Recognizing the Nature of States

Familiarization with the free play of perceptual transformation releases the existential friction of incongruence

The Existential Friction of Incongruence

As sensation is transformed into perception, it becomes a way of seeing the world, as cognition (a characterization of the way things are, whether discursive or in the form of responsive behavior in bacteria, plants, and animals) and affordances (the apparent possibilities of action).

Life would be helpless if it had to re-cognize the world in every moment. Many a clam can live a life successful on its own terms with a relatively finite scope of responsive action. The vertebrate world is often a world of greater change, with challenges of responding to seasonality, prey distribution, and social coordination; these changes happen at a broad distribution of temporal scales, from seconds to eons, directions, and magnitudes. When adaptation to change lags too far behind the rate, direction, or magnitude of change, congruence is lost in the responsive interaction between organism and world, to lesser or greater degree.

This lack of congruence creates an existential friction, at root caused by momentum in patterns of interaction which prevent a fluid reorientation of responsive interaction back to congruence, moment-by-moment. This is like surfing a wave: there is no such thing as “perfect congruence” between the surfer and the wave, but pleasure arises when the surfer stays congruent enough with the wave to continue surfing. A loss of congruence (a wipe-out) need not be permanent…there is always the next wave to sync-up with, and restoring the congruence of surfer and wave when it is lost can also be a pleasure.

Transforming Sensation into Pattern

At root, cognizance is pattern recognition. Human discursive thought is a particular type of pattern recognition, with experience labeled and categorized, but the world of clams is just as full of pattern recognition, as part of its fixed patterns of responsive interaction. Sensation is the raw material for interaction, but without pattern recognition, sensation is not the basis for orientation and subsequent action.

What are the fundamental experiential elements whereby sensation, whether external or internal (such as emotional sensation prior to label, the sensation of thought prior to content, and the sensation of preference and desire as pure magnetic pull), whether bodily or apparently not of the body, gets transformed into pattern?

Sensation occurs. The fundamental state of sensation is differentiated without distinction, with all sensation perceived, and no sensation more or less prominent. Differentiation in sensation occurs as a matter of raw sensory input: green is not blue. But, distinction, that green is not blue matters in some way, is not added to sensation. The four foundational perceptual moves that transform sensation into pattern are:

• amplification of sensation. This is seen, for example, when a siren and flashing lights draw sensation away from other sensations. A particular pattern of sensations has been amplified and made prominent.

• diminishment of sensation. This is seen, for example, when a repetitive background noise fades away from awareness.

• putting aside of sensation. This is seen, for example, in those cases when concentration is created by dropping out other sensations from experience.

• relating of sensations to other sensations, whether through time, space, or across sense channels. Hearing speech as meaningful is relating aural sensation across time. Seeing the shape of an object is relating color experience across space to create a boundary. Synesthesia is the relating of sensation across sensory channels; this occurs continuously and need not be dramatic - for example, hearing a synchronized low-pitched rumble changes the experience of seeing a tree fall.

Potential and Kinetic Transformation

These perceptual transformations establish patterns in sensation. These patterns can be useful, beautiful, or incongruent. Every sensory experience has potential to be transformed in all these ways: amplification, diminishment, putting aside, and relating. When this potential is actualized, then the potential has become kinetic, by analogy with how lifting a rock off the ground creates potential energy, and when dropped, the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy.

To allow pattern recognition (cognizance) to remain congruent with the continuous changing of context, there are two extremes we can explore. First, we can become restored to the awareness of potentiality, by allowing all transformation of sensation to remain solely as potential. This is discovered by subtly relaxing the transformative gestures of amplification, diminishment, putting aside, and relating sensations. As this relaxation is prior to any discursive thought, developing this relaxation is a subtle art, similar to learning to relax the body. There are more and more subtle layers of relaxation, and, in this case, any intellectual scaffolding that supports relaxation of perceptual transformation must also be relaxed, until any thought is also experienced solely as sensation.

Congruence is about responsive action. Remaining without perceptual transformation of sensation is the base of congruence, but not the whole picture: a surfer must relax all ideas about what the ocean may do and remain in contact with what it is actually doing, while also feeling their own potentiality for action. Similarly, we can enter fully into kinetic transformation, bringing all the affordances for action fully into play, by fully entering into all the moment-to-moment possibilities of amplification, diminishment, putting aside, and relating of sensation. Again, this is a subtle matter, which can be analogized to the experience of surrendering into a chaotic, dizzying, disorienting free dance in a room full of flashing lights and sound.

When there is both the capability to both allow all sensation to remain without perceptual transformation, and the capability to maximally perceptually transform all sensation, then we can rest in the free play of fluid pattern recognition, a play of sensation and perceptual transformation, without the momentum of fixed pattern recognition in changing context, which leads to the decoupling of incongruence.

Pattern recognition is meaning, and sensation resting without perceptual transformation is meaningless. Instead of recognizing objects in the field of vision, merely seeing a meaningless field of color. Instead of the aural experience as words, instead hearing meaningless sound. This meaninglessness is the foundation for fresh meaning to continually arise. The full allowance of perceptual transformation of sensation via amplification, diminishment, putting aside, and relating is the creation of meaning with full potency: a green portion of a color field becomes a plant, a particular sound becomes the vowel “oh”.

The Nature of States

All states are comprised of a bounded infinity of sensations and transformations, giving rise to a bounded infinity of affordances. This is true of formless meditative states and blissful meditative concentrations equally as much as ordinary everyday experiences such as putting on a shirt. Discovering that we can either relax engagement with patterns of perceptual transformation, leaving sensation as unrealized transformation potential, or kinetically transform sensation via perceptual transformation, leads to the recognition of the nature of states: the existential realization that whatever is being experienced, that, too, is another state.

Recognizing the nature of states, we can rest in the free play of constantly changing sensation and perceptual transformation, meaning and affordances continually shifting, but always remaining in congruence with the changing context. This could be called continual freshness, as attempting to forcefully maintain any state leads to incongruence and staleness of state (or, at the extreme, rotten states, whether “the stench of enlightenment” or “being lost in a personal hell”.)

States without Momentum

Recognizing the nature of states is both infinitely close to and infinitely different from life without this recognition. Without momentum of states, there is a free play of states, but each state looks no different, in itself, than the same state if it were arrived at by contrivance or intentional methods. The subtle characteristic difference is that states that are contrived eventually become stale (it could be seconds or decades), that is: no longer even tenuously congruent enough with context to be maintained, and so are often exited suddenly and ungracefully.

While “just doing what you do” is the “characteristic” of recognizing the nature of states, “just doing what you do” is not a method to recognize the nature of states; rather, this imitation of the fruit of recognition of states is a continuance of the momentum of states.

The Clarity and Bliss that are not a State

Meaning becomes fluid when there is experientially both familiarity with allowing sensation to remain without transformation, and familiarity with kinetically fully realizing the potential for sensory transformation. These familiarities disclose the nature of states, revealing a state as a textural configuration of sensation, perceptual transformation, and affordances. When this recognition is integrated into life, then congruence with ever-changing context can be effortlessly maintained, or, if lost, justified confidence is found that congruence can be restored.

When there is confidence in the nature of states, any remaining existential friction of incongruence with context is no longer sufficient to constitute any sort of existential dilemma. There is no fixed boundary between “inner” and “outer”, as sensation and perceptual transformation are inseparable. The formless clarity of presence to sensation, like a surfer uniting with the wave, and the formless bliss of congruent transformation arise, like a surfer seeing and taking the possibilities for action, whatever state occurs.

This is confidence in the recognition of the nature of states.