1. First reflections

When presenting what did I like and did not like about my work from unit 2, I actually realised a few things as I kept talking, and maybe they are worth writing down. 

My favourite part was writing, because it held the most meaning to me. It was not simply an explanation or presentation of the studio work. It was a process itself. Or rather, I feel that the most important process happened in my head, and I tried to put it in words. In the autumn term, the writing became the work itself, it held space for observing connections between different ideas and trying to bring them together.

The other side of the coin is that, in result, my studio work had less and less substance, and to get into my project, one would actually need to read it all. There was less making going on.

What I tried to do at the end of each term, was to make someone experience what I had experienced when working on a project, rather than to make them understand it. On a symposium presentation I didn’t talk about all the things I touched on, I couldn’t summarise them. Instead, I took a fragment, an aspect of my work, and tried to bring it to people as something to immerse in, to be in, to feel and ‘get’.

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After our discussion, I see that I tend to circle around the quality of a whole, an entire structure that needs to be felt and experienced, which also requires time. It can’t be taken apart, summarised, because the relationships between its elements are not defined and can’t be explained. They need to be felt.

There is a question of what I was actually trying to convey through the content, rather than what was the content, or even what I thought was the content.

Another question is, how to focus  on that quality itself and manifest it, so that it becomes the centre of the project. How could it be brought to life? Through which prompt?

For now, I have a few quotes that I think could hold some meaning here.

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As we’ve seen, reality isn’t an object, but a seamless web of processes, each affecting all others, each implying and held by cosmos. What we feel as reality is the interplay of unfolding relationships. (…) If reality cannot be objectively known though, we should appreciate that it can be felt, it can be experienced. It lives through you.

Wholeness is the primary, inescapable nature of reality. The whole cannot be known or controlled, cannot be named or itemised, cannot be measured or predicted, it lies utterly beyond the scope of any perspective. 

The quality of wholeness emerges through the relationships of its parts, but it cannot be explained by its parts. And because the whole lives through each of its parts, its parts cannot be known with any finality, because such knowledge would necessarily require the knowledge of a whole. So despite the arrogance that tell us otherwise, we live in a mystery that will never be pinned down.

Wholeness is not something you can achieve, it doesn’t need achieving, it already irreducibly exists.

Radical Wholeness, Philip Shepherd

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A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time — encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail. Think of it as a taste, if you like, or a great musical chord that makes you feel a powerful impact, a big round unclear feeling. A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling.

The inner aura as you think of a person isn’t made up of discrete bits of data that you consciously add together in your mind. In thinking of Helen, you don’t laboriously list all her physical and personal traits one by one. You don’t think, “Oh yes, Helen: she’s 5′6″ tall, has blond hair and brown eyes and a small mole next to her ear, talks in a high voice, gets upset easily, wants to be a playwright, likes Chinese food, needs to lose weight. . .” Nor do you list each detail of your relationship with her. 

There are undoubtedly millions of such bits of data that describe Helen as you know her, but these millions of bits aren’t delivered to you one by one, as thoughts. Instead, they are given to you all at once, as bodily felt. The sense of “all about Helen”—including every one of those thousands of bits of data that you have seen, felt, lived, and stored over the years—comes to you all at once, as a single great aura sensed in your body. 

Focusing, Eugene Gendlin

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Whenever Carl tackled his father with religious questions, the pastor became irritable and defensive. ‘You always want to think’, he complained. ‘One ought not to think but believe’. The boy reflected inwardly ‘No. One must experience and know’.

Jung. A very short introduction, Anthony Stevens

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You know, I believe, if there’s any kind of God, it wouldn’t be any of us. Not you or me. But just this little space in between.

Before Sunrise