I decided to use ‘music listening‘ as the activity for exploration. I previously experienced listening and standing as if removed from the activity to control it by emphasizing what appeared in the sense field and mental space, (melody, rhythm, modulation, instrumentation, etc.) elements that I valued (desired), which also included memories of the music patterns and my feelings about them. I showed less attention by deemphasizing what was valued less, and allowed the least valued or neutral to pass mostly as background. I noted the ‘desire‘ or anticipation of what lay ahead in the familiar melodies, and gauged where ‘I’ was in the unfolding of the listening in time, as the music and ‘I’ unfolded in linear time. I realized the evidence of the subject-self was the result of ‘position’ and ‘identity’ that was assumed, such as the basic feeling of ‘I am‘ and that sense of I am ‘here’ in opposition to all the objects the music presented. Noticing the subject (I am here) and objects in opposition pointed to the intervening space. This view revealed what has been referred to as the Field of not-knowing, the Polar space, a fundamental ignorance, a knowledge gap, even an existential static or disquiet.
I tried reversing the subject-object relationship, as ‘I’ the subject attempted to become the objects in time – the music. The sense of ‘I am here‘ seemed to merge or ‘dissolve’ into the objects as perceived distance disappeared. This uniting with space and vibrations, the experience of the music, brought with it the feeling of simultaneity and fullness. It seemed a more fundamental and direct event than the separation and distance necessitated by the subject listening to, and interpreting or judging, the objects in the listening process.
Then, ‘being’ the music I tried imagining the subject-me as the listener, and I became aware of separation. I seemed to no longer be the music, but a separated subject imagining or remembering me from before as listener, and thus just another object, along with all the musical objects. The feeling of simultaneity and fullness was gone; I had returned to the familiar self-subject orientation, a contracting against direct experience.
The exercise asks: How is the subject constituted and what determines its boundaries? When I look for the self in mental space I find nothing, only evidence of its activities. Self can’t seem to take up a view prior to it, to observe it, because ‘I am it’ as a consolidating tendency. I can only observe it as an objective memory and its pattern of consolidations and controlling activities, but not the self as a separate entity. However, when I look for the self and find nothing, what is this nothing? At first it seems, it is something like coming upon an open question, like the space left by the question, “What?” But this space is somehow not nothing, for it is aware, and it seems that what appears arises within this space, and is then often consolidated and interpreted through the momentum of an inherent tendency to particularize, organize and gather. But prior to this arising aggregating tendency is the allowing aware space, not an unconscious ‘blank’, but a wakeful glowing awareness.
David
