It is this sense of ‘inner understanding and clarity’ that is a marker for awakening of perception. The insight that emerges from awakened perception arises as a core truth or trust.7 But in this case, we are not trusting of any thing, meaning, symbol, image, or dogma that has been handed down to us. Rather, we are trusting in the truth of perception based on transparent participation. To trust, to truth, is to behold. It is a consequence of beginner’s mind, which is based on ‘believing in nothing.’ It is a state of dynamic stillness, of active preparedness to participate, authentically and fully, states of intense clarity that I call still hunting—a phrase that captures the alert, attentive, intentional, dynamic stillness that integrates sensitivity with clarity, awakened feeling with awakened perception. Diana Fosha refers to this as the ‘core state and truth sense:’
Core state refers to an altered state of openness and contact wherein individuals are deeply in touch with essential aspects of their own experience. Experience is intense, deeply felt, unequivocal, and declarative; sensation is heightened, imagery is vivid, focus and concentration are effortless… The affective marker for core state is the truth sense. The truth sense is a vitality affect whose felt sense is an aesthetic experience of rightness, the rightness of one’s experience.
We can think of the cycle of an awakened experience from affect through perception as completing and repeating an ‘arc of transformation,’ as composing and recomposing the transformational self. Fosha writes:
The emotion-based transformational process, unfolding through the directional thrust of emotion, moment to moment kept on a progressive track by vitality affects signaling the operation of recognition processes, describes an arc: A psychoevolutionary perspective at one end is organically linked with aesthetics, spirituality, and the quest for personal truth at the other. The experiential processing of emotions shaped by eons of evolution, naturally culminates in experiences of aliveness, hope, faith, clarity, agency, simplicity, compassion, coherence, and both truth and beauty.
The transformational self no longer relies on a storehouse of old memories and social programming and is no longer interested in the symbolic representation of reality. The transformational self is not a social being and has no interest in either collectivist or theistic attitudes. The transformational self is a fully individuated self, capable of authentic participation with the world. The transformational self is an inter-being, in a participatory ecology with other transforming agents, including non-human beings. The transformational self activates imagination to co-create new possibilities in the participatory field.
These possibilities emerge from the adaptive landscape of all participating agents, from microbe and molecule to planet and quasar. This is something that Carl Gustav Jung only began to understand late in his life; he had relegated the liminal processes of the imagination to the passive expressions of knowing, to collectively shared symbols, archetypes, and myths, and the collective unconscious material of humanity’s deep evolutionary past. Then towards the end of his life, Jung discovered that in the fully individuated self, imagination becomes an instrument of enacting entirely new futures by envisioning new possibilities—a process I have come to know as ‘dreaming one’s self awake’ and have experienced as ‘falling in love with the future.’
I remember Peter Sloterdijk suggesting that meditation came naturally to our ancestors as one or two were sitting silently, on watch - listening intently for nothing in particular as predators could make all kinds of noises and you have to listen for them all...
What kindled my understanding was the "nothing in particular" in that listening. I regard meditating as the activity of thinking, doing and imagining nothing in particular - open stage, maybe.
Transformative self sounds to me like "moving between forms" without being anyone in particular. In transform I'm in between something and nothing and to whatever extent free from the tendency to lean one way or another; to interact I transform into something, usually the one that claims continuity as me. And when contemplating I lean into something to inhabit as good as I can at the time.
Tip-toeing around the incarnated understanding that Reality loves me (and anyone else that understands her, and does so as transform-self) my imagination takes flight: What now is possible!!!
This is not a text.
(paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp this is not a pipe)
It is a fractal action protocol! Full of sentient "gap junctures", little ecstasies of oscillation, an apophatic prayersturbation (Layman Pascall) & an enlivening transvaluator of SAD passions:
ALEGRIA! that which increases our capacity to think and act.(Spinoza), which in your words "activates imagination to co-create new possibilities in the participatory field." these are the seeds that can grow in the next world even if we will never see them bloom.
A process of negation of negation, as Fosha writes, moment to moment kept on a progressive track by vitality affects signaling the operation of recognition processes, which "no longer relies on a storehouse of old memories and social programming and is no longer interested in the symbolic representation of reality".
Something needs to be done with the shit ton of refluxive narrative dysbiosis we call western thought, — like when you kill off all the microflora in your gut and it gives too much free real estate for monologuing pathogens to take over... But your answer is to not kill off the pathogen, but to overwhelm it with other microbes, with other stories. It is not about throwing any of them out. Its about throwing them ALL IN to a compost heap! Where re-search is inseparable from POP-UP conviviality.
I have been reading Eliot's Four Quartets since I was a teenager battling a suffocating trifecta: dictatorship, catholicism and colonial war — reading became my "flow space". Today these fragments arose differently, washed of melancholic pesticides, TRANSVALUATED with beginner mind!!!!
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn.
...
I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
...
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.
...
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
...
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
...
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
What my organism is experiencing in this journey from mind to body to nature, which I sensed would offer a deepening of phenomenological engagement with warm data initiation. Both the composting AND the seeds... the how of Ursula Le Guin's exodological interpelation in "Walking away from Omela". This is "THE Work", a nod to Gurdieff, of rewilding cognition, if we let that work work on us such that we "without thinking" can leave seeds which would not have otherwise been possible, the needed training implicit in this Whitehead fragment (inside my white head) :
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
As you say "sensation is heightened, imagery is vivid, focus and concentration are effortless…"
Dear Bonnitta "Beautiful"!!!!! in Portuguese, this work is dispositionally worth giving the rest of my life for:
“I would not give a fig (FUCK) for the simplicity this side of complexity; but I would give my LIFE for the simplicity the other side of complexity.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Deep gratitude from this MAD Iberian fellow Ex-Temporarian