The Visible and the Invisible 16 v1
By Rudolph Bauer, Phd Mon, Dec 27, 2010
Rudolph Bauer,Ph.D. Author, Erin Johannesan, Ma., MD. Editor
The lived experience of AWARENESS, the experience of awareness of awareness, is embodied…and this unfolding of the awareness field is an embodying unfoldment. This lived experience of awareness is centered within our body and opens immediately out unto the world. Perception and the perceived are given immediately…in oneness…the inner ying meets the outer ying. “To experience” means being an embodied subject simultaneously opening to an existent world and opened to the openness, which is subjectivity. Both subjectivity and world arise out of primordial openness…Primordial embodiment arises out of flesh arising out of the manifestation of the elements…We can never get outside the avenues of experience.
My body is a field of localization. Primordial awareness is located within me as me…both in time and space and beyond time and space. I am in both time and timeless awareness; such is the wonder of being a human being. The world is the ground of all beings and things...the world is the ground of being manifesting beings and things and actions.
The unconcealing, the revealing of truth of consciousness…aletheia…is the perceptual unfolding that leads progressively to a more complete grasping of the thing perceived…an entering into the essence of appearance, into the essence of the apparitional manifestations of the world, or into Beingness phenomenalizing itself into perception. [Of note, aletheia is a term originally of Greek origin used by early-mid 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger as the truth that first appears when something is seen or newly revealed.]
The flesh is like an element, and the dimension of flesh is the manifestation of the elements…The manifestation field is replete with meanings. Words and language are not the only source of meaning…Meaning is also held within the world, and the combining fields of world and language are the articulation of these felt fields. The primordial field of awareness manifests as well as absorbs and dissolves phenomena. The path of awareness is the path of appearance, of apparitions, and of pure openness…luminous openness…of appearance and disappearance.
Through meditation, by becoming aware of awareness, we must experience embodied beingness, an experience which is easily lost. Awareness itself becomes embodied, and by its embodiment it comes into realization… the embodiment of awareness is itself realization. For many unhappy traditions, awareness is disembodied; dissociated from the body and from the world as body. This dissociation creates a detachment that is, at times, autistic-like, or at best, schizoid-like in its solipsistic containment. One becomes lost in witness-consciousness…lost in alternate states…lost in mind. Most dissociative and trance states separate body from mind and particularly separate body from highly conflicted or charged states of mind…from thinking, affect, sensation, and memory. There is then a kind of self-absorption that leads to functional dissociation.
Many people filled with goodness hide in a vacuum-like state that is not the dharmakaya of primordial awareness brimming with potential space. For them, the true self is more or less disembodied. Their awareness may be exceptionally alert and keenly observing with exceptional lucidity. Many Eastern philosophies in their early formulation, whether Buddhist or vedantic, each with their [Asian] Indian manifestations, shared a similar dissociative approach to experience and shared a similar anima approach toward embodiment…toward this world of flesh. [The phrase ‘anima approach’ refers here to the manifestation of ourselves as embodied elements arising from the earth.] For the Buddhist mind, the aim became only thinking; for the vedantic mind, with its distrust of proximity or nearness to others, its aim became an earnest attempt to wipe out bonding and attachment to human experience, to desire, and to relational life.
The unreality of experience, including the internal magnifications of phantasies of omnipotence and being persecuted by the world, is a natural consequence of schizoid and autistic-like positions. The schizoid, or autistic-like self, seeks to become unembodied to transcend the world and hence be safe deeply within the within. From this perspective, everything is contained within; in the everywhere outside, there is nothing. Life is a non-existent vacuum, a delusion. There is the need to keep the world at bay, to keep the world’s enveloping impingement at a distance, and so the defense of foreclosure comes into being and brings forth what was feared…a foreclosure of experience both within and without…
The detachment of the self means that the awareness of one’s inner experience is never self-revealed directly in an individual’s expression or actions. The detached individual does not experience anything immediately, or spontaneously. The self’s relation to otherness is removed. The world becomes meaningless, false and futile. Action or any touching of the objective…that which is not him…is experienced as unreal and so does not exist.
In the state of detachment, the inner self cherishes certain ideals, and there is a profound substitution of relatedness to the otherness of the world. The detached individual is afraid of impingement, and his/her dread is unmitigated [untouched] by personal love.
In the state of detachment, the self easily relates to objects of its imagination and engages in elaborate enactments…phantasy and reality are kept apart. The reality of a person of consciousness manifesting within the human body to such a detached individual is simply unthought.
There is an un-commitment of objects…at all costs one must never be what he or she is…and the schizoid abhors actions, so the act is simple and determinate: One must remain ungraspable, illusive, and transcendent. If one were to act, one would be at the mercy of experience after experience. Such self is endless possibility, endless intention, and the detached individual views this self as the false self. For him, the action or deed is never true reality. The world, which is the objective element, is nothing. Action is merely a pretended performance…with respect to both perception and action, the inner awareness self withholds itself from the objective element. There is no spontaneous action, and there is no spontaneous perception. Commitment in action is avoided…the self is uncommitted to the flesh, to the objective element…the self is free to dream and to imagine anything…without reference to the objective element, it [self] can be all things to itself. This freedom and creativity is exercised in a vacuum, and the creativity is the creativity to produce phantoms to which the self is placed in relationship.
Unlike the detached individual, the more fully aware individual experiences the beingness of being as the ground of all beings, as the singularity of being. The ground is anima, and the singular beings are a manifestation of anima. The very earth is anima, which is a manifestation of the elements…alive…the earth where we live and from within which we rest and move…The earth being the ground from which all rest and movement arises… is not made of corporeal flesh, but of embodied clarity, the beingness of flesh…the primordial source manifest as embodied source..the elements that bring place into being and which lift all particular beings out of nothingness and into somethingness…luminous somethingness. Such experiencing is a knowing of the world as an open-ended horizon, or ground, which is a pure and elemental density. The work of Merleau –Ponty was inspirational for this essay.
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