Monday, May 4, 2009

Reflection: The Facets of Thinking, Feeling, Observing

Being present sometimes seems like an eternally recurring forgetting.

Frequently, I find myself in the present, unguarded, having fun or talking with other people. Then something challenging happens. Say, someone gets angry at someone else. Or maybe no one is angry at all. Let's just say that a group has reached a dilemma, an emotional impasse of some sort. Sometimes in such a moment I feel frozen and powerless. Words and acts don't lead to resolution. Later, I discover that I had so much to say about the dilemma, but in the moment I forgot it all. In the moment, I didn't know where in my experience to go for resources.

Just the other day, a group was dealing with anger in its midst. The group started to talk about this occurrence of anger and the appropriate use of anger and liberation of anger. I felt challenged. What could I say? What was needed? (N.B.: I did not reveal that I felt challenged. I don't know if I felt self-aware enough to do so.) (Also, N.B., right now in this moment I am reflecting, not simply “being present.”)

The group ended. Resolution was only partial.

Then, later, I reflected on what happened. I realized even more clearly how, in the moment, I had forgotten many things that I have to say about anger. For example, I have found the distinction between "feeling anger" and “directing anger at” someone to be very useful. The “at” is a kind of violence and finger-pointing; it requires the construction of a story, a story of blame, intention, etc. The feeling is separable from that story, and on its own can be celebrated for what it has to say about what the person cares and feels passionately about. Anyway, that’s just an example.

What I was trying to talk about here is a fundamental gulf, which is fruitful and also challenging, between the "unmediated experience of presence" (what you might call our biological, emotional beingness) and our living in language.

One fundamental reason for this is that "presence" is wholly in the moment by definition, whereas language comes from a place that necessarily includes past experience.

What I'm saying is that part of us always remains wholly present, that is, our biology. But the part of us that goes into language is by definition bringing something from somewhere else, from another time and place, into the present. Language never comes from the present (though it comes into it); language comes about through the discovery of coherences (repetitions) in the flow of time, which permit us to make the abstractions that are language. The repeated experience of "sitting," for example, enables us over time to distinguish (create the abstraction) the idea of "sitting." Therefore when we say "sitting," we are participating in an abstraction that comes from the noticed repeated experience of something over time. Language is abstracted from many "present" experiences, through reflection, and therefore transcends simple presence.

This distinction between the "sheerly present" or biological and languaging is critical, but it's also easy to draw it in overly facile ways. The line is not so easy to draw. In fact, the issue isn't mereley to "draw a line," but to notice the productive power and possibilities for learning inherent in paying attention to what's on either side of the line.

It works like this. In the present, we make observations; we notice things and we have feelings about them. If one pays attention to the distinctions between what one is feeling, what one is observing, and what one is thinking/languaging/interpreting, and then goes round and round in "reflecting" these different aspects of experience each upon the others, one makes discoveries about how one is making the distinctions. For example, I start asking myself with regard to any particular moment "what was I feeling?," "what was I thinking or assuming?," "what was I actually observing, independent from my thoughts and feelings and what am I not paying attention to?"; and I pay attention to how any one of these can help me better understand any of the others and shift and grow any of the others.

This sort of reflection, seeing how we are working our observations, emotions and languagings together to create the world we are living in, can lead us in the direction of personal growth (more steady emotion, more articulate thought and languagings, more perceptive observations), which leads us to become more effective agents and actors in the world.

Whenever we begin to speak (or think) there is an element of reflection that enters into the present; hence, whenever we begin to speak or think, we always "start up" from a languaging framework or understanding. We always start up, to put it another way, from a basis of assumptions. And yet there is always preserved in us also at every moment the experience that we have as infants, of just being in the world in a non-languaging way, with our bodily biologies, which have both passive and active dimensions, and which are, additionally, affected by our languaging (just to complicate the matter).

One help that a diverse group has is it can bring more capacity of reflection (more past experience) to bear on the present.

Perhaps the chief skill to develop is to learn how to bring the calm space and power of reflection into the moment. First: Calm yourself, let the triggered return to where it was at, thinking requires that we be in the emotion of loving calmness.

A "culture" is a medium for human relations that is built up out of many past experiences. How nice to be in a medium of trust!