The Simplest "Exercise" of Responsiveness

Surrendering to full participation in every moment: relationship without the feeling of relatedness

The basic "exercise" is to enter in to self-transcending responsive relationship under all circumstances.

“Self-transcending” here means that the fully responsive and improvisatory nature of participation in opportunities for relationship (with anything and everything), such that difference between “self” and “circumstance” or “self” and “other” is elided, to the point that no feeling of relatedness is present, in the same way one does not “relate” to the hands or the heart: relatedness is a feeling reserved for “that with which there is not full participation”.

Self-transcending is not to be confused with self-eliminating. It is not the elimination of the self, but responsive action where the interaction becomes primary, backgrounding the perhaps-still-sensible distinction between “self” and “circumstance” that constitute the interaction: the dancers and the music and the clothes and the room and the audience become the responsive interaction of the dance.

While transient and local purposes, goals, and projects may arise (whether for thirty seconds, thirty days, or thirty years), responsiveness has no prescribed destination.

Responsiveness, as a spontaneous expression of searchlessness.