August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The concept of ‘dualism’ involves an experience of being in which the world is separated into two parts or materials. These are variously designated as ’self and other’, ‘body and soul’, ‘body and mind’ and ’subject and object’. The normal experience of the act of seeing gives strong reinforcement to such dualism because of its structure. From a naïve standpoint, vision seems to involve the operation of two major component parts: the seer and the seen, together with conditional components which support the act, most notably the space which lies between seer and seen and across which seeing operates, and the light which must be present if seeing is to happen at all. The self-evident obviousness of such a structure, combined with the aid to this kind of thinking that some scientific support for its validity provides, inevitably forces one to conclude that the location of ’self’ within this system is with the ’seer’ and that everything else that is ’seen’ is ‘other’: that ‘mind’ only exists at the location in space occupied by this seer and the rest is inert matter, including the ‘body’ one sees when one looks down or indeed the body of another person. Here is the subject, there is the object. Vision, as described here, is the objectifying sense par excellence, and remembering that up to 40% of brain activity is comprised of the visual processing of information it is not surprising that, as Paul Bloom puts it, we are ‘natural born dualists’. Since so much of our brain activity is taken up with visual processing, a fact observable by noting how much of our cognition and language relies on visual metaphors, we have an inbuilt tendency to constantly reproduce the conditions under which dualism thrives.
Any move toward achieving non-duality must inevitably confront this difficulty or find ways to minimise its effects. Clearly one way is to develop a set of techniques which privilege non-visual ways of being in the world and which do not have this this tendency to spatialise and objectify. However, many traditions do attempt to offer ways of finding non-duality which rely on the concept of ’seeing’, or which make extensive use of visual and spatial metaphors despite the inherent difficulties. Such methods work because of a number of strategies which have been found which circumvent the duality-producing tendency of vision.
One way this has been achieved is through the building up of an identification or association not with the ’seer’ in the structure of vision but with some aspect of the conditions in which seeing operates, usually light or space. We intuitively associate ourselves with the position of seer, feeling our self as existing at the place where the looking is taking place or coming from. This intuition can be broken down however, allowing us to change the location of such identification, at least partially. In fact we routinely modify the location of our identification, extending it to cover our family, team, country, or species, swelling with pride when ‘we’ have taken our first step, scored a goal, turned green and pleasant as an English springtime, or evolved an opposable thumb. Alternatively we may shrink our identification to include only our head, our brain, our consciousness, placing the I deep inside and casting everything else out into the over-there-ness of objective space. We also habitually and non-mystically move ourselves away from ourselves whenever we see someone in pain; we wince in empathy, placing part of ourselves momentarily in their shoes and neuronally mirroring their being. It is a comparatively small step from these everyday resizings and relocations of the self to an identification with the non-self components of vision mentioned above. When we feel ourselves to be, not the subject or object in the visual equation, but the space in which these entities appear, we are adopting the space as ourselves and feeling the singularity and non-duality which comes with that territory. This is particularly potent if we have an understanding of space not as the emptiness which lies between the stuff of the world but as a continuous substrate which permeates every-thing and (so physicists would attest) at the deepest level comprises everything. Similarly, the development of a close association with light, the other great condition for the functioning of vision, can also allow one to avoid objectifying dualism which still utilising the power of visuality.
Some practices, particularly activity-based ones, find a non-local location for self in an identification with the affordance connection between ‘here’ and ‘there’, between this thing here called ‘I’ and that thing there called ‘it’ (or ‘you’). An affordance connection draws on that faculty of our minds which synchronises our perceptions with the actions required of the object of those perceptions. So, for example, when we see a chair we do not simply see a collection of wooden geometrical shapes assembled in a particular way, we ’see’ the sitting opportunities offered by this object. Similarly, when we see a tool with a handle we ’see’ its graspability. According to Gibson, this recognition of affordance is not some rational act carried out by the conscious mind once visual perception has taken place, rather it is completely embedded within the perceptual act, preceding such analysis as geometry or the recognition of a particular material. When we see something, the first thing we see it how we should interact with it, and this seeing is an unconscious, embodied, felt sense. The other more formal aspects of objects relating to their shape, size, colour, etc follow this primary active perceptual response, and it is these secondary perceptions which most clearly separate seer from seen, subject from object, self from other. A form of ’seeing’ or ‘being’ which foregrounds these primary affordance relations between perceiver and perceived may reduce the dualism which normal seeing tends to promote. So Herriman, writing about Zen and Archery, can claim that non-duality is achieved when the archer ceases to exist as an individual separated from the bow, arrow, and target, and begins to exist as the action which coheres these disparate elements into a unity. This singularity is a result of an identification by the archer not with his self as distinct from the activity, but with the affordance structure which makes these elements one.
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