One of the things modern humans aren’t very good at is being fully present in a given moment — being here now, as Ram Dass famously put it — and remaining so in the midst of the activities, distractions, and challenges of the day. Meditation apps and mindfulness teachers can train you to do that while sitting with your eyes closed, but being fully present while feeding your kids, running to catch a bus, reading a blog post, or arguing with your boss is not as easy. (Okay, I don’t scream often, so the heading of this blog post is a bit over the top. But sometimes I’d like to.)
One can ask what it means to be “fully present.” My quick answer is: with all of one’s capacities. If there’s one thing that process-relational philosophy, considered as a way of living, intends to help you with, it’s that. As napkin scribble #8 puts it: The present is all that there is; how you respond to it is all you can do. Philosophy-as-a-way-of-life is the theme of the second third of my book Shadowing the Anthropocene, and its core question is “How can I best engage this moment in its full range of possibilities?” (followed by “How can I get better at that?”). The other parts of the book deal with the reasons for doing that — for instance, to lessen the suffering occurring around us as the Anthro/Capitalocene unfolds — but here I focus only on the method.
(The history of the way-of-life tradition within philosophy, at least in the West, is the focus of an excellent new book by Australian philosophers Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life. The book is a groundbreaking contribution to the “PWL” field.)
This post will provide a synopsis of two things: (1) the initial method I present in Shadowing the Anthropocene for cultivating presence in all of one’s capacities (a method built on the work of Buddhist mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young, and presented here in its first Peircian “triad,” without the apophatic or “quaking” variation you find in the book), and (2) the way I’ve developed it since then to make it congruent with G. I. Gurdjieff’s three-body model of the human bodymind (or “machine,” as he sometimes called it, long before Félix Guattari adopted that term for more proactive uses). The post ends with a brief and simple “presencing exercise” that is intended to help with the task of being fully here, now.
The Shadowing triad: noting, doing, realizing
The second part of Shadowing, “Engaging the Act,” begins by laying out Shinzen Young’s Vipassana-based system of identifying and noting what is present in one’s experience. Young distinguishes between sensory inputs — seeing, hearing, and feeling (the latter includes touching, smelling, and the other felt senses) — and between “external” and “internal” sources of those things, where “external” things are “in the environment” and “internal” things are those that occur within your mind and/or body. He further identifies “flow” states, “rest” states, and some other things we won’t get into. (See here and here for an introduction.)
All of that provides a “gameboard” of things for the mindfulness practitioner to “note” as they arise within your experience: i.e., “seeing out” (noting what you see around you), “seeing in” (noting what you see in your “mind’s eye”), seeing flow, seeing rest; hearing out, hearing in, et al. The practitioner can attend selectively to one or more of these, or to combinations of them (such as “focus out,” which involves noting all externally based sensory phenomena, or “focus on flow,” which does the same with “flow” states). Or to everything that arises, noting it as it does, without judging or letting it affect you in any way (which is Vipassana meditation in a more or less pure form).
It’s hard enough to do that while sitting with your eyes closed; in “life” it’s even harder, but practice on the cushion makes the latter easier. With the regular and repeated practice of mindful observation of all of these things, one improves one’s capacity for concentration (attention), sensory clarity (knowing what’s going on), and equanimity (not getting carried away with what’s going on). That’s the claim, and there are centuries of anecdotal evidence, and growing scientific evidence (e.g., here and here), suggesting that it works.
My variation on Shinzen’s system of distinctions is guided by Charles S. Peirce’s triadism. Its intent is to give full due not only to what can be noticed, but also to what can be done (through action) and what can be realized (as the synthetic result of action and interpretation). It’s not that these aren’t possible in Shinzen’s system; it’s just that they are not as directly acknowledged as an event-based ontology (like process-relational ontology) calls for.
I take Peirce’s “firstness,” in this context, to refer to the simple noting of what is there (as in traditional, seated meditation practice), “secondness” to the effort felt in acting in relation to what is there, and “thirdness” to the realization of the action in oneself and in the world — realization that is experienced as the recognition of change and as felt and understood “meaning.” That gives us two further layers onto the first one, resulting in three layers of the three sensory modalities:
- 1. Noting (seeing, hearing, feeling)
- 2. Acting (showing, sounding, touching)
- 3. Realizing (mapping, speaking/conveying, moving)
The parenthetical terms are the technical terms given to each of the three sensory modalities. The other coordinates — internal (“seeing-in,” “showing-in,” et al.), external (“seeing-out,” “showing-out,” et al.), flowing (“seeing-flow”), resting (“seeing-rest”), and so on — remain as possibilities for all of these.
Working with this “triadized” (or three-dimensionalized) set, however, I have found that feeling states — emotionality, affectivity — could easily be given short shrift. As I understand Shinzen’s system, there’s a good reason for its de-emphasis. This is that people tend to become overly identified with their feeling states, so there’s great value in redirecting attention first to basic sensory experience — what is seen, what is heard, what is felt — and, secondly, to “unpacking” emotions by distinguishing what they are made up of, which is always images (things seen inwardly), sounds (especially voices heard internally), and bodily felt feelings. Once the images and sounds are identified and detached from the rest, what’s left is bodily felt feelings — “feel in,” as Shinzen calls it — and these can be localized in your body. (Try it and see.) This makes it possible for us to work toward “defusing” the compound power that feelings have over us when they are packed in with memories (or people, situations, etc.) and the various ideas (images, narrations, voices, et al) that come with them. It makes it easier to gain clarity on what is happening in our experience, especially in highly emotive states.
This is all good for mindfulness practice, and could provide a lifetime of work for most of us. But for my Peircian triadic practice, with its interest in doing and realization (and therefore living out one’s ideals), I felt I wanted to experiment with a different way of carving up the territory.
The three-body machine: or, the society of mind
Specifically, I wanted to bring in G. I. Gurdjieff’s notion of three “brains,” “bodies,” or “centers.” The initial distinction in Shinzen’s system between seeing, hearing, and feeling felt a bit artificial to me. Gurdjieff’s distinction is one I’ve found useful in the past, and it also has intriguing neurophysiological parallels. As I explain here, Gurdjieff’s notion, which he proposed in the 1910s, prefigured the “triune brain” model developed by neuropsychologist Paul Maclean in the 1960s. That model has been critiqued and modified since then, but it is still influential in some circles (as shown in Asma and Gabriel’s book The Emotional Mind, which I reviewed here).
According to Gurdjieff, humans in our usual state are not unified “agents.” Each of us, rather, is more like a multiple, modular, complicated, and disunified “machine” consisting of systems and subsystems that interact chaotically and inefficiently. (This isn’t too different from how cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky much later described “the society of mind.”) “We” have desires, thoughts, impulses, and capacities, but these are misaligned with each other, and that misalignment is usually covered over by the illusion of unified selfhood. When we say “I,” we hardly know which “I” is speaking. So Gurdjieff trained his students to learn to say “I” with commitment and full presence, by which he meant physical, emotional, and mental presence. Work on developing that presence was a core part of the “Gurdjieff work.”
This distinction between three “brains,” “bodies,” or “centers” — the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual — is a key to Gurdjieffian practice. While Gurdjieff often spoke of humans as “three-brained beings,” he also spoke of as many as seven “centers”: the physical includes the moving, the instinctive, and the sexual centers; and the emotional and intellectual each have their “higher” counterparts, “higher emotional” and “higher intellectual.” But for most purposes, it’s sufficient to refer to three. These can themselves be readily correlated with Maclean’s “reptilian complex” (moving-instinctive-sexual “brain”), “paleomammalian complex” or “limbic system” (emotional brain), and or “neomammalian” or “neocortical” (intellectual brain), though neuroscientists today would tell you that the references to reptiles and mammals should be taken loosely, if at all.
So how do we incorporate awareness of each of these three “brains” in the moment-to-moment activity of machinic living?
Simple presencing practice
The short answer is: it takes effort and time. But certain practices can help. Here’s one.
The practice to be described uses affirmative phrases as a point of concentrated attention, and at the same time as an opportunity for a “scan” of oneself: one’s senses (seeing, hearing, touching/sensory feeling), one’s feelings (emotional affectivity), and one’s knowing (mental or intellectual activity). The terminology reflects the different sensory or perceptual fields: it includes the physical-sensory triad (“I see,” “I hear,” “I touch,” all of which in combination can become “I sense”), the emotional (“I feel”), and the mental-intellectual (“I know”). Together, these add up to “I am.”
But the use of “I” makes this more of a focused, intentional act — it is not so much a matter of noting what’s there (as in Vipassana practice) as it is of asserting the noting of what’s there. In an ultimate sense, the assertion is of course not really “mine”; it is assertivity itself, action, the immanent flow of reality as it becomes “a life,” but it is what it is “only then, when I am” (as Gurdjieff put it). This makes it an effort of attention against resistance. (For Gurdjieff, resistance plays an important function; the heart of his method is often described as “conscious labor and intentional suffering.”)
The second part of each phrase adds a kind of reversal — “I see, and am seen,” “I hear, and am heard,” and so on — so that I am recognizing not only what I am sensing, feeling, and knowing, but how the world is sensing, feeling, and knowing me back (my body, my presence, my action). There is a Merleau-Pontian, chiasmic intent in this, an effort to note where it is that “I” end and the world begins (or where concrete, specific others begin), and vice versa, and to watch how they interface and interfold over and into each other. This is something not necessarily found in many forms of mindfulness practice, though in Shinzen it is found in his concept of “flow.”
There are two forms of this presencing exercise. The first is solitary, and simple. It is this.
Solitary practice (speak, feel, and think each line for the count of at least one breath, or potentially for as long as it takes to feel it in the intensity of its full meaning):
I see, and am seen.
I hear, and am heard.
I touch, and am touched.*
I feel, and am felt.
I know, and am known.
I am. You are.
Here we arrive in presence together.
The first three lines are sensory, and refer to the physical body. As you speak each phrase, note all of what is included in each of the sensory experiences of seeing, hearing, and touching (including interoception as well as smell and taste, if you wish). I’ve added an asterisk at the end of the third phrase to indicate that you could add a fourth here, which is a composite of the first three: “I sense, and am sensed.” Since each of the sensations is rich, this fourth phrase would allow for a collective “gathering together” of all the senses.
The next phrase, “I feel,” refers to the emotional body, that is, to the felt character of one’s affectivity and emotionality at the given moment. If you have difficulty sensing that, it’s helpful to imagine it located in the front part of your upper torso, i.e., around the chest, heart, and solar plexus areas. But ultimately the emotions can be found located in different parts of one’s body: for instance, as tension held in the chest or neck, “emptiness” in the “pit of one’s stomach,” and so on.
The fifth phrase, “I know,” refers to the “intellectual body,” or the mental space, which can be imagined as present in one’s head or behind the eyes. This offers an opportunity to “collect” together all that one knows (“I know”) and that could be known about you (“and am known”) in the given space of the moment. By that, of course, I don’t mean a long list of everything you could possibly “know,” which could take a lifetime to recount, but a kind of “quick but deep scan.” (More on that below.)
The sixth puts these all together: “I am,” followed by a recognition of others who may be with me, or in my vicinity, or simply those who also are: “You are.” And the seventh brings them here, into the moment as it is collectively or intersubjectively experienced. Every moment is an arrival; treating it that way gives it a measure of its own dignity.
Each of the statements above — each sentence, each phrase — can be voiced out loud or voiced internally. As this is done, each should be considered in the depth of its meanings, which could take a moment (for instance, a single, slow breath per sentence) or several. Or each could be turned into a lengthier contemplation.
Considering each in the “depth of its meanings” might mean something like this. The statements “I see,” “I hear,” and “I touch” could mean noting everything that I see (looking around, or at least moving one’s eyes within the field of vision) and hear (all sounds) and touch (all bodily sensations), both outside of me and in my mind’s eye, mind’s ear, and mind’s body. The statements “I am seen/heard/touched” can involve recognizing that there are others around me who are seeing, hearing, and touching or sensing me. These may include actual humans or other animals in my vicinity, with eyes and ears and bodies more or less like mine. They may be eyes and ears I don’t myself see and hear — satellites in the sky, the billions of organisms living inside me, the eyes and ears of the world around me in all its unencompassable plurality, the eyes of ancestors, of descendants, and of the nonhuman intelligences religious and folkloric traditions speak of. (The actual shades into the imaginal here, but that’s okay.) There are the eyes through which I see myself, and through which I will see myself tomorrow or ten years from now. (Lest this make you feel paranoid, know that you can look back, speak back, and touch back. The exercise is dialogical in that sense.)
With touching (“I touch”), feeling (“I feel”), and knowing (“I know”), things can get even more interesting. There are of course the multiple bodies of the vibrantly material world, down to the micro-organismic and cellular, if not the subatomic levels, all of which hum and percolate in their own intimate ways, and many of which “touch,” “feel,” and “know” me in ways I can barely imagine. (The same, of course, goes for them barely imagining me.) So this can become an exercise in relating to the world, in whatever form it happens to take for me at the given moment.
The practice can be given as much time as you need in order to feel each affirmation more fully; it can grow to fill the space you give it. But it can also become internalized as a quick “scan,” to be used in the midst of any activity. The point is for it to aid in one’s sense of presence, and for that sense of presence to encompass the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual in their encounter with the world.
While the phrases do not explicitly distinguish between “noting,” “acting,” and “realizing” (the three levels of the “Shadowing triad”), they effectively include them. Since there is direct effort to note certain things, and to expand and deepen what is noted, there is action (“secondness”). For instance, “I hear” is not just said with the intent of hearing one thing, but of hearing all that can be heard; and “I am heard” is intended to capture everything that might be heard of and from me. And with the phrases “I know, and am known,” “I am,” and “You are,” there is an intended level of realization of all that I know and all that can be known of me (in the moment), and of all that I am and that those addressed as “you” are. The final statement, “Here we arrive in presence together,” is intended as kind of intentional realization of effort at “three-body presence” in the world at this moment. If done in a group, it can be all the more meaningful.
That brings us to the second version of this presencing exercise. It is shortened and simplified from the first, but adds concrete reference points — “face,” “voice,” and “presence” (or alternatively “body,” if appropriate) — so as to make it more workable for group use.
Group practice (to be said, felt, and thought collectively, when initiating a group activity that requires “full presence”):
I see your face, and I am seen.
I hear your voice, and I am heard.
I feel your presence, and I am felt.*
Here we arrive in presence together.
The asterisk at the end of the third line indicates a possible variation: “I touch your body, and I am touched,” which could be used if this is appropriate with another person. Or you could add the other lines from the solitary practice: “I feel you,” focusing on emotionality, “I know you,” and so on, without the addition of specific objects (face, voice, body). That of course can get complicated in groups. Or work out your own variations. But the one given above is generically applicable.
With both the solitary and the group practice, once the practice is completed, with a certain amount of “presence” achieved, the goal is to maintain that sense of presence as you move into other, more challenging activities.
If those more challenging activities involve screaming to stop and redirect the world, or, for that matter, listening to the world scream, bellow, howl, or screech, you can now do that with conviction. If, as Yeats said, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, be bad. But do it well.
