Introducing some Vocabulary

Searchlessness, Responsiveness, Streaming, Patterns of Interaction, Conductivity, Searchless Responsiveness

Searchlessness

Searchlessness is the gnosis that there is no intrinsic existential problem, whatever is happening. This implies that there is also no intrinsic existential problem if something else were to happen. No existential problem does not entail that there may not be preferences for something else to happen, and so practical action may become oriented toward transformation of what is happening without the root motivation of transformation as an attempt to escape from an existential problem.

Responsiveness

Responsiveness is a surrender into participatory play with what is happening. Play here as in the play of sunlight on the water, not as in play a fun little game. Responsiveness is never a prescribed [pre-scribed: written before] response, because what happens, in its totality, always has fresh and unknown aspects. This is not a call to be utterly unique in every moment; in complete allowance of the spontaneous possibility of unique response, responsivity may follow well-known paths, but it is never fixed to such paths, and is free to leave them at any moment.

Streaming

Streaming is the first aspect of responsiveness. It is feeling, without limitation, all that is happening. Feeling here is as in finger tips feeling, the maintaining of responsiveness in everyday life by intimate sensory contact such that the distinction between “what is sensed” and “sensation” elides. Streaming could be considered as the heart’s, and the whole-body’s, existential finger-tips-feeling of what happens.

Patterns of Interaction

Patterns of Interaction are the second aspect of responsiveness. They are participatory possibilities. Conceptual understandings can provide orientation for patterns of interaction; rituals can provide opportunity for discovering unfamiliar bodily forms of engagement. Ritual and concepts are two examples of scaffolds for patterns of interaction to “grow into” and become fully inhabited. Consider learning the etiquette of a dinner party: at first, there may be verbal instruction. Then, there may be participation in the ritual. At some point, the world of the dinner party is a world which can be fluidly participated in. Patterns of interaction reveal world-and-self-possibilities, ways of being that arise as forms of participation.

Conductivity

Conductivity is the third aspect of responsiveness. It is the full inhabiting of patterns of interaction. The sense of being a body-separate-from-world dissolves into unitary body-and-world; the texture of existence becomes that of responsive interaction, which is neither of the body nor the world, but of the relationship between them. Relationship here is an external view; the sense of relating dissolves with full inhabitation, just as in ordinary life, we don’t “relate” to our hands.

Searchless Responsiveness

Searchless Responsiveness is responsiveness which imposes no existential agenda on what is happening. What is happening, including the world, apparent others, body, emotions, thoughts, sensations, and spiritual experience, participate in the play of responsive action, just as in sexual play with a lover, response happens spontaneously as part of the participatory interactive event.

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Comparison with Other Vocabularies

I can only speak of teachings I have a modicum of familiarity with. The below are all very distinct traditions, each with numerous sub-traditions. I mean to evoke enough to serve as reference points for those familiar with these traditions; they are certainly different flavors. Each tradition has a distinct “one taste”.

Buddhism

Searchless Responsiveness has resonances with the Nyingma school of Vajrayana Buddhism. Searchlessness could be related to dharmakaya and responsiveness could be related to sambhogakaya, within the perspective where nirmanakaya is considered emanation, or the way the world concretely comes into being as a participatory, but not entirely controlled or controllable, event. Searchless Responsiveness could also be analogized as the union of wisdom and compassion, where wisdom here arises from not imposing any notion of truth on the world, but allowing local and transient truth to spontaneously reveal itself as clarity, and compassion is responsive action that arises from intimacy with the circumstances.

Streaming, Patterns of Interaction, and Conductivity could be analogized respectively to dang, rolpa, tsal, which could be defined simply as the emptiness of energy, the energy of energy, and the form of energy. The emptiness of energy is found in the mere feeling without patterning; the energy of energy in the recognition of patterning; and the form of energy in the full inhabiting of patterning.

Hinduism

In Trika Shaivism, the inseparability of all-pervasive and unmoving consciousness (Shiva) and ever-moving play of forms (Shakti) can be taken as experiential pointers to the fullest experience of searchlessness and of responsiveness, respectively.

Taoism

In Taoism, searchless responsiveness could be likened to wu wei.