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One of the many questions that arises from the issue of attention is - what do we attend to?
Our culture tells us that all knowledge of value is in the realm of thought and ideas - an idea that itself arose from Plato, who believed that the "Really real" was in the spiritual realm - which was non-physical - and therefore was pure thought. [1]
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
Alfred North Whitehead [2]
If we consider embodiment and the body as a source of information through the senses, Plato considered the senses to be fallible - a mere shadow of true reality, hence his analogy of the Cave. That level of scepticism about the somatic has continued as a major train of thought in Western culture. So I wish to very briefly go through the various ways that useful information can be accessed, and known to be useful.
It is well recognised in mainstream philosophy that all determinations through pure reason and logic are dependent on a set of a-priori (baseline) assumptions that cannot be rationally derived. Most a-priori assumptions are taken for granted and (unless painstakingly unpicked) are invisible - because everyone has a particular set of beliefs as to what the world is, what we are doing in it, what is possible and what is not possible, and who to trust (or not trust) for further information.
Which brings us to a very serious modern problem - that we rely on a certain level of genuine information to underpin rationality. This is all second-hand information - things we have not personally experienced, but have read or heard or seen on video or images. All of Science is founded on the idea that it is possible to rely on second-hand information, and a scientific method and publication protocol has been constructed to make that second-handness as reliable as possible. Vested interests in money and influence have increasingly stripped away the reliability of apparent second-hand information, and there are serious questions as to the reliability of some branches of science. [3]
I'm not saying that all second-hand knowledge is trash, but I am asking how we should navigate through the present increasing adulteration and distortion it is subject to.
The only option to second-hand information is direct experience - but it is second-hand experience that privides an intimation that there might be new and different things to experience..
Some things that are second-hand deliberately invoke experience - such as poetry or music or art or religion/spirituality [4]. But your own experience is your own, regardl;ess of many pundits who attempt to to sow confusion and convince you that your experience is unreliable. If you trust anyone else's opinion over your own direct experience then that is problematical.
If you don't trust your own senses, whose do you trust?
Tad James
Which slightly misses the point in that - just as a tiny bacterium or even a virus has to sense and make-meaning in order to respond, we also have to meaning-make. It is the level of interpretation of direct experience that tends to be fallible - for the same reason mentioned above - implicit (and invisible because they are so "obvious") assumptions as to what is or is not real or possible.
There is so much empasis on thought and ideas that it can be difficult to remember that each of us grew and learned to use our bodies through direct experience of using them in the world. Direct experience in a sensory-motor feedback loop results in an ability to use the senses and limbs at will an deven to forget what a truly miraculous thing this is. The kind of experience-action (sense → meaning-making → response) involved in learning to use the body (or even to speak your mother-tongue) is a natural kind of knowledge and living-in-the-world. That skill is inherent - we arer not taught to learn in this way, but rather teach ourselves, even as babies and infants. As such, this kind of learning an dknowledge is extraordinarily powerful. But our culture has decided to ignore its power; and its limits are rarely plumbed or explored - in preference to learning ideas an dthe manipulation of ideas.
Interestingly the bacterium and virus (and other life-forms such as grass, slime-mold and cockroaches) tend to be pretty good at meaning-making. If they were not they would cease to exist.
There are a vast array of senses in the body, and all of them are being processed subliminally and liminally - even if we are paying them no attention at all, or even if we are totally unaware of their existence. But we conceptually only have a relatively small number of meaning-making channels with which to process these ... inner and outer vision, inner and outer hearing, touch, smell, taste and the somatic interoceptive senses. Instinct is simply a process of detecting something via single - or a combination of - senses of which we are only liminally aware, an dthen knowing we have been aware, without knowing how - or perhaps even what senses the information is arising from.
So animals of all kinds - even viruse and cockroaches - tend to do better than us in sensing and particularly in sensing the almost imperceptible ... They don't care whether something is conscious, liminal or subliminal or by what means they might be aware of something - because they implicitly trust their sensory system. They have no need to "make sense" of their senses and have take in no idea that they might doubt them.
Intuition comes in several forms, depending on the sensory preference of the individual. Some people are very internally visual and so "see", others very strongly internally auditory, and so may have alittle inner voice. Regardless of how the information is processed and presented by your sensory system to to your cognitve awareness, all instincts (liminal and subliminal sensing) arise substantialy from interoceptive senses - from the body. In which case embodiment is particularly important such that we can be (at least) as aware as a beetle or bacterium.
The ideas of "Love", "belief", "presence" and "relationship" are just a few principles that are culturally bandied around as words - that have a range of meanings well beyond the scope usually attributed to them. We can, however, only know their meaning to the extent that we have experienced it.
These principles are all processes rather than things - as is everything else in the Living world. Even the Earth is a process, though one with a vastly longer heartbeat than the one in your chest. There can be no second-hand experience in these terms. And so experience itself is seen to be a process of unfolding into that-which-was-unknown. It is not ppossible to apply the usual degree of force and wilful effort on these matters, because the newness unfolds of itself. If we are stuck in a reactive survival loop, there can hardly ever be anything new - and perhaps one of the main aims of this book is to generate the right conditions to make luminous unknowns more knowable.
When Embodied Instinctive sensing is further developed by (re-)connection to the heart, then it creates a profound (but in the experience of it, very matter of fact) state of knowing - Gnosis - in which opinions, ideas and theories no longer necessarily count for very much.
References & Notes
