Interstitial Final + 3
Some bon mots to clear the palate
On Perception and Attention
Form is the moment-to-moment creative act of differentiating sensation at the millisecond timespan: the predominantly pre-conscious emphasizing, de-emphasizing, and ‘turning off’ of the infinitesimal pixels within the undifferentiated field of sensation to create differentiation.
Perception is the structuring of sensation by action potential, via emphasis, diminishment, and setting aside. See a tree instead of a brown-green color field? Aspects of the color field are structured by potential interaction with the tree.
The felt sense of space is quite malleable. An interesting exercise is to relax into an open space of sensation and then discover if and how allowing attention to flow to a particular sensation distorts spatiality. This distortion can often be consciously relaxed or accentuated.
As attention can deform the phenomenology of space and time, being able to relax default deformations is nice. That accomplished, you can enjoy the aesthetics of deformation which occur of their own accord.
On Non-Duality
“Subjectivity” is the field of sensation. “Objectivity” is the field of affordances. Other phrases for “union of subject and object” might be: Total sensorimotor integration. Integration of perception and action. Integration of body and environment.
We cannot talk of objects-in-themselves: objects are patterns cast from subjectivity. We cannot talk of subjectivity-in-itself: subjectivity is a patterning of content. Subjectivity and objectivity are two aspects of an indissoluble union.
In some contexts, “Emptiness” could be translated as “sensation without pattern”, and “Radiant or Luminous Emptiness” could be translated as “care without pattern in the context of sensation without pattern”. This care is compassion before it coalesces into specific activity.
Realization of non-duality is always in a dualistic context; there is no “non-duality in itself”. Due to engagement in a temporal process, an aesthetic accumulates, often “how the school of the realizer presents non-duality”.
On Worlds and Presence
All truths are visionary truths. When you perceive the world a certain way, you interact according to your vision. “The vision of atoms” is a truth instrumentalized via perceiving the world through atomic theory and the instrumentation of electron microscopes.
Every worldview reveals some affordances for interaction but conceals others. The meaning of this moment can rotate through arising in different worlds; you can taste the relative power of each for this here-and-now. Worldviews are alive, and this rotation changes them.
When there is presence to the totality of all that is happening, then, recognizing all that is happening as “already OK”, the natural inclination is to “play”, such that “already OK” becomes “even better”.
A common and deep tangle: If everything is already fundamentally OK, how can a change be better? Conversely, if a change would be better, how can everything be already fundamentally OK? Let’s try this: In Fundamental OKness there can be Attractive Change.
On Desire and Thought
Presence to the feeling-tone of being provides the most freedom for diverse coalescence of feeling-tone into patterns of free-feeling desire, which flow outward as heart-full interaction.
Grounding the emergence of abstraction in sensation often results in a quiet mind much of the time, because there are no useful abstractions to generate. But when thought does occur, it is fresh and beautiful and useful and fitting the circumstances.
Properly understood, conceptuality is purely generative: each concept is an always re-constructed lens to gaze at an aspect of an always-fresh totality. Conceptuality without fixation is a beautiful second-order sense derivative of the primary senses.