Shadow in the Stream

The following is a meditation from Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart. 

"Just as every community has a shadow, every set of teachings will also have areas of shadow, aspects of life they do not illuminate wisely.  Every style of teaching will also produce its near enemy, the way that particular teaching can be most easily misused or misunderstood.  It can be useful to take some time to reflect on the strengths and limitations of the practice you have chosen to follow.  You can then consider to what extent these are issues in your own spiritual life.  The following examples hint at the possible shadows you may encounter.

Insight Meditation and similar Buddhist practices can lead to quietude, to withdrawal from and fear of the world.  The emptiness taught in Zen and nondualist Vedanta can lead to a related problem, to being disconnected and ungrounded.  Any form of idealistic, otherworldly teaching that sees life on earth as a dream or focuses on higher realms can lead one to live with complacency, amorality, and indifference.  Physical practices such as hatha yoga can lead to bodily perfection instead of awakening the heart.  Kundalini yoga can lead students to become experience junkies in search of exciting sensations of body and mind rather than liberation.  Those such as Krishnamurti and others who teach against any discipline or method of practice can lead people to remain intellectual about spiritual life without providing any deep inner experience.  Practices that involve a great deal of study can do the same.  Moralistic practices with strong rules about what is pure and what is not can reinforce low self-esteem or lead to rigidity and self-righteousness.  Practices of tantra can become an excuse to act out desires as a pseudo form of spiritual practice.  Devotional practices can leave clarity and discriminating wisdom undeveloped.  Powerful gurus can make us think we can't do it ourselves.  Practices of joy and celebration such as Sufi dancing may leave students lacking an understanding of the inevitable loss and sorrows of life.  Practices that emphasize suffering can miss the joy of life.

As you reflect on these shadows, consider your own spiritual path and tradition.  Let yourself sense its strengths and weaknesses, its gifts and the ways it can be misused.  Notice where you may be caught and what more you might need.  Remember that there is nothing wrong with any of these practices per se.  They are simply tools for opening and awakening.  Each can be used skillfully or unknowingly misused.  As you mature in your own spiritual life, you can take responsibility for your own practice and reflect wisely on where you are entangled and what can awaken you to freedom in every realm."

This meditation, while useful in itself, also helps to highlight for me the strengths of an approach such as Integral Life Practice.  One of the primary aims of ILP is to take the sort of broad, shadow-sensitive view that this meditation also encourages, using an AQAL lens to help identify areas of one's life and dimensions of one's being that are being overlooked or ignored, and then adjusting one's practice accordingly.  Although I have not felt a need to invest in the packaged version of the ILP that is being marketed, I have tried to take an ILP-inspired approach to my own spiritual practice since first learning of it.  This has not always been successful -- my physical practice is still very weak, consisting mostly of evening walks during which I also do a particular TSK practice -- but I do believe it has been helpful overall. 

But acknowledging the strengths of ILP, I think it is important to look for what gaps or shadows might be present in this approach as well.  One shadow that such an approach might cast, for instance, is something that was touched on in the discussion on my Integral Theory and Inclusivism blog:  the potential for students of Integral to exaggerate or over-estimate their own understanding, perhaps unconsciously assuming that, because one has access to a purported "map of everything," one therefore personally transcends and includes these things in his own lived understanding.  One's "knowledge" might thus generate a kind of not-knowing, a rigidity of outlook, that is the shadow side of the belief that one's framework or model already "has it all accounted for."

A possible "shadow" or consequence of a modular, practice-oriented approach to spirituality, depending on how it is engaged, is that it may reinforce an instrumental mode of knowledge, possibly at the expense of other modes, and may lead one to conceive of "knowledge" and "realization" as something outside of oneself -- a product of some sort, for instance. 

Related to this, the modular, practice-oriented approach may encourage a sort of spiritual materialism -- a fascination with technologies, an ego-driven compulsion to adorn oneself with an impressive array of spiritual "ornaments" and "instruments."  Wilber has commented on this potential in some of his talks and writings.

Lastly, the emphasis on practice, wedded to a model which attempts to "cover all the bases," might tend to reinforce a control-oriented approach -- a fixation on self-mastery and development which overlooks those aspects of one's being which are not subject to control -- which seeks to subject all spontaneous arisings to the same paradigm of control, or which inhibits surrender and retreats from the insecurity of not-knowing.

wed aug 13:  Balder (Bruce)
thurs 14: James
fri 15: Adam

(Break)

mon 18: Buddhacious (Matt)
tues 19: Julian
weds 20: Crouching Tiger (Erin)
thurs 21: Marmalade (Ben)

I will be leading off the event, and will provide links to all of the other entries as they are posted.  The other participants will be doing this as well, so there should be plenty of visibility and accessibility.  I invite any regular readers of my or the other participants' blogs to join in the discussions that we hope each entry will generate.  Your participation will help make this event a success!

Previous symposiums:  One, Two, Three.

Buddhacious' Youtube teaser for Symposium Four.

Prologue

I sit in the coffee shop, the bass pulse of the radio beating like a second heart in my chest, the notes of the song skittering through the architecture of my limbs - warm pulses, limpid blooms of light behind my eyes as they close softly and I lift up word clusters in the resonant field of my attention.  Enactivism.  Integral Theory.  21st century spirituality.  Each notion is a field in itself, and just sounding these words aloud calls up fleeting, complexly layered associations and images that flash momentarily like the jeweled sides of fish breaking the surface of a river, and then drop again into the invitingly deep and indeterminate bed of my body.

As I repeat the words of the title of this symposium to myself, trying to coax the jeweled sides of each to flash a moment in this morning's sun, wondering how the light from each will play with the others, I find myself engaged in an act that can only be called magical - an invocation of unruly presences, an unpredictable enactment.  I am aware that whatever I write today will not be the "truth," in the sense of simple correspondence; it is not simply an uncovering of "what is there," but an evocation of "what can be."  And the others in this symposium will be doing something similar throughout this week:  a mapping that is not simple disclosure, but creative enactment, a movement which invites of us to ride, whole-bodied, on the burgeoning crest of the future infinitive.

Background (Structural Coupling)

I first learned about the enactive paradigm in July of 1995.  I know this because a sticker on my copy of The Embodied Mind has the date of purchase printed on it.  At the time, I had recently returned to the US after living in Asia for four years, and I recall the book calling out to me from its prominent display on a shelf at an Austin bookseller.  It promised an integration between Western and Eastern knowledge that I had come to see as essential, after having spent a number of years studying and practicing at monasteries and meditation centers in Southeast Asia, India, and Nepal:

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.  The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete.  Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

This was music to my ears.  Particularly inspired by the dialogues between Krishnamurti and Western thinkers such as David Bohm, Dr. David Shainberg, and others, I had become very interested in the potential for Western disciplines to be enriched by Eastern contemplative perspectives and practices.  I also recalled having watched a dialogue between Krishnamurti and a young Francisco Varela, in which the latter seemed to run circles around K, so I was very interested to learn more about his views. 

When I first read the book, I did not yet fully appreciate its import, particularly in relation to postmodern epistemology, but it started me on a path of research that led eventually to Integral Theory and the works of Ken Wilber.  This in turn led to an exploration of a number of the sources that informed his Integral vision - an exploration which, for me, is ongoing.

In this essay, I would like to look at some of the essential features of the enactive paradigm, including the Integral reformulation of enactive principles, and consider their implications for an embodied, transformative modern spirituality.  Each of the topics in the title is rich and multi-faceted, as I mentioned above, so in these reflections, I will only be evoking a small portion of their potential for interaction and mutual enaction; I will rely on others to explore other potentials, with the aim not only to voice a plurality of perspectives, but to invite creative integration and embodiment of shared spiritual vision.

In particular, I plan to talk briefly about the enactive paradigm, and then to explore the themes of imagination, transformation, groundlessness, and integrative pluralism in relation to enactivism, Integral Theory, and 21st century spirituality.

Enactivism

What exactly is the enactive paradigm?  In its original, narrower sense, it is a model of embodied cognition that was first articulated by Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch.  In the context of cognitive science, the notion of embodied cognition has been proposed as a "middle way" between what we might call the Myth of the Given (representationism) and the Myth of the Framework (solipsism or constructivism).  According to the enactive paradigm, the representationist perspective is naïve and no longer can be sustained.  Using the example of color perception research, for instance, Varela, Lakoff, and other cognitive scientists point out that color is not a quality that exists "out there" in the world; it is not an observer-independent, objective quality of things-in-themselves.  Rather, it is a particular experiential domain that emerges through the interaction of our color cones, our neural circuitry, our embodied history of structural coupling (our particular evolutionary trajectory in time and co-determinative relationship with our environment), the reflective properties of objects, and electromagnetic radiation.  Our words do not point to observer-independent, self-existing objects, unrelated to our activity in the world; our categories do not simply reflect what is already there.  On the other hand, however, the enactive paradigm also rejects the extreme of constructivism or the Myth of the Framework - the idea that reality is entirely observer-generated, that it is wholly the product of our subjectivity.  The experience of color cannot be accounted for simply on the basis of culture; while cultural elements may influence the experience of color, biological and environmental factors also come into play and cannot be meaningfully bracketed out of the picture. 

According to the enactive paradigm, the world for any organism is best understood, not as a pre-given reality which the observer passively and more or less accurately reflects, but as an historically emergent domain of distinctions enacted by sensorimotor involvement with its wider environment.

To unpack this a little further, I will briefly describe four key points which Varela uses to summarize the major claims of the enactive paradigm.

• Cognition is enactively embodied:  co-determination of inner/outer
• Cognition is enactively emergent:  co-determination of neural elements (local) and cognitive subject (global)
• Cognition is generatively enactive:  co-determination of Me-Other
• Consciousness is ontologically complex:  co-determination of first- and third-person descriptions

In simple terms, Varela is pointing out that the mind is not simply in the head, but rather that cognition and cognitive worlds unfold through our sensorimotor involvement with our environments - that inside and outside, subjective and objective are co-determining and co-arising.  Second, the mind, while inseparable from our neural architecture and our embodied action, is an emergent global process which not only depends on these local elements but which may, in turn, act on or affect these processes.  Varela draws two corollaries from this point which will be relevant later, so I will quote him here: 

If you put together key point one and key point two, embodiment and emergence, [the first corollary is that] the mind is fundamentally a matter of imagination and fantasy.  In other words, it's the internal activity of these rich emergent properties, plus the fact that you have an ongoing coupling that forms the core of what the mind is.  The mind is not about representing some kind of state of affairs.  The mind is about constantly secreting this coherent reality that constitutes a world, the coherence of the organizing through the local-global transitions.  Stated in other words, perception is as imaginary as imagination is perception-based.  

The third point is essentially the point of intersubjectivity:  cognition is not only embodied or emergent, it is intersubjectively generated.  Drawing on the work of Daniel Stern and other researchers, Varela argues that this mind is that mind - that subject and object distinctions arise out of a pre-reflective, empathic-affective ground.  An important consequence of this point is the recognition of the importance of loving care in the enactment of healthy neural architecture and subjective organization in young infants. 

The last point, as Varela summarizes it, is that consciousness is a public affair.  By this he means that consciousness is open, not only to external, third-person exploration via the methodologies of neuroscience and cognitive science, but also to careful, systematic first-person exploration via various contemplative disciplines.  His proposal here is an approach he calls neurophenomenology:  the integration of first- and third-person approaches to the study of consciousness.

The territory of concern covered by the above points is already suggestive of the Integral / AQAL framework, so I will turn to that model briefly before discussing the relevance of the enactive paradigm to modern spirituality.

Integral Theory

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Wilber expresses his admiration for the enactive paradigm, recognizing it as a valid attempt to integrate left- and right-hand (subjective and objective) domains in a coherent scientific model.  He agrees with the refutation of representationism or objectivism that it represents, and points out that he is therefore careful, when discussing the territory of the Integral map, to describe phenomena as being called forth or enacted by particular perspectives rather than simply disclosed. 

However, he regards Varela's enactivism as a partial enactivism - functioning, for instance, with still somewhat of a biologistic bias, and failing to take full account of the dialogical understanding afforded by Lower Left, postmodern paradigms.  While agreeing that the recognition of the sensorimotor enactment of cognition is indeed an important advancement in knowledge, he believes that Varela's model remains "mired in the sensorimotor."

Wilber's amendment to the enactive paradigm is to extend it into the four quadrants, suggesting that subjective, objective, intersubjective, and interobjective domains tetra-enact - that they are co-determining and co-arising.  In the points above, Varela comes close to this picture, but in his writings, he still tends to describe the "interiors" of subjects in third-person, scientific language, not yet "embodying" in his work the full range of perspectives that are available (and which he acknowledges in theory).

In my view, the recognition of the tetra-enactivity of the four quadrants in Integral Theory transforms the theory from its Cartesian function as a rational, representational map (pun intended) to an enactive symbol-system, a psychoactive agent, an embodied operator which awakens me to the co-presence and co-determination of these fields in my lived body.  Just reflecting on this subject this morning had me inhabiting my body differently.  There is a feeling of opening which does not erase boundaries or render them meaningless, but which nevertheless leaves them translucent and calls attention to the creative enactment of experience which echoes and embodies a particular lineage of appearance while also opening into the novel, the new.  The horizons that this view opens may not be entirely clear yet, so I will return to this notion below when I discuss the promise of an integrative pluralism.

Imagination and Transformation

Drawing both on neuro-imaging studies and the implications of his enactive paradigm, Varela argues for the central role of imagination and metaphor in human cognition and perception.  This perspective is echoed by Lakoff and Johnson, in their seminal work, Philosophy in the Flesh.  According to the latter, cognition is not only embodied but rooted in metaphors of embodiment, in image schemas which derive from our sensorimotor engagement with an environment.  One consequence of this view is that reason can no longer be envisioned as abstract, ethereal, or disembodied; it is, in fact, a subtle-level, higher order dance of the body in lived space.  But the consequence that concerns me here is one explored in some depth by Francisco Varela and Natalie Depraz in the essay, Imagining: Embodiment, Phenomenology, and Transformation.  The argument that they develop is too involved for this essay, exploring the neurological and phenomenological dimensions of imagination in some depth, but the essential point is easy to state:  imagination, as a shaper of perception and motor actions and the means by which we on-goingly (locally, evolutionarily) secrete worlds, exists at an important cross-roads and can serve as a powerful mediator of self-transformation.

As mentioned above, Varela argues that cognition, as a global, enactively emergent phenomenon, is capable of downward causative action and influence:  "the large-scale integrative state that underlies a moment of nowness is capable of accessing any local neural processes."  It is in this context that Varela and Depraz explore various meditative disciplines, particularly Vajrayana or Tantric practices which employ sophisticated imagery and imaginal processes in the service of self-transformation.  Imagination, they argue, is a sort of mixed object which traverses material and experiential domains without boundary or gap; and in this context, Buddhist practices such as the ngondro, Tantric visualization, or tonglen, are both intelligible and powerful examples of mind-body know-how.

This is a rich topic, and I invite interested readers to explore it with me in the comments section below.  For now, I will quote a relevant passage from TSK literature which I think speaks effectively to these concerns:

One way to make the transition from conceptual knowledge to knowledge active in our being is to draw on the power of imagination. Imagination engages us at the level of our experience. It allows us to conceive a different reality.

To imagine a world in which reality depends on con­structs does not mean retreating into fantasy. Instead, it means entering that world, with its prevailing logic and its presupposed order, as fully as we can. Can we allow the governing vision of our present way of being to unfold within us? Can we savor its subtle blend of flavors? Can we explore from that perspective the ways in which we conduct our lives?

...From the moment we imagine our way into the heart of our own being, the limits on our knowledge begin to lose their hold. It is not a matter of discovering secret knowl­edge or arriving at revolutionary insights. We simply find it available to us to imagine that what has been constructed could be constructed differently. With that simple move, the past and its structures, the self and its identities, no longer bind us so tightly. The gateways of the possible open to a new way of knowing.

To imagine fully that we conduct our own reality into being is to imagine the power of imagination, and thus to multiply that power. Imagination discloses that we are free to shape appearance and to choose how we respond to what appears. Once we accept that we are already at home in this new world, and that we are actually exercising our creative freedom in each moment, we can take responsibility for a knowledge that has been available always (Visions of Knowledge, Tarthang Tulku).

Groundlessness

A recurrent theme in Varela's work is the discovery of groundlessness.  Similarly, one of the implications of Integral post-metaphysics is that the Kosmos is, in an important way, groundless: that the given ground, at any given point, is still a perspective, and therefore not really given at all.  At any stage in our development and understanding, we may work to "ground" ourselves in the knowledge available, mastering and masterfully employing the models at our disposal and the tools they provide, and this is indeed a wise use of our energy, but we should also recognize the inherent vulnerability and instability of the ground they establish.  Other perspectives will always arise to challenge our own; the evolution of knowledge in time will eventually undermine or overturn our founding stories.  If we mistake our beliefs and models and convictions for solid, inviolable ground, we will find ourselves called again and again to defend the territory we have claimed, and upon which our felt sense of identity rests.

As an alternative to this conventional definition of being grounded, I propose that a grounded approach is one which is intimate with the living knowledgeability of Being, the open-ended knowingness which is the creative ground for all particularized acts of knowledge and all individual knowledge claims, and which in its spaciousness accommodates the multiplicity of perspectives which enact our self-world horizons.  In practical terms, this means having reached the point, through sustained inquiry, that one recognizes this knowingness, this open clarity, not as an ideal, not as a position to be adopted, but as the actuality of being.  Because this knowing is foundational, being grounded means being open to what is, in and as its presencing, in uncontrived intimacy. 

Perhaps surprisingly, when one first enters deeply into this, the realization of this groundlessness is simultaneously a deepening in embodied presence - greater intimacy with its living field.

In terms of state training, this involves realizing and stabilizing in the spontaneous clarity of non-positioned knowing.  In terms of philosophical perspectives, it may mean recognition of the postmodern truths of constructivism and contextualism, or a profound (AQAL) grasp of co-dependent origination.  In terms of moral grounding, it may involve recognizing the wisdom of insecurity or growing comfortable with uncertainty (to borrow from two popular book titles which address the question of groundlessness). 

Integrative Pluralism

The last point I wanted to make in relation to this topic - admittedly only sparsely explored in this essay - is the implications of the enactive paradigm for our understanding of religious traditions and the horizons of transformation and realization that they trace out.  Because the day is almost done and I have yet to post my essay or properly kick off this symposium, I will only touch on this briefly here.   

In his book, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, Jorge Ferrer draws upon enactive and postmodern theory to articulate a participatory vision of spirituality.  In many respects, his proposal is quite similar to Wilber's model, particularly as he has expressed it in his most recent writings.  In Ferrer's view, the perennialist worldview is caught in the Myth of the Given, and the contextualist view is caught in the Myth of the Framework.  It is appropriate neither to posit a pre-given, underlying spiritual reality waiting simply to be disclosed by independent observers, nor to argue that that spiritual realities are wholly culturally or linguistically determined, without any objective basis.

I find this view to be generally consonant with Integral Post-metaphysics (though the details of his argument vary from it, stopping short of what Wilber believes is essential).  But the point in common is this:  to an important extent, the spiritual horizons traced by different traditions, the liberative potentials and the spiritual, transrational phenomena, are best understood as creative enactments, not simply as pre-existing spiritual domains or conditions "uncovered" by contemplation or other means.

As we explore the promise of the enactive paradigm for 21^st century spirituality, I believe this insight will have lasting value, allowing us to explore spiritual traditions and practices in terms of their enactive potential, rather than in terms of their propositional truth value or the validity of their metaphysical claims.  No commitment to otherwordly realities is required; but neither should we cling blindly to, or simply accept as pre-given, our models of this world. 

We are invited, instead, to step full bodied, open-eyed, into the burgeoning stream of our evolutionary unfolding, with all our faculties - body, senses, reason, imagination, and awareness - open and intact.

Well, the Fourth Gaia Symposium is rocking along, in spite of a few bumps in the road, and has been generating a lot of excellent discussion.  If you haven't read the entries yet or joined in the conversations, please do! 

Because of computer issues and other problems, we've had to adjust the schedule some.  I will post links to the current entries below, and will update this page every day as new entries go up, so please check back here if you want an easy way to link to the discussions.

Day One:  My entry

Day Two:  James' entry

Day Three:  Matt's entry

Day Four:  Adam's entry

Day Five:  Julian's entry

Day Six:  Ben's Entry

Dealing with a few nasty gremlins that have kept him from posting on schedule, Adam has still kindly offered us a few appetizers to tide us over:  taste them here and here.

Come join us and help make this even richer and more rewarding than it has been!

Boundaries in Light

Z4 Symposium week has passed, but it isn't over yet!  Conversations are continuing in the comments sections of each of the contributions, a couple Gaia members have added complementary pieces on their own blogs (see Ashramdiarist's excellent commentaries here and here; see Starlight's poetic reflections here, here, and here), and I believe Erin, who had to drop out because of computer problems, will soon be adding a contribution of her own.

Of the three topics we intended to explore together in this symposium, enactivism has received the most attention.  I think this is appropriate.  It was an unfamiliar concept to several of the participants, so a significant part of this exercise was just to explore the concept in more detail and to trace out its implications.  This "tracing" is still ongoing, and I feel it's a bit premature for me to offer any conclusions about the outcome of this symposium yet, but I would at least like to offer a few thoughts on why I find the approach to be compelling.

In my own philosophical study and spiritual practice, I have not considered myself an "enactivist."  Rather, Varela and Maturana's enactive approach was one of a number of related perspectives that have informed (and which continue to challenge and refine) my understanding:  Buddhist notions of co-dependent origination and emptiness; the deeply process-oriented thought that comprises aspects of Dzogchen teachings (which Herbert Guenther has explicated in some depth); the process philosophy of Whitehead; David Bohm's dynamic cognitive, linguistic, and cosmic models (Thought as a System, the rheomode, soma-significance); General Systems Theory; structuralist and post-structuralist thought; the Time-Space-Knowledge vision (TSK); Raimon Panikkar's cosmotheandric vision and his integral dialogical model; Jorge Ferrer's participatory spirituality; and Wilber's re-translation of enactivism in AQAL terms, among others. 

These perspectives are certainly not identical, but they do broadly reinforce a vision of reality as dynamically interdependent and deeply participatory - an understanding which, if only for the purposes of this symposium, I am happy to summarize with the label, enactive*. 

In his contribution to this symposium, Adam listed a number of reasons why he found the enactive perspective to be beneficial and compelling.  Because his reasons are so clearly expressed and so closely resemble my own reactions to this approach when I first began to explore it, I will copy his list here and then will add a few of my own thoughts below:

• it encouraged me to see more that nature and environment is not just something out there - we are part of it, and that we influence our physical world just as our physical world influences us.
• it brought extra dimensions to the understanding of conceptual consciousness
• it highlighted life as unfolding process
• it encouraged deeper insight into assumptions
• it increased my feeling of environmental responsibility
• it heightened my awareness of the different elements of cognition as they happen
• it reminded me that the falling tree in the empty forest doesn't make a sound ; )
• in some ways, it didn't contradict my existing worldview, it helped bring it to life...
• i related strongly to the 2-way process of evolution, how organisms affect and are affected by their environment
• it coincided with a conversation i was having with a friend a few weeks ago about the difference between insecurity and uncertainty, and my embracing uncertainty as the most rational approach to engaging with present awareness! spooky huh?
• it also coincided with deeper recognition of life as flow/process that's been going on of late

And to this, I would add:

• It encourages a deeper appreciation for the body and a deepened sense of participatory intimacy with the world (which has affective, moral, and cognitive consequences)
• Its "middle way" approach offers us a way to begin to relate to the world's multiple spiritual traditions as objectively rounded creative enactments, neither attempting to reduce them all to an overarching (and reductive) ideological inclusivism, nor settling for an easy but unsatisfactory flatland relativism.
• It opens a concrete, practical way to begin to integrate, and encourage relationships of inquiry between, scientific and contemplative practices and perspectives, which promises to further human knowledge.
• It reminds us just how deeply we are related; how Me and Other are co-implicated, co-creating
• Deeply appreciated, it transforms our sense of both time and space - a shift which impacts the fabric of our experience, our embodiment, and our sense of self. 

I do not intend with this list to over-idealistically inflate this notion.  It is not "the answer," and I am not holding it out as such.  But I have found it to be a powerful way to look at things which has opened the door for me, in many spheres, to a deeper appreciation for what is and a greater sense of what is possible.

To close, I will describe a handful of practices which I have found helpful for exploring the meaning of, and more fully embodying, an enactive sensibility.  Several years ago, I worked on a project exploring connections between Wilber's Integral Theory and the Time, Space, Knowledge vision.  In that project, I suggested a number of TSK exercises that I believed would be helpful for exploring and deepening insight into several key Integral concepts, including enactivism, perspectives, and post-metaphysics.  I'll mention a few here.

Among all of the TSK practices, perhaps some of the most well known are those that deal with the Giant Body.  In these exercises, you are asked to visualize a giant human form, male or female, suspended in the space or the sky before you.  Adopting the perspective of a proportionately tiny observer, you approach the body and begin to explore it in intimate detail, first observing its surface features and then entering into it to travel through its internal spaces, systems, and structures.  Over a series of six exercises, as you conduct this exploration at increasing levels of detail and finer levels of magnitude, you are encouraged to move into, "open up," and transparentize the boundaries of the nested structures and systems that comprise the human body, with the aim of developing intimacy with space and embodiment.  In the beginning, space may appear first simply as the space between boundaries that make up and allow for the "shapes" of given organs, cells, or molecules, and then become more pervasive as boundaries are opened and the transparentized body is experienced as an intricate world of "interactions and shining outlines."  Carried out intensively, however, these exercises allow you to develop a subtler experience and understanding of space which, at these deeper levels, challenges not only objective distinctions but subject-object distinctions, as you come to experience the inseparability and dynamic co-enactment of perspective, form, and space in the lived body (Leib) -- a relationship which obtains even in our normal experience of the body as solid and opaque.

In a series of practices which immediately follow the Giant Body exercises (Body-Mind-Thought Interplay; The Translucent Person; Participation as Observer/Participation as Embodied Person; Participation and Space), the student begins to attend to the interaction of body, mind, thought, and emotion in a variety of situations and settings.  In these practices, the student explores the dynamics of this interplay in light of her more spacious and open sense of embodiment, opening up boundaries and partitions in experience in subtler ways, and paying particular attention to the emergent presence of the observer in the overall constellation of experience (the factors that contribute to the concrescence of a sense of "you" in a given situation).  These exercises are valuable on many levels, constituting an integral approach to exploring embodiment, but I will comment on just one aspect here.  Having been led to an experience of space as an unqualified openness, the student is enabled to more clearly perceive the co-emergence and co-constitutive nature of subject and object poles of experience.  As Tarthang Tulku writes, "Following concerted practice of Exercise 9, it may be possible to see the emergence of objects and of the ordinary ‘knower' as a tendency toward ‘freezing' what is actually a completely open dimension."  Here and elsewhere, Tarthang Tulku leads us in an exploration of the emergence of subject-object perspectives as a never-fully-consolidated freezing tendency that I believe gives us a visceral understanding of the process Wilber notates in his integral calculus as 123/p, and which he describes as a momentary stopping or "freeze frame" in the "cascading flow of infinite perspectives" that allows us to apprehend objects in a world.  Importantly, the power of these practices is in the conceptual and phenomenological shifts they are intended to encourage; they are not, Tarthang Tulku explicitly states, intended to be taken as metaphysical propositions.

The TSK vision includes over 130 exercises, a number of which are relevant to our present concerns, but I'll mention just one other - an analytical inquiry practice to complement the imaginative visualizations of the Giant Body exercises and the active, situational mindfulness practices of the second set of meditations I described.  This practice is entitled Lineage of Appearances, and essentially involves sustained inquiry into the objective, subjective, and intersubjective "lineages" that contribute to the "appearance" of any given object of experience.  "For example," Tarthang Tulku writes, "an object can be traced to its component elements; alternatively, it can be traced to the whole of which it forms a part. There could be tracing in the direction of greater subtlety or underlying energies; tracing in new dimensions, both visible and invisible; tracing of asso­ciated sensory and mental operations (including those involved in tracing); tracing of historical conditions and causes. Lineages can be investigated in various domains: structural, chemical, biological, mathemati­cal, philosophical, therapeutic, linguistic, cultural. Experiment with different ways of opening experi­ence and appearances through tracing lineages. You may find that the further you go, the more character and meaning change. The common-sense emphasis on sub­stance can no longer be contained; there is a move toward process that opens new perspectives."

Another practice I wanted to mention is one I am not very familiar with, but it seems interesting and promising enough to me to mention here.  At the recent Integral Theory Conference, I attended a session on a new perspective-taking practice that is being developed by several members of Integral Institute: the Meta-Practice.  It is based, in theory, on Wilber's integral (perspective-based) math; but in practice, it involves a number of different elements, from the grounding factors of concentration and mindfulness, to method acting, improvisation, Meisner's repetition technique, gestalt, ongoing positive regard, encounter work, and affective therapy.  The practice is fairly intensive and typically takes five or more hours to complete.  Practitioners sit in a circle (with one or several observers situated outside the circle), and the facilitator slowly guides them through a range of exercises designed to deepen subjective and intersubjective awareness and to exercise perspective-taking capacity (from 1^st person out to 6^th person levels of complexity).  

I watched a group of individuals demonstrate this practice, but I haven't had a chance yet to try it myself.  I mention it here because the carefully guided interactions did seem to provide a powerful way to expand awareness of the enactive power of perspectives.

Many other practices could be mentioned.  Deep engagement with daily life itself is enough, of course, but sometimes directed or intentional practices, by running counter to the currents of our habits and expectations, can open spaces that we might not otherwise have the opportunity to enjoy or appreciate.  If you know of any practices that would be complementary to the topics explored in this symposium, I invite you to share them below.




* Technically, of course, this term applies primarily to Varela's model, and more loosely to at least two which have borrowed it and reframed it - Wilber's tetra-enactivism and Ferrer's participatory spirituality