Saturday, 5 November 2016




In normal waking consciousness the sense of self is distributed over many components of mind, but this plurality can be reduced to a basic duality. There is the silent one who feels and responds, and there is the active one who exists only in the doing. This latter deliberates, thinks, processes, internally verbalising at times; it continually evaluates situations, both internal and external. The active self is a manager who does the work of maintaining (or consuming) the life which is not done by autonomic processes, and in waking life it is as noisy as a parliament, but all of its labours are directed toward the other, taken to be the silent sovereign self and the sole reality. The actor responds to the needs and directives of the other, even when it knows its actions fall short or that the feeling self is deranged by passion or desire. The other is oddly incapable, limbless and frustrated, as if it has expended itself in the vain attempt to train the actor to do its bidding. The disciplines of serenity seek to return the centre of gravity of consciousness to the silent listener, to the audience, to the one off-stage who feels, and also to loosen the identification between the two. The centre of gravity of mind is usually ungrounded and sustained by a continuous effort of thought. The division of foci between performer and audience is seen in all mental phenomena, even in the rapidly shifting roles in a conversation, and is often quite subtle in its nuances. The actor can express the very quality of subjectivity without actually possessing it, the audience is all untamed subjectivity but is incapable of appropriating it, or even recognising it. In projecting its own subjectivity the silent subject creates a world as an extraordinarily rich organisation of intentional relationships.

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