immanence

Part Two of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene (open access to all) outlines a system of “bodymindfulness” practice rooted in the mindfulness meditation system of Shinzen Young, but extended triadically to account for the active nature of living. Here are a couple of comments on and tweaks to that system, which I’ll refer to as pre-G practice, short for “process-relational ecosophy-G” practice. (Note: This is my post for Orthodox/Byzantine Good Friday… Now I will go listen to my favorite Vespers, Michael Fortounatto’s on Ikon Records (IKO 9), which I am still awaiting the digital release of. Someone please convince Musica Russica to do that.)

On sitting

Sitting practice is generally thought to be something like the baseline, the exemplar, and perhaps the “gold standard” of meditation practice. Pre-G practice resists that notion.

Sitting is a luxury and a gift. Anyone who can carve out chunks of their day for regular bouts of undisturbed sitting is living a luxury most people can scarcely afford. It is a gift from those who make it possible for the person to do that. It constitutes a baseline only in that it sets up parameters and boundaries within which practice is made easier, rather like a sandbox does for building castles or like piano practice does for live performance. Without it, for many of us, stepping into a life of practice is nearly impossible. But it is also neither the end goal nor the standard within which one’s practice should be evaluated. That standard is life, in the midst of relations with all of the rest of life’s companions, resistances, and exigencies. If sitting is practice, then it is practice for living.

At the same time, there is a way in which sitting practice provides the most accessible opportunity for what can be called “a complete act.” There is nothing missing from it; all of the elements that constitute life itself are present in it.

There is the Firstness of “that which is presencing” — all of the things, the processes, and the relations that make up a moment can be witnessed and noted. Shadowing refers to this dimension of Firstness in terms of the noting of what is, whether it be seemingly external to oneself (sights, sounds, sensations, and so on) or seemingly internal to oneself (thoughts and memories heard or seen in the “mind’s eye,” felt feelings, and so on). We can simply call that Presencing, the Presencing of That Which Is. There is the Secondness of Action, in its encounter with resistance and otherness: in seated meditation practice, this is found in the effort of witnessing. And then there is the Thirdness of Realization, whatever form that takes (visually “mapped,” auditorially “spoken” or “conveyed,” feelingly “moved,” et al.; see here for the technical terms).

Presencing, Action, Realization: these are the experiential correlatives of Peirce’s categories (firstness, secondness, thirdness), Hegel’s dialectics (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), and Gurdjieff’s Law of Three (affirming, denying, reconciling; we can leave aside the differences between these three triads for now). In seated meditation we can think of these as Presencing, Witnessing, and Realization; the first two are sufficient to reveal the third term, which needs no label. Each of them is ultimately a “flow” of relational process, and the realization of that and of how they are so, in the specificity of the moment, makes of sitting practice a (potentially) complete act. There is nothing missing from it.

If there is nothing missing, then the entirety of the world is there, too, which means that everything and everybody is there with you. (That, to my mind, is what Whitehead was getting at in his idea of the “solidarity of the world,” whereby every actual entity presupposes the entire world that is given to it and, in some sense, the entire world, full stop.) As they will be when you get up from your seat (even more so, of course). So make the most of their presence. Experience them in their completeness.

The obverse, the negative, and the solidarity of all things

The pre-G system presents a series of triads that can be contemplated and “activated” as one goes through life. Among them is the triad of becoming, which in its firstness moves from the Void (as I initially called it, encompassing the darkness, silence, and emptiness before the arising of any form) to the Presencing of that which is (seen, heard, felt), in its secondness from the Heart (the tremor, murmur, and flicker at the origin of any action) to the Deed (showing, sounding, touching), and in its thirdness from the Mystery (the unknowability, unspeakability, and immovability that precedes any realization) to the Realization (as mapped, conveyed, and moved in any way). Renamed slightly, this triad of becomings looks like this:

• Emptiness –> Presence (–> Emptiness…)
• Heart –> Deed (–> Heart…)
• Mystery –> Realization (–> Mystery…)

in a continuous cycle of becomings and vanishings. These obverse triads are themselves relational processes, which can be engaged triadically — through the effort of witnessing how they become each other, how they cross the cusp and fold over into each other and into their own disappearance, and so on.

My tweak to this triad is that I now want to acknowledge that both “void” and “emptiness” are in some sense inadequate when conceived as “obverses” of Presencing. This is because there is always something from which “that which is” — that which presences and can be noted, witnessed, and appreciated for what it is — has issued.

If there is always already non-Void, then what is it that’s there? “Heart,” of course: the tremor, murmur, and flicker of what is already affecting us as we begin to notice what’s there. We come to things always already with heart, with soul, with feeling; they are there at the origin of any moment of experience. And insofar as their origin is mysterious, “mystery” is also always there — a mystery that is already infused, thick, heartfelt, and non-empty.

Emptiness, in this sense, is more a matter of realization — the realization of the lack of self-sufficiency of anything in particular — than it is the origin of anything.

This is of course the core Buddhist insight. And it is always important to remember that by “emptiness” Buddhists don’t mean nihil, nothing; they mean something more like absolute openness. There is a way, then, that emptiness, heart, and mystery meld together into a resonant experience of felt openness, one in which we feel, in the depths of our being, the radical solidarity (and, at the same time, non-solidity) of all things in their true nature — as arising (or arisen) and passing (or destined to pass) and feeling relational process-entities, which twist and bend and seek and suffer just as we do in the wind of a process reality that is real and tangible, yet utterly ungraspable and unencompassable. And that is the ground of our being.

I hesitate to give that “melding” (of emptiness, heart, and mystery) a single-word name, as I suspect that any labels would tread on territory that’s already overlabeled (with terms, for instance, like Soul, G-d, Atman, Brahman, Rigpa, and many others).