ABSTRACT
Without abandoning our reason we have begun to enter the unspoken that lies behind words. In the shadows of our ‘inner’ illusion we have found a mode of being which seems to resonate with a myriad intersecting meanings. Our meaning now lies in the fusion of different meanings. We can no longer see meaning or being as static. We experience a flow of meanings and of ways of seeing. The meaning becomes a process that reflects shades of an inclusive experience. Thus its nature lies, not in the ‘content’ of any one of its constituent meanings, but rather in the activity of their emerging and of their intermingling. It is in the nature of that activity that meaning simultaneously reflects alternatives within a single form. If we fix on any single reflection of its form, then for as long as we do so we temporarily render meaning static and arrest the flow of meanings. We divide and diminish a myriad wholeness. In so doing, we no longer see meanings flickering in a dynamic process. We alter that way of seeing by limiting ourselves to a single focus. Our way of seeing becomes staticized, reflecting only that particular aspect which we choose to focus on as the exclusive ‘content’: the single orientation of meaning. Vision as it reflects different meanings becomes invisible. We have halted the process of simultaneous reflecting. We no longer experience this perceptual movement. We paralyse the shifting focus of alternate ways of seeing. Our way of seeing becomes staticized. From our present perspective this seems possible only by shrinking the capacity of reason-partially blinding the visionand foreclosing both the experience of a dynamic process of seeing, potentially alterable by choice, and of the flowing interplay between reason and vision. (For parallel observations see Ames, 1960, pp. 59-60, 142-3, 181, 210.)
A threshold: daydream focus Meaning has become confounded with seeing. As well as standing simultaneously for different meanings, our experience of dynamic meaning evokes accompanying shifts of focus whereby we see differently as sight reflects a different meaning. Again, we might logically have deduced this alteration in our way of seeing, since a way of seeing is dependent on a perception of a person, or ‘individual’ who is the see-er. But again we are surprised. The experience expresses what we could not have learned from logical deduction but only from the very activity of questioning it. In Western industrial societies, the everyday experience of sight is concerned only with that point at which an image of something emerges. In that case we fix our focus on ‘what’ it is that our sight finds in that external image. Sight is, however, an activity that is centred in the organism. That which we normally characterize as ‘sight’ represents only a small part of the whole process of seeing. It seems, then, that not only is the nature of that content-whole on which we focus selective, but we are also selective in our focusing on a particular phase of the whole process (see, for
example, Neisser’s indication of the centrality of movement as vision, only through which can a static image finally be constituted: Ornstein, 1973, pp. 195-210). It could be argued that the fact that we focus on that point in the process at which an external and staticized ‘object’ emerges is a form of selectivity which must greatly influence what we perceive to be the nature of that which we come to act towards as ‘what we see’. An ‘object’ is never still; we impose that staticizing which emerges as the ‘object’ that we see, in the form of our perception. Since our focus is fixed at the point of emergence into an externalized image, it follows also that our mode of perception has created that apparent disjunction and distinction between ‘real’ seeing and seeing in the ‘imagination’ that philosophy has spent so much time arguing over as if it were an objectively fixed distinction.
