Conductivity/Responsiveness

Engagement in the Lifeworld: the dwelling constructed from the Feeling of Being.

Responsiveness is complete participation with what happens. Here, we look at three indivisible aspects of responsiveness, as an aide to cultivating responsiveness: The Feeling of Being, Lifeworlds (both when inhabited and when absent), and Engagement.

Cultivating responsiveness is not an improvement over anything. For some it is an interesting project, for some not. Responsiveness as a search has unnecessary existential friction due to compulsion to arrive at a particular result. Responsive capability is something that can be practically improved, but need not be, like physical flexibility.

And, if you are searching for searchlessness…well, that is the first thing to relax! Apply recursive levels as useful (searching to relax searching for being without search): being already free from existential bondage is no more than an infinitesimal away.

The Feeling of Being

What is happening is sensation, and perception-affordance (or how sensation is organized into patterns of entities and relationships at a perceptual level, and the possibilities for action that entails: classically, snake or rope?)

Perception is created via pattern recognition’s emphasizing (amplifying), de-emphasizing (diminishing), and putting aside (nullifying) of sensory experience, creating perception out of sensation.

Sensation-perception-affordance pattern recognition has momentum…this is perhaps most evident in “hidden picture” puzzles, where our momentum of perception is used to “trick” us into unseeing, for example, a witch’s broom “hidden” in the shape of a cloud.

Living as the momentum of sensation-perception-affordance pattern recognition entails a loss of contact with what is happening, and so is a degraded basis for responsiveness. It is reaching out the hand to touch a leaf, not noticing that it has become dry, unintentionally using incongruent force, causing the desiccated leaf to crumble.

When the momentum of pattern recognition is relaxed, then the feeling of being is nakedly present.

Scaffolding Exercise: 

Sit and simply feel, in all the senses, inner and outer, traditionally defined or not, releasing any emphasis, de-emphasis, or putting aside of any sensation.

Sit and appreciate the flux of amplifying, diminishing, and nullifying of sensation. Perhaps even do more of all of these. And even more.

Lifeworlds, Inhabited and Absent

In a house, priorly unarticulated space is carved up into partitions and functions. This is useful and why we built a house. As we live in a house, we more and more come to inhabit it: be familiar with using the structure in our activities of daily living. We know where all the light switches are, how to open each window, how to work the thermostat.

When we build a house, the nature of the environment constrains the structure of houses that can be built. On a river, a houseboat; at sea, a yacht or an oil rig; if in a warring kingdom, a defensible fortress. Not every space is actually available for building a dwelling — relatively recently, in the span of human history, we created Spacelab, in a a location that was not actually available to build a dwelling, until it became so.

The “space” where the “dwelling” of a lifeworld is built is the space of sensation. The dwelling is the emphasis, de-emphasis, and putting aside of sensation alloyed with action and annealed to create perception-affordances. The more we rest in the feeling of being, the more “materials” for our house are available. The house constructed is an alloy of perception-affordances, annealed into a “hardened” pattern of interaction.

We are often dwelling inside complex patterns of interaction. Consider our activity in a house when we are inhabiting the pattern of “person who lives in the house”, “handyman repairing the house”, “photographer for glossy architecture magazine”. In each case, we see and interact with the house in different ways.

When a pattern of perception-affordance is fully inhabited, we can confidently make use of it. Each fully inhabited lifeworld is a pattern granting possibilities of powerful responsiveness.

Pattern recognition, then, can be either a source of unwanted momentum or a source of power. This is true of all momentum: when it is going the direction you want, it is powerful; when not, it may be anti-powerful, or leading in a fruitful unexpected direction.

As in a race car, their are many attributes that affect our momentum:

• Navigation: are we “steering” into the most appropriate lifeworld?

• Acceleration: how quickly and powerfully can we fully engage in a lifeworld?

• Breaking: how quickly can we release our engagement in a lifeworld and enter into a new lifeworld?

• Traction: can we dynamically transform our current lifeworld into another one in a way that preserves momentum usefully?

• Courage: do we have confidence when we lose traction, that is, we are in a liminal space where there is no lifeworld that is actually available, any lifeworld is absent? Can we respond confidently when there in no pattern recognition?

Scaffolding Exercises

Master things. A diverse array of things. Cultural capabilities, relational capabilities, mental capabilities, spiritual capabilities. Presume everything is a skill issue.

Become exquisitely sensitive to every whim. The faintest sensation of desire is a portal guiding you as to which lifeworld to step into for the moment.

Find opportunities to be disoriented, to not know what's going on. Relax, and participate.

Engagement

Dwelling in a lifeworld, we can either fully participate in the pattern of interaction, or merely allow the patterns of interaction to remain as potential. Inhabiting a lifeworld projects patterns of perception and affordances on what happens; when there is full engagement in an affordance, then action happens.

Affordances can be apprehended without engagement. Then, they merely come or go, as the slightest impulse to act, below the action threshold of movement.

“Engagement” emphasizes the interaction, as opposed to the nominal goal, and evokes the possibility of non-engagement. We can never control what the results of our engagements are.

Scaffolding Exercises

If you are going to do something, do it with every fiber of being. 

If you are not going to do something, let every fiber of your being relax from engagement with that possibility.

Now, half-ass.

Full Conductivity

Engage and relax
dwelling in the lifeworlds which coalesce and dissolve
out of the space of the feeling of being.

Scaffolding Exercise

This can only be described symbolically.

Feel with the heart, as a tactile organ, to infinity, without limitation, by surrendering the personal heart to the all-pervasive Heart that is already coincident with all space, which is feeling-space.

Breathe from the all-pervasive energy above the crown of the head deep into the body. The energy available for engagement is always there.

Be moved by the feeling-heart-space and the all-pervasive energy to responsive action.