felt sense response 3/5/2014

From Lavender, “Bodily Felt Sensing”Sills describes BFS as a kind of “global perception of the whole of arising process in any one moment of emergent experience – a sense of “all of it.” All those sensations, emotional tones, mental constructs, symbols and images that compose our self-constellations are directly experienced as an embodied and coherent whole.”

This description also, I believe, corresponds to what I usually call “intuition,” which is itself something I describe as an explanatory function rather than a function of its own. That is, I usually think of intuition as a word to explain something that doesn’t seem to have an explanation; it isn’t magic.  An experience of “sensing it all” and having meaning—something to new to say–arise from that feeling seems, to me, to be another way of describing intuition, because just saying “intuition” is unproductive in a classroom. It seems related to the clich “trusting your gut.”

In both of the Lavender articles, she cites Madison, G to describe “felt sensing as a “temporary wave, from the sea of being.” I think this is where it could be thought of as spiritual for those interested in non-western philosophical traditions that are often translated as “spiritual” practices in the West (I am thinking, specifically, of yoga and Buddhism).

As we move “forward” in new media and new ways of collaborating in knowledge “communities”—it’s worth questioning, in a separate discussion, what we may legitimately call a community, knowledge or other–the concept of “interbeing” seems useful.

In another class, I have been thinking of a phenomenon for which interbeing may also prove to be of some theoretical use. Some students in another class have taken an interest in theorizing violence. I think this may be a productive activity when I consider how much violence and threats of violence control our everyday lives, our relationships with government, natural resources, and the origin of many of the commodities we use. There, we frequently discuss the violent resource-grabbing, corruption, and population displacement surrounding the origins of various minerals in the global south. In the way violence is discussed it is usually carried out by various echelons of aggressor attacking or threatening, to various degrees, everyone but those who pay for their services. We do not discuss, in class—perhaps it is less germane to the object of the course—the mutuality, or “interbeing,” of violence. That is, the violence that is done to the aggressor by the act and encouragement of aggression remains under-theorized. The only writer I’ve known to address it is Fanon in his case studies. I am less interested, personally, in theorizing violence, but I would like to think about the rhetoric that separates aggressor-act-victim into neat categories when our conversations suggest, in other contexts, that mutual exclusion, in the social world, is a fiction.

What does this have to do with writing and meaning? Lavender’s article on Gendlin’s “Interaction First” takes an interesting turn toward the end. Her description of an instance of focusing between a therapist and her client rested on the emergence of a word whose meaning carried a mutual resonance that made it more significant than it might be in another context. Lavender doesn’t draw too heavy a connection between her earlier claims about “interbeing” and the anecdote that follows, but I gather that the mutual resonance of “manageable—unmanageable” enabled the therapist to share the burden, through language/meaning, of a physical-emotional weight—something that would be harder to describe and defend if she’d tried to found such a claim on a common subject/object duality. I wonder about neighborhood/mutual friend circle/work vocabularies in which shared terms deepen in mutually resonating meaning through shared experiences, affinities, and avoidances. I mean, I wonder what it would look like to do this, not through social science/linguistics (?), probably the typical researching discipline, but through this concept of “interbeing,” in which the present is being informed “freshly” by these resonances, experiences, meanings, and so on, all holistically shared. I suppose this would be a phenomenological approach. Moreover, I suspect it’s been done and that I just haven’t read about it.