Hilarie's Response to Lavender

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#644

In “Bodily Felt Sensing,” Lavender calls bodily felt sense the “smallest indivisible microunit of experiential process.” The fact that this unit still contains (indivisably) mind and body is, I think, pretty revolutionary. I wonder if part of the reason it’s so easy to succumb to Cartesian dualism is because we, as thinking and feeling bodies, have no appreciable access to the mechanisms of connection between mind and body. We are too close to them to be able to perceive them. Instead of conceptualizing them as one as a result of this, we think of them as (somewhat) separable. As I struggle with why exactly we seem to choose dualism (and it may be much less natural than conditioned by history), it strikes me that it’s a false feeling, a false sense. In this sense, we don’t connect the parts of our own being in a real way. Lavender notes that “the content [of felt sense] may be vague at first,” which I think is connected. Gendlin calls BFS “an internal aura,” which is helpful for me in trying to think through this connection conundrum as well as thinking through felt sense itself.

Perhaps relatedly, Lavender’s list of things (like thinking) that felt sense includes but isn’t defined by reads to me almost like religious or spiritual literature (Hafiz, Ram Dass, Patanjali, Buddha, maybe even the Talmud). The “is not..yet” construction is oddly profound and strikes a chord with my (complicated) religious and (less complicated) spiritual sensibilities.

In the “Interaction” post, the idea of “human being” (gerund) is a really useful one for me as I try to trace the particular connections between The word “interbeing” is harder to hold onto (which maybe Gendlin, with his moveable meanings, would say is fine); I keep thinking of it as related to “intermediate” rather than “intersection,” and losing the valence of continuing connection. Keeping the ideas of “living-in the world, and living-with others” front and center as I think through this helps with the confusion. More peripherally, perhaps, I’m interested in the hyphenation – does that privilege the preposition in a way it wouldn’t without the hyphen?

[Sondra Perl]

#670

Nice point about the hyphen that may be trying to do something that our separated language doesn’t account for.

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