibility of a lurking
predator for example. Even before the animal moves, this sense
of danger is embodied in the animal’s alert posture, as a
perceptible readiness for flight in response to any perceived
predator. Sense in general is bodily motion - in response
not just to patterns of perception and action but potential
ones.
Saussure compared language to a
surface plane of signification, one side of which was
constituted by the ‘signifier’, a sound of a word, and the other
side by a word-concept or thought, its ‘signified’. But what if
not only language but perceived reality as such constitutes a
plane or membrane of signification that surrounds or envelops an
inner semiotic space or ‘semiosphere’ (Hoffmeyer) with its own
depths of potential meaning or significance. The
outer semiotic membrane or ‘sembrane’ would correspond to the
sign function of sense-perceptible phenomena – their place in an
already established pattern of signified sense or
‘sense-conception’ (the inner surface of the sembrane). The
inner space of the semiosphere, would correspond to the
unbounded domain of sensed but as yet unsignified and
unmanifest significance that Gendlin calls ‘felt sense’ or
‘bodily sense’.
Nowhere is the distinction
between bodily sense, sensation and sense-perception more
significant than in medical science, which makes no distinction
between a patient’s underlying sense of dis-ease, the sensations
of bodily discomfort or pain they may experience, and
sense-perceptible symptoms. The latter are read as possible
diagnostic signs of some bodily disease whose reality can be
made sense-perceptible — either through direct or indirect
sense-perception using diagnostic instruments and tests. The
sign function of the patient’s symptoms – their sensations of
discomfort — is reduced to their place within established
patterns of significance associated with particular diseases. No
attempt is made to help the patient explore their felt sense of
dis-ease, and with it, the felt meaning or sense of their
symptoms. Doing so might reveal an unmanifest symbolic
significance to those symptoms that no medical examination can
ever disclose.
Bodily symptoms, like dream
symbols, are just as much signifiers of felt bodily sense
– and of the unmanifest dimensions of significance latent in it
— as any words with which we might signify this sense. A child
whose un-ease at attending school remains unexpressed and
unsignified in words may develop tummy-aches that prevent them
from going to school. Seeking to sense the inner meaning or
significance of the child’s felt un-ease is a quite different
matter from seeking medical diagnosis and treatment of their
symptoms. Arnold Mindell uses the term ‘dreambody’ to
distinguish bodily sensations from their felt sense or
significance, understanding bodily symptoms as something dreamt
up in the same way as dream images, and bearing similar depths
of symbolic significance. The term ‘dreambody’ is a way of
understanding bodies as semiospheres whose surface skin or
membrane can be perceived from the outside as bodily signs,
signals or symptoms or perceived from the inside as dream
symbols and dreamt bodies. Both the sense-perceptible dimensions
of bodyhood and those of our dreams, however, constitute domains
of signified sense, and conceal inner depths of potential
meaning and an inner semiotic space of sensed significance
– “felt sense” -which constitutes the immeasurable and unbounded
inwardness of any body.
“It is a
remarkable thing that what flows out remains within. That the
word flows out and yet remains within.” Meister Eckhart
Thinking in purely extensional
terms, ‘inwardness’ — for example, the inwardness of a container
such as a jug, is formed by its outwardness, the material form
of the jug. But as Seth emphasises:
“The
outwardness is formed through the inwardness, not the other way
round. There is always an excess of this inwardness, struggling
to express itself in an outward form. For this reason, a study
of the outwardness will never result in a true comprehension of
the inwardness. There will always be that inside which is still
unexpressed.”
That is why the inwardly sensed
significance of a phenomenon can never be reduced to a
set of signifying words, the sense-perceptible ‘things’ we take
to be signified by these words, or their pre-assigned place
within an already established pattern of conceptual significance
or sense-conception. Sensed meaning or significance is not a
property of signs or sign-systems at all, whether body signs or
road signs. It has to do with sensual patterns, qualities,
intensities and directions of awareness. The root meaning of the
word ‘sense’ is ‘way’ or ‘direction’. Conventional signs might
seem to be all about one thing pointing to another – as a road
sign may point to a nearby supermarket. But in essence, the road
sign is not one thing pointing to another. It is something which
points us in the direction of another. Not just
sense-perceptible signs but bodily sensations and symptoms have,
like dream symbols, intrinsic sense, pointing our awareness in a
certain direction, orienting and preparing us to act in a
certain way. The spatiality of bodily sense has to do with
orientations of our being and not just our bodies. The ‘space’
of bodily sense is a ‘potential’ space (Winnicott), a space of
potential patterns of action and speech, perception and thought.
Its dimensions are ‘subjective’ – for our sensed distance or
closeness to a place or person may have nothing to do with our
measurable or ‘objective’ distance from them. Similarly, the
sensed or ‘subjective’ duration of a journey may bear little
relation to its measurable duration in standardised clock-time.
The problem is that subjective spatiality and distance, like
subjective temporality or subjective speed and motion, is seen
as less ‘real’ than measurable space and time, speed and motion.
That is not just because ‘objective’ reality is identified with
the positions and movement of extended bodies, but also because
bodyhood as such is identified with bounded extension
‘in’ space.
“Space is neither in the
subject, nor is the world in space.” Heidegger.
On the contrary, subjectivity or
awareness has its own intrinsic, and unbounded spatiality. If
our awareness did not extend beyond the apparent physical
boundaries of our bodies we would have no sense of a space
around our bodies or of other bodies within that space. What we
call the ‘senses’ are what enable us to perceive this space and
these bodies with our own. Bodily sensation (for example of
movement or balance) is what allows us to feel this space.
Bodily sense is what allows us to sense it in a way that
transcends both sense-perception and sensation – for it includes
a dimension of sensed meaning or significance to do with
potential patterns of action and perception, potential
sensations and sense-perceptions. But the fundamental thesis of
this essay is that neither sense-perception, sensation or what
Gendlin calls ‘bodily sense’ are functions of the body as a
bounded extensional object — a ‘body thing’ in space. To believe
so is to ignore the fact that what Gendlin calls ‘felt sense’ or
‘bodily sense’ has as its basis a felt sense of our own
bodies, which we may feel or sense as more or less bounded or
unbounded, more or less spacious or constricted, more or less
solid or fluid, more or less weak or intense, more or less
formed or amorphous. Recognising this brings us to a
fundamentally new conclusion – namely that bodyhood as such is
essentially a function of sense and sentient awareness and not
the other way round. In sensing our own bodies, becoming aware
of bodily sensations, and perceiving other bodies with our
senses, we are actually giving bodily shape and form to a
field of sensory awareness – one that has its own
qualitative dimensions of spatiality, and temporality, distance
and duration, shape and substantiality. Bodyhood is the bodying
of sentient awareness. Sensation is not something produced or
located in the body.
You see a painting on the wall.
You see it with your own eyes. But where do you see the
painting? The painting is on a wall. Your eyes are in your head.
But is your seeing in your head, in your eyes or brain? Or on
the wall? And where do you see the painting? See it as a
painting. Seeing meaning or sense in it and not just a blotch of
sensory colours and shapes.
You hear sounds of music coming
from a loudspeaker. But where is your hearing? Where do you hear
the sounds? And where, if anywhere, do you hear their music? In
the air? In your ears? In your brain? In your feelings? Is the
space of your felt resonance with the music a space in the room,
a space in your ear? Is this resonance a vibration of molecules
of air in your room or of fluids in your ear? Is it a release of
nerve signals in your brain or hormones in your body?
Dreaming, we may have vivid
sensory perceptions of other bodies in our dream environment,
but our sense of our own bodies may be more or less substantial,
dense or solid. Waking, we may sense on our body the warmth of
the sun, or the feel of a breeze, the contact with your clothes,
the ground you are standing on or the chair you are sitting in.
But what does this mean if not that your sense of your own body
is always and everywhere inseparable from your sense of other
bodies? Or rather, these other bodies, like your own, are bodily
shapes and combinations of sensations – sensations of light and
darkness, colour and tone, form and texture, weight and density.
What are sensations? Are they
your body’s sensory awareness of other bodies? Or are they
sensual qualities and intensities of awareness as such,
patterned in such a manner as to shape an experience of bodyhood
– your own body and other bodies? And what is bodyhood, if not a
non-localised field of sensory awareness which in turn
takes on bodily shape and substantiality? And what are eyes,
ears and brains if not examples of bodies or body parts that we
can locate within that sensory field of awareness, if we choose
to do so.
When you look at a painting on
the wall, the painting is not first of all ‘there’, on the wall,
then a set of light waves, then a set of nerve signals triggered
in the eye and brain, then a mentally illuminated image
constructed by the brain to ‘copy’ the ‘real’ picture, then a
projection of this luminous image into a mentally constructed
three-dimensional space and onto an image of a wall in that
space. A tall scientific story if ever there was one
— yet
this is how science explains the visual perception of objects.
Your looking at the painting is
not dependent on you being here and it being there, somewhere
else in physical space. Your attention to the painting is what
first stretches out a field or space of sensory awareness as
such, one that spans your ‘here’ and its ‘there’. That is why,
when you look at a painting or any other object in space, you
are both ‘here’, inwardly sensing your own body from within, and
‘there’ at the outer surface of this other body. You not only
see the shapes and colours of these other bodies, but sense
their surface feel and their very substantiality – their
texture, weight and density. You see what they would feel like
to touch or hold, or feel what they would be like to see. You
even sense the sound they would make. All sensation is
‘synaesthetic’ – an intermeshing of sensual qualities of
awareness which come together to create a sense of the shaped
substantiality or ‘bodyhood’ of an object.
Moreover, the sense you have of
your own body is shaped by the sensation and sensory perception
of these other bodies. The more your awareness is drawn into the
things around you, the more it takes on their sensual
bodily shape and substantiality. The more your awareness is
drawn into internal sensations, the more it takes on the shape
and substantiality that you identify as your own bodyhood.
Within the field of your sensory awareness, therefore, every
body is potentially your body, shaping your sense of your
own bodyhood in its very substantiality. Lashed by rain in a
stormy wind, you do not merely ‘sense’ the wind and rain ‘with’
your body or because you ‘have’ a body. Rather your very sense
of bodyhood takes on something of the nature of wetness and
windiness. Similarly, if you are with somebody else, you do not
just ‘perceive’ their body with yours – your own sense of
bodyhood takes on something of the shape and tone of this
some-body-else.
Where and how then, do you draw
the boundary between your body and other bodies around you,
between you as ‘some-body’ and ‘some-body-else’? You do so by
feeling a withinness to your own body that for the most part,
you only dimly sense in other bodies – first and foremost, other
human bodies. The field of our sensory awareness has two
dimensions. One is the dimension of ‘aroundness’ – of
extensional ‘physical’ space and the bodies we perceive within
it. The other is a dimension of ‘withinness’ that has no
measurable physical dimensions, but consists of sensual
qualities of awareness that take on the felt shape of our own
bodies. The sensed boundaries of the felt body may or may not
coincide with our skins, or rather with skin sensations. More
often than not it is defined by qualities of muscular sensation.
Essentially, however, the boundary of the felt body is a mobile
and unbounded boundary, not a physical skin boundary but a
sensual field-boundary between the dimensions of ‘aroundness’
and ‘withinness’, a boundary that may expand or contract, be
felt as more or less porous or translucent. Here it can help to
think of the TARDIS, the name of an imaginary time machine in
the science fiction series ‘Dr Who’. TARDIS meant ‘Time And
Relative Dimensions In Space’. As a device it had the apparent
outward form and dimensions of an ordinary police telephone
kiosk, with room for no more than one person within it. Once
entered however, its spatial volume appeared to have inwardly
expanded, taking on the dimensions of a spacious living room.
Once again, however, it must be
emphasised that it is not our bodies that ‘possess’ or ‘produce’
sensory spatial awareness and our felt sense of bodyhood. Rather
that felt sense of bodyhood – the felt body and its felt
boundaries – is a shape taken by sensual qualities of awareness
as such. Sensory fields, field-shapes and field-qualities of
awareness are not a product of specific bodily shapes and
sensations occurring within them. Sensing is no more a product
of bodies we sense than is dreaming a product of images we
dream. This being the case, however, just what sort of reality
does our body, or any-body, have, besides being a shaping of
sensual field-qualities of awareness with their own felt
substantiality? For one thing, perceived from the outside,
whether as a mirror-image or by other people, this
field-pattern, though changeable, has a certain stability, and
fixed boundaries. But what we perceive as another person’s body
in the space around us is no less a bodily patterning of
our own field of sensory awareness than the image of ourselves
in a mirror. It is, as it were a ‘materialised body image’ of
another human being created in resonance with the
patterning of their own outer body image and their own inwardly
felt body shape.
When we look at ourselves in the
mirror, what we see is a double of ourselves, manifest in the
mirror. But similarly, when we look at others, what we see is a
double. We ourselves shape a bodily double of the other’s
body. In doing so we shape a double of a double. For the ‘true’
body of the other is itself a double – a combination of their
own outer body image and their own inwardly felt body. How do we
create these doubles of doubles? Through resonance with
the outer and inner field-patterns and field-qualities of
awareness which the other identifies with their own body, and
through which they maintain their familiar sense of bodyhood.
The dimension of aroundness that
is one side of our field of sensory awareness takes shape in the
form of other bodies in space. But the dimension of ‘withinness’
that constitutes the ‘other side’ of that field of sensory
awareness, whilst it takes shape in the form of our own inwardly
felt body, is above all an embodiment of our being – of our felt
self. The felt body is also the beselved body. The
dimension of withinness consists not just of the inwardly felt
sensations of bodyhood but of their felt sense or meaning. Felt
sense has to do with felt potentials of our being – with the
potentials of the felt self. It is also our link to felt
resonance with others – with their felt body, their felt self
and its potentials.
The dimension of withinness
leads directly into a third dimension of our field of sensory
awareness. This is the dimension of unbounded interiority.
It is through this dimension that our own felt body and felt
self is linked with the felt body and felt self of others,
vibrating in field-resonance with them. Our felt body is our
resonant link to the felt body of others. Our innermost self is
our resonant link to the felt self of the other. Our felt
resonance with others is a field-resonance occurring in
the dimension of unbounded interiority. It is through this
field-resonance that we are able to create outer doubles of
their body image in our perceptual field, but also create an
inner double of their felt body within our own. And it is
through this inner double that we gain a bodily sense of their
own felt self and its potentials.
Gendlin rightly emphasises that
the perceiving subject is not just a disembodied ego or “I”, nor
even a bodily subject capable of perceiving its environment. For
this bodily subject is at the same time in constant dynamic
interaction with its environment on many levels – organic,
cellular, molecular, atomic and sub-atomic. It is therefore also
a reservoir of information about that environment and its own
actual or potential relation to it that we can access through
‘bodily sense’. Implicit in Gendlin’s thinking is a new type of
relational epistemology of the sort that confirms the
reality of the body’s own immediate interactional ‘knowing’ of
its environment in distinction from knowledge of or about it. As
Heidegger put it “Knowing is a relation in which we ourselves
are related, and in which this relation vibrates through our
basic posture.” Put in other terms, our every experience is the
expression of a specific relation or comportment to our
environment that forms part of an ongoing interaction with it.
What I believe is still missing
in Gendlin’s account of the nature of ‘bodily sense’ however, is
that it takes the body and its environment as two pre-given,
sense-perceptible entities ‘in’ interaction with one another.
This model contrasts radically with that of the German biologist
Jakob von Uexküll. It was Uexküll who first recognised that each
species of organism constitutes its own unique sensory and
perceptual environment or Umwelt. Uexkülls cites the
example of the tick, whose Umwelt is primarily constituted by
its senses of touch and warmth. For us as human beings, the term
‘warm-blooded’ is simply a general concept applying to a number
of distinct sense-perceptive species, whereas for the tick
‘mammalness’ is not a tangible sense-conception. For its
own sense organs do not differentiate, as ours do, between
different species of warm-blooded animals, and therefore it does
not mentally abstract it as a general category, for it senses
other species only through their innate body warmth. But
Uexküll’s thinking has yet deeper, still unthought implications.
For it suggests that the way we, as human beings, perceive both
the bodily form and environment of another species – for example
an insect or a shark, may in no way correspond to the way these
species (1) perceive each other, (2) perceive their environment,
and (3) perceive our own human bodily form.
Lacking the electrical sense
organs of the shark, for example, we have no idea how they
perceive the bodies of other fish, of human divers or the
oceanic ‘environment’ as a whole through this sense. No-one has
yet fully thought through the paradoxical and subversive
implications of Uexküll’s Umwelt biology for our
understanding of the nature of bodyhood as such. For if our very
scientific ‘knowledge’ of the shark’s sensory organs comes from
our own species-specific sense-perception of its body and
behaviour, how are we to say what the bodily nature of sharks,
or any other species of organism, essentially is? Questioning
along these lines, we are driven inexorably to the conclusion
that the bodily nature of an organism is essentially nothing
more or less than an organising pattern of sensory awareness,
one which will necessarily be perceived in a different way by
different species of organisms, or even different members of the
same species.
The fact that our own human
perception of other bodies in the natural world is shaped by our
own species-specific field-pattern of awareness does not mean
that it is illusory, only that it is partial. Nor does it mean
that our perception of the universe is necessarily limited. For
like other organisms, our own field-patterns of awareness are
themselves one expression of a primordial source field of
awareness that includes other potentials patterns. This source
field can be compared to an ocean. Just as sharks, jellyfish and
other oceanic life forms are expressions of the life of the
ocean as a whole, so are their field-patterns of awareness
configurations of an oceanic field of awareness. Our own
localised human subjectivity or ‘ego-consciousness’ can be
compared to a fish’s awareness of itself as a body separate and
apart from other fishes and life forms in the ocean, separate
and apart from the ocean as such. It is unlikely however, that
other species apart from our own are aware of themselves in this
way. More likely, a fish is aware of itself in a bodily way not
as something apart from but as a part of the ‘ocean’ as a
whole, connected to other fish, and to other oceanic life forms,
through it. What Gendlin calls ‘bodily sense’ is our human
equivalent to this mode of awareness – our bodily awareness of
ourselves as ‘part of nature’, intimately connected to other
beings through it. What I call our ‘sense of self’ however, is
something quite different. It cannot be identified with our
highly species-specific mode of ego-awareness. Instead it is the
human equivalent to the ocean’s awareness of itself in
the form of a particular fish. Human ‘self-awareness’, unlike
that of the fish, can therefore be said to have three basic
levels as opposed to two.
1.
Human ego-awareness – our perception and conception of
ourselves as localised bodily subjects or centres of awareness
separate and apart from others.
2.
Body awareness or ‘bodily sense’– our ‘instinctive’
bodily awareness of ourselves as part of a larger natural
environment, and in constant energetic interaction with other
bodies in it.
3.
Self-awareness – our awareness both of our own egos and
bodies as localised self-manifestations of a larger
sensory field or ocean of awareness, one which includes
other potential field-patterns of awareness, and gives us
potential access to these patterns.
As far as level two is
concerned, we must remind ourselves that even a fish’s awareness
of itself as part of the ocean as a whole is shaped by its own
species-specific awareness of that ocean. Each oceanic life form
senses and perceives the ocean itself in a different way. The
question therefore arises as to what the ocean as such
essentially is. This is where the term ‘ocean of awareness’
ceases to have a merely metaphorical character. For just as the
bodyhood of an organism is essentially an organising
field-pattern of awareness, perceived in different ways by other
organism, so is the ocean essentially a field of awareness
manifesting its potentials in different organising patterns of
awareness. This ocean of awareness, however, unlike perceived or
sensed oceans, does not have any extensional dimensions
whatsoever. It has a purely non-extensional or ‘intensional’
reality, consisting as it does essentially of potential
field-patterns, field-qualities and field-intensities of
awareness.
“To every actual intensity belongs a virtual one. Actual
intensity has extension (form and substance), virtual intensity
does not: it is a pure intensity. The virtual has only
intension. That is not to say it is undifferentiated. Only
that it is indeterminate in our spatiality. Every one of its
dense points is adjacent to every point in the actual world,
distanced from it only by the intensity of its resonance and its
nearness to collapse. This means that it is also indeterminate
in relation to our temporality. Each of its regions or
individuals is the future and the past of an actual individual:
the states it has chosen, will choose, and could have chosen but
did not (and will not). All of this is always there at every
instant, at varying intensities, insistently. The virtual as a
whole is the future-past of actuality, the pool of potential
from which universal history draws its choices and to which it
returns the states it renounces. The virtual is not
undifferentiated. It is hyper-differentiated. If it is
the void, it is a hypervoid in continual ferment. ” Brian
Massumi
The distinction between
extensional and intensional reality — the Outer and Inner
Universe — does not correspond in any way to the dichotomies of
‘body’ and ‘mind’, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ reality, or
‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities. It corresponds instead to a
more fundamental distinction between the domains of Potentiality
and Actuality. Potentialities, by their very nature, are not
perceptible or measurable as Actual realities. Potentialities
can indeed be felt and sensed, but not seen or perceived in any
way. A more fundamental distinction than that of primary and
secondary qualities, one attuned to Heisenberg’s recognition of
‘tertiary’ qualities or potentia — is that of primary and
secondary cognition. Secondary cognition is ‘consciousness’ in
the ordinary sense –awareness in the form of perception of
some actual thing, event or ‘phenomenon’. Primary cognition on
the other hand, is not unconsciousness of the actual, but
awareness of potentiality. It has the character of a direct
feeling cognition or ‘felt sense’ rather than any type of
sense-perception of actualities, or their conceptual
representation in thought.
Potentialities have ‘reality’
only in awareness, and therefore also have reality only
as potential patterns, qualities and intensities of
awareness. The domain of potentiality is intrinsically
inexhaustible – unlimited by any domain of actuality.
Extensional bodies and space-time universes belong to the
dimension of actuality. All such bodies and universes however,
have an intrinsically intensional character, for they open up,
expand and contract within an inexhaustible,
non-extensional space of potentiality. Topologically,
extensional space opens up within intensional space and bodyhood
is the infoldment of an intensional space of potentiality
within extensional space. This topology is represented in
Diagram 1 below, with the shaded area outside the circle
representing intensional or potential space and the infoldment
of this area representing the human body – or any body – as it
exists in extensional space (the white area within the circle).
The shape of this body is unimportant. What is important in this
diagram is that it is a way of illustrating how bodyhood as such
is a dynamic boundary state of extensional and intensional
space, the domain of potentiality and that of actuality.
Diagram 1
Intensional reality consists of
formative potentials latent in fields of awareness. What we call
‘energy’ is the formative activity (Greek energein)
by which these inner potentials are actualised in
material forms.
“Matter is as you know
camouflage, the outwardness of energy. The outwardness is
formed through the inwardness, not the other way around… The
inwardness therefore flows through and forms matter, and the
inwardness remains when it has finished expression in any given
form.” Seth
Matter and ‘material bodies’ are
the localised, outwardly perceptible form taken by energy. But
if material bodies are the ‘outwardness’ of energy, its
actualised extensional reality, then awareness is the very
inwardness of energy, its intensional or potential reality.
But since energy is the autonomous self-actualisation of
infinite formative potentials of awareness, it is itself
inherently inexhaustible. Strictly speaking, energy in all its
forms is not a ‘source’ of power – it has its source in
power, in an intensional dimension of those potencies or
potentialities whose autonomous self-actualisation it is.
Nowadays, New Age philosophies,
like theosophists and body psychotherapists speak of ‘other
bodies’ besides the physical or material body – an ‘energy body’
or ‘subtle body’, an ‘etheric’, ‘astral’ or ‘mental’ body etc.
The term ‘energy medicine’ is a current catchphrase drawing on
such concepts. But simply talking of an ‘energy body’, for
example, does not begin to address the fundamental question of
what bodyhood itself essentially is, or for that matter, what
‘energy’ or ‘matter’ essentially are. Only in the work of
Gendlin and Heidegger do we find any pointers in this direction.
For Heidegger it was clear that the lived body (Leib),
was something quite different in nature from the corpus (Körper),
the body as perceived or examined from without. A distinction
between the lived and the physical body does not force us into
the postulation of some ‘other body’, any more than a
distinction between the inwardness and outwardness of a cask,
vessel or vat (the root meaning of ‘body’) forces us into the
postulation of some other vessel.
What Gendlin calls ‘bodily
sense’ or ‘felt sense’ is our connection to the ‘lived body’ –
or rather to what might be called the sensed body or
felt body, the body as we sense or feel it from within. But
when we speak of the body’s sensed or felt withinness, we are
not simply referring to a psychic interiority bounded in
dimensions by the physical body. For as Heidegger points out:
“When I
direct someone towards a windowsill with a gesture of my right
hand, my bodily existence as a human being does not end at the
tip of my index finger. While perceiving the windowsill….I
extend myself bodily far beyond this fingertip to that
windowsill. In fact, bodily I reach out even further than this
to touch all the phenomena, present or merely visualised,
represented ones.”
Even the
body in motion cannot be conceived as encapsulated by our skins.
“When I
go toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and
I could not go to it at all if I were not such that I am there.
I am never here only, as this encapsulated body; rather, I am
there, that is, I already pervade the room, and only thus can I
go through it.”
Our distance or closeness to one another as human beings is not
something measurable by the distance that separates us as bodies
in space. We can be close to another human being though there
are thousands of miles separating them from us. Similarly, we
can be physically close to them whilst at the same time being
‘miles away’. The closeness we feel to other beings – and not
just human beings – is a qualitative distance that is not
measurable in quantitative terms. But it is no less a felt
bodily closeness than the closeness we feel from an object
at a measurable distance.
But what if not just human bodies, but material bodies of all
types, from particles and atoms, to planes of glass and
windowsills, cells and living organisms, are in essence
unbounded — immeasurable in a purely extensional way? What if
they are instead the energetic embodiments of field-patterns and
field-qualities of awareness – not only human ego-awareness but
beings whose awareness has a pre-egoic, pre-conceptual,
pre-perceptual and indeed pre-physical character?
Field-phenomenological science, as qualia science,
demands and allows us to think the hitherto unthinkable. That
material bodies are no more extensionally bounded than our own
bodyhood is in relation to a windowsill, a pane of glass or
another human being. That in this sense, material bodies are not
separated from one another in extensional space, nor do they
move ‘in’ space. That the movement of bodies, their kinetics, is
not simply a change of place but kinesis in the sense
that Aristotle understood it – a change of state, transformation
or metamorphosis.
What if space as such is not a uniform system of coordinates in
which any body can occupy any position? What if the Greeks were
right in thinking that every body has its own natural place or
topos, as did their temples and the people that visited
them, as do plants or animals, planets and stars? These
fundamental considerations may be thought of as too deep and
philosophical to have any direct implications for our current
scientific understanding of the universe. And yet there are
reasons why they do have such implications. Firstly, they
provide a new and deeper way of understanding otherwise new
scientific concepts such as non-locality, matter waves etc.,
which challenge the traditional understanding of bodies as
indivisible extensionally bounded units of matter – ‘atoms’ in
the original Greek sense.
Secondly, these fundamental considerations open up new ways of
understanding such basic concepts as space and time, distance
and movement, mass and energy, light and gravity. For if every
body has its own place, and like the site of a temple in a Greek
landscape, and like the temple, also lends a particular cast to
that landscape – affecting its own ‘space’ or environmental
field — then the whole idea of a motion of bodies in space might
give way to an understanding that the movement of bodies is in
fact a movement of spaces – space of awareness. And if
all movement is essentially kinesis – not change of place
but change of state — then ‘energy’ is not simply some
actual ‘thing’ that conserves itself ‘in’ every transformation.
Instead, it is that very formative and transformative activity (energein)
through which states of potentiality actualise themselves in
extensional form. What if the ‘mass’ of an extensional body is
the expression of a field-density of intensities, potential
intensities that in turn are the source of its potential energy?
Then maybe gravity itself can be considered in a deeper way –
neither as a force exerted by a body through its inertial
mass, nor as a relativistic function of matter in motion, but as
that which first attracts and gathers, draws together and
densifies a range of field-intensities of potentiality.
When our own sensed body feels ‘heavy’ with fatigue, it is not
just because we have used up physical energy, but because we are
weighed down with an accumulation of ‘residues’ from our lived
experience – residues that remain undigested and unprocessed,
whose potential significance remains unformulated
or unexpressed until we go to sleep and dream. We feel the pull
of sleep in a bodily way as a gravitational force leading us
down into ourselves and towards the ‘black hole’ of sleep —
making it difficult to sustain our focus of the light of
our awareness on our outer, extensional reality and seeking to
draw us inwards. When we feel close to a loved one who is far
away we sense that closeness in a tangible bodily way – as a
warmth of feeling within us. And yet this warmth is not
itself a measurable physical warmth – our temperature does not
increase as it might do hugging that person physically. Is this
language of the ‘sensed body’ merely a set of metaphors drawn
from the physics of bodyhood? Or are the physical sciences
themselves fundamentally mistaken in thinking of their own basic
concepts as purely exo-referential — referring
only to external, physically measurable dimensions of reality?
Are warmth and light, mass and density, distance and duration –
and extension itself — only physical dimensions and
relationships of bodies? Or are they the physical expression of
psychical qualities — intrinsic qualities of awareness which
constitute the very essence of the sensed body?
From the point of view of the modern physiologist, psychologist
and physician it is bodies and brains that see and hear, think
and feel, breath and metabolise. It is bodies that are aware and
bodies that interact. From the point of view of
field-phenomenological science it is quite the reverse. It is
not bodies and brains but aware beings that see and hear,
think and feel, breath and metabolise. We do not see because we
have eyes, hear because we have ears or think because we have
brains. We have eyes, ears and brains because we are seeing,
hearing and thinking beings. Similarly, we do not breathe
because we have lungs. We have organs of respiration because we
are breathing beings. Breathing and the functioning of our
respiratory organs is the bodying of our capacity for
respiration as beings. What we inhale as beings in this
respiration is not physical molecules of air but the
‘life-breath’ of awareness (noos) that in Greek
went by the name of psyche. In doing do we energise
ourselves not with ‘quanta’ of energy alone but with qualia
— qualitative nuances, tones and intensities of
awareness.
“We know by
now a great deal – almost more than we can encompass – about
what we call the body, without having seriously thought about
what bodying is. It is something more and different from
merely ‘carrying a body around with one”. Heidegger
In
its understanding of bodyhood as bodying,
field-dynamic
phenomenology takes forward Heidegger’s project of developing a
new phenomenology and a new “fundamental ontology” of bodyhood.
The term ‘ontology’ comes from the Greek ontos – being.
Ontology is the science of beings and of Being as such.
Awareness can no more be considered a product of any bodily
phenomena we happen to be aware of than can Being or is-ness be
considered a product of particular beings. To paraphrase Sartre,
the Being of Awareness is the Awareness of Being. Being as such
however, is no actual thing, no particular being that is. In
this sense it is Non-being. But Non-being, however, is not a
word denoting an empty void. It consists of infinite
potentialities of being that have reality within awareness, and
exist as potential forms and figurations, patterns or gestalts
of awareness. The ‘void’ is actually a plenum, fullness or
pleroma – not empty or undifferentiated but a
hyperdifferentiated field of potential patterns of awareness. A
‘being’ that emerges from this plenum is essentially a
particular figuration or field-pattern of awareness,
one that by its very nature configures its own patterned
field of awareness. It is the former that constitutes the
sensed body of a being and the latter its sensory
environment or Umwelt. But it is only through resonance
with the sensed body of other beings – their own field-pattern
of awareness — that it is able to sense and perceive them as
bodies in its environment. It is this field-resonance between
“sensed bodies” that I believe constitutes the essence of
“bodily sense”. Field-patterns of awareness are not fixed
perceptual, conceptual or linguistic patterns. They are
patterned tonalities and intensities of awareness, constituting
different sensed bodily textures and densities of awareness.
This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the Body without Organs,
composed of vibratory regions, each of which is a “zone of
intensity”.
“Some of
the body’s vibrations resonate with its surroundings and are
amplified. Some clash with them and are muffled. Resonant
vibrations are identified as belonging to the baby in some more
essential way than clashing ones. “Good baby!” They come back
amplified into virtues (the genealogy of morals).” Brian Massumi
The mistake of medicine is to
confuse the sensed body with the physical body, the patient’s
felt meaning or sense of their dis-ease with felt sensations of
discomfort, or sense-perceptible signs of organic disease. The
mistake of Freudian psychoanalysis lies in reducing the sensed
body and sensual qualities of awareness to the body’s senses and
sensual desires, thereby reducing sense and sensuality as such
to its sexual significance. The mistake of physical science lies
in ignoring the immense potential of the sensed body as a medium
of Fundamental Research into the Inner Universe. By this I mean
the use of felt sense and ‘field resonance’ to obtain direct
feeling cognition of the inwardness and inner relatedness of
natural phenomena, and the inwardness and inner relatedness of
current scientific concepts themselves.
In
the Inner Universe, concepts themselves have an energetic
reality and, as Deleuze recognised, an unbounded inwardness — an
inexhaustible dimension of potential significance. Both
philosophy and the physical sciences see truth as a function of
verbal propositions – a truth solely determined by their
capacity to represent verifiable actualities.
Propositions about the actual necessarily make use of concepts,
or seek to define or refine them in terms of other concepts. But
no set of theoretical propositions about reality can fully
express or exhaust the meaning of the very concepts it employs
or explores in those propositions. This is particularly true of
the ‘body’ concept, a concept largely unquestioned and
unexplored not only in medical science but in philosophy,
psychology and physics itself. To get inside any concept means
to sense its inwardness, to feel its singular multiplicity of
inner senses in a bodily way. To explore and express the deeper
dimensions of the body concept is only possible through a
deepened experience of our own sensed bodies. This in turn is
impossible without a deepened resonance with at least one other
body, for the sensed body is inseparable from our sense of other
bodies. Dyadic field resonance is the basic principle of
Fundamental Research, a form of qualitative,
field-phenomenological research whose sole instrument or
organon is the human organism — the sensed body.
The sensed body is an inherently motile and
shape-shifting body – an amorphous body of awareness with its
own substantiality with an unlimited capacity for metamorphosis,
comparable to a jelly-like blob. When our sensed body is in
resonance with another body – whether a human body or that of a
rock, plant, or animal, an organic or inorganic structure,
mountain range or cloud formation, molecular or atomic structure
– it tends to take on the sensual shape and substantiality
characteristic of that other body, sensing this as a bodily
shape and substantiality of awareness. It is because of this
that we are capable of creating perceptual images of other
bodies in our dreams, for dreaming is our primary way of giving
perceptible form to those shapes and qualities of awareness
which make up our sensed body. In dreaming these other bodies
however, it is as if the part of our body or blob of awareness
that has taken on their shape becomes severed from the main body
of this blob, and takes on an independent life of its own. The
same thing happens when our awareness gets drawn into something
in everyday life. When we read a book, part of our awareness
goes into the book and takes on the shape of its language. That
is to say, part of our sensed body — our Blob — goes into its
mould. What happens however, if the portions of our awareness
that go into things and get moulded by them — not just books but
the media in general, everyday concerns, thoughts and emotions,
situations and projects etc. — get severed from the main body of
the Blob or the main Blob of awareness that constitutes our
essential bodyhood? Then we get the so-called 'mind-body' split
— which is nothing else than a split between elements and
portions of our body of awareness. Arnold Mindell’s term
‘dreambody’ suggests, without in any way explicating it, the
implicit relation between dreaming on the one hand and
‘bodying’ on the other. For these are the two fundamental
processes by which we give form to the shifting shapes,
qualities and intensities of awareness that constitute our
sensed body and the intensional space, semiotic space or
‘dreamspace’ it inhabits and shapes. The latter is a resonant
space of potential meaning and significance, potential bodily
action and interaction, potential speech and movement, potential
percepts and potential concepts.
Diagram 2 represents the dyadic field of two
bodies in a state and space of resonance that they experience.
The latter is experienced as a consensual extensional space of
‘aroundness’ (the overlapping white circles). The inner
relatedness of the two bodies within this space however, is
mediated by the sensed ‘withinness’ of their own bodies (the
shaded area within the white circle) which leads into a sensed
dimension of ‘unbounded interiority’ – the shaded area
surrounding the white circles. The latter is an extensional
representation of the intensional or potential space within
which all actual extensional spaces, including those of our
dreams, open up. Represented extensionally, however, this
dimension of unbounded inwardness appears, paradoxically, to
surround the extensional spaces that open up within it. And this
is indeed how it is sometimes sensed mystically – as the
noumenal ‘behindness’ of the extensional spaces and sensory
phenomena ‘around’ us, as a depth dimension of inward
awareness that leads into a wider more all-embracing
sphere or field of awareness. The sensed body or dreambody is
indeed also the ‘inner body’ of the shaman, who enters the
higher spheres of the ‘spirit world’ to rescue or retrieve the
souls of others. How? Not by ‘leaving’ their body in extensional
space but precisely by going further down into its own
sensed interiority, its intensional inwardly unbounded
‘soul-space’.
Diagram 2
Whilst our sensed body has an unlimited shape-shifting potential
for what Deleuze and Guattari call “Becoming-other” — allowing
what we sense and how we feel to transform our felt, bodily
sense of who we are – this very capacity is crippled by a
capitalist culture and economy in which personal identity,
including body-identity is treated as private property. In this
economy and culture ‘Becoming-Other’ takes the form of
purchasing of new part-identities in the form of commodities and
their brand-images and identities. ‘Self-actualisation’ and the
fulfilment of ‘Human Potential’ thus comes down to the
individual’s actual or potential earning and buying power. The
purchase of some stylish new car or piece of clothing makes the
consumer ‘feel’ other — more confident, independent, mature or
‘successful’ — irrespective of whether they are or have
become such. Becoming-Other through the sensed body is
reduced to “Feeling Other” through changing the outer face of
the physical body with clothing or cosmetic surgery, altering
its brain chemistry with designer pharmaceuticals or adding
appendages to it in the form of technological gadgetry. You’re
“worth it” after all. Despite all prosthetics, however, the
bottom line is that the body is essentially an economically
prostituted commodity. Its only recognised potential is its
labour power, its only recognised value the market value of that
labour power. Its only recognised standard of ‘health’ is its
capacity to ‘function’ as an instrument of labour. As a result,
the inner structure and dynamics of the sensed body become
rigidified — isomorphic with the physical body, corporate body
and the body politic — with the ‘head’ as leader and manager in
control of the rest of the body as functioning instrument.
Individuals can no longer distinguish between their own sensed
dis-ease, physical sensations or diagnosable medical symptoms.
The function of medicine and psychiatry in this system is to
police the sensed body by medicalising and medicating all
physical and psychological expressions of the deep dis-ease
resulting from the limitation of its creative potential. Medical
science, based on an unquestioned concept of bodyhood, provides
the ideology for a high-tech battle against deep dis-ease, one
which offers an unlimited source of corporate profits as new
cures are ‘discovered’ for newly diagnosed conditions or
‘disorders’.
Gendlin’s reaffirmation of the epistemological primacy of bodily
sense has profound implications for philosophy and psychology.
It has already found application in a new understanding of
‘psychotherapy’, not as a specialised professional practice but
as a potential we all bear within us to reground ourselves in
our own bodily sense of who we are, how we feel, and what we
desire – and our potential to help others do likewise. But this
regrounding of thinking in a bodily sense and, with it the
potential regrounding of medical science in the sensed body also
has radical cultural, social and political implications. What is
at stake is nothing more or less than the freedom of each and
every individual to Becoming-themselves by Becoming-other. This
means rediscovering not only the innate wisdom of bodily sense
but the innate motility of the sensed body. For freedom is no
abstract spiritual ‘value’ or constitutional ‘right’. We may be
‘born free’ but the embodiment of the freedom we are born with
is impossible if we lose contact with bodily sense and the
sensed body or allow them to be moulded by our social
environment. Freedom, as genuine bodily autonomy and not just
‘freedom of thought’, is freedom from those supposedly
‘automatic’ bodily responses that are associated with the
actualities of the ‘autonomic’ nervous system.
“Becoming-other is an exponential expansion of the body
repertory of responses. Not only does each stimulus evoke an
indeterminate number of pragmatic responses, but there is a
change in the body’s mode of response. The body is capable
of selecting any one of these responses, but it does not have
to. It envelops a growing number of bifurcating futures in
each of its presents, but none is preordained.” Brian Massumi
What Gendlin calls “Focusing” is a procedure designed to restore
our capacity to choose between different possible ways of
expressing ‘felt sense’. This means using learning to
‘resonate’ back and forth between felt sense and its different
possible formulations in language. To find the fitting or
resonant words requires that we feel how ‘resonant’ each
possible formulation is with our overall bodily sense
of the meaning that it seeks to express, not just how resonant
it is with a specific thought, emotion or perception. Focussing
is one dimension of what I term ‘Doubling’, since to practice it
requires a type of double or dual awareness – of words and the
wordless, formulated and unformulated, verbal and bodily
dimensions of sense or meaning. Doubling has another dimension
however, and that is the capacity to choose between different
possible ways of embodying felt sense in our
moment-to-moment decisions, deeds and bodily demeanour. This
means learning to resonate back and forth between felt needs,
impulses and intents on the one hand, and different bodily ways
of expressing or enacting them. To do so requires that we focus
on how resonant a particular mode of bodily expression is with
our sensed body as a whole, — not just how resonant it is
with a specific sensation, emotion or impulse. Focussing
requires an act of restraint – a capacity to suspend automatic
use of habitual words and phrases, and choose language in
resonance with bodily sense. Doubling also requires restraint –
the capacity to suspend automatic or habitual modes of bodily
self-expression, hold back habitual ‘autonomic’ impulses, and
choose actions or responses in resonance with the sensed body.
Only in this way do we become truly free and autonomous in deed
as well as word – for by learning to act in resonance with our
felt body as a whole we learn to respond to our felt self
as a whole and to body that self.