Immanencing: Opening Up to Affect

It’s almost impossible to talk about Open Awareness, one of the central tools in our practice, without bringing up affects- those pre-verbal and precognitive intensities that emanate from, and stick to bodies in space and time. When you enter a place of worship and feel an abstract energy of devotion, or when you walk around an area with historical significance and feel a ghostly mixture of thoughts and emotions, these are affects at work. They’re not merely memory, but cross-temporal, often cross-spatial records of emotionally-charged events or objects that manifest and establish territories in the now. This category of affects is the glue that puts the agents of life-world together; they are the liminal stuff with which bodies, human and other, communicate and resonate with each other. In this way, they are similar to the fungal rhizomatic network that connects trees in a forest, the language that precedes and supersedes language itself.

As we wake up and go about our day, we are always accompanied by a dense constellation of affects, most of which are indiscernible. These constellations are assembled from dreams, environments, the deeper layers of our psyche, and the experiences of our bodies and our communities. They constitute our Heideggerian state-of-mind or mood, which “is not a subjective state that rubs off on the objective world, It is the world. The world disclosed in a fundamental attunement is subsequently articulated by thinking in terms of concepts” (Han, 2022). So when we experience life and narrate it to ourselves and others, we do not do so from the total spectrum of possible experience, not from pure life, but from the subset or constellation of life that is present to us through affects.

The Quality of OA

Tunnel Awareness is not necessarily an impoverished affective landscape, but it is undoubtedly a closure to, or a reluctance to engage with the affective field surrounding us. In contrast, Open Awareness, or aesthesis, is an Opening to the totality of the flows of affect traversing our bodies and shaping our experiences and interactions with others and the world. When we say that OA is a receptive state, we are namely being receptive to these flows- a communion with what is. The invitation to “sense the entire volume of space that one’s body occupies”, and expand or radiate outwards from there on is an invitation to assimilate more and more of that affective field.

Open Awareness is also a specific type of attention. Krishnamurti urges us to strive for a mode of attention similar to “being in the same room with a snake.” This is not to be interpreted as a “threat mode”, rather as a type of empathic but vigilant focus. The image of the snake is particularly telling, for the snake is the symbol of the self that transcends dualities and conjoins the earthy and the chthonic with the spiritual. The snake is that singular meeting node between Muladhara- the chakra of rootedness and materiality, and Sahasrara- the chakra of the divine. Keeping an attention like being present with a snake is recognising the sacred in the everyday mundane; it’s being bathed in the mystery of immanence, knowing that when bodies (human and non-human, abstract and manifest) encounter each other, something quantum and unconscious happens, and the subjective infold of participating agents is altered. 

OA as Ethics

To indicate what OA would be like in terms of ethics, let’s play a game of inventing words. The awareness described above is a sort of Immanencing, which is similar to embodying or presencing, but more explicitly directed outward. It is a dual operation of recognizing the non-/human other as other, and including that other in the very constitution of the self– a gesture of re-appropriation that is typical of “narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, open, extended” without which “the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance” (Morton, 2015). I would simply interchange “other” with “world” and close on this note.

References

Han, B. (2022). Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld. Polity.

Boon, M., Cazdyn, E., & Morton, T. (2015). Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism. University of Chicago Press.