"Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters, then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue."(1)
Language arose in beings like us—beings embodied in the world attempting to capture their experience and communicate it to others. Iris Murdoch leads off her seminal essay "The Sovereignty of Good Over other Concepts" with the following idea:
"The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision."(2)The contemporary philosopher Steven Asma sees imagination (especially improvisational imagination) as filling in the gap between concepts and perceptions.
"I will be arguing that the manipulation (improvisation) of information-rich perceptions/memories/image schemas/bodily gestures is born out of our primate social, emotional needs. Our intellect is a product and servant of our social life, and the improvising imagination—our early intellect—gave us the behavioral/mental scaffolding to organize and manage our experience long before words and concepts." (3)I think it could be said that the employment of metaphor, imagination and improvisation brings us back from the world of symbols to the world that overflows our capacity to grasp, capture, enclose or confine it. If we imagine this process bridging both ways— body to thought, thought to body—might there be particular ways of moving our bodies in the world to help bring clarity of vision to our unresolved concepts? What I am trying to get at here is the way these two forms of communication—artful imaginative bodily movement and artful imaginative use of metaphor—reach towards each other. There is an ambiguity of meaning embedded both within the pre-verbal dance of the body as there is in the beyond-verbal pointing of the metaphorical, and yet somehow there is a promise of clear vision suggested in their union—a transcendence or resolution of the ambiguity.
The movements that follow may aide in the process of discovering this sense of resolution.
Stir The Whirlpool – Draw from the Inexhaustible Source
In this movement we create an oblique circle with the wrists starting low by the left hip and extending out and up towards a point level with the right shoulder before spiraling back towards the point of origin. The movement is directed by a smaller circular motion emanating from the body's physical center (the lower dantien).The metaphorical image here is of discrete fragments (yet to come together) swirling around each other on varying planes, inter-relating in convoluted ways in a complex mix and manifesting a shape that winnows itself down towards a transcending unifying singular resolution. Imagine that in the upper reaches of the whirlpool the fragments are more numerous and on the swirling descent many find their place dissolving into the clear liquid flow. Imagine further a second level metaphor in which the fragments are representing our unattended, unconscious, unresolved, attachments (fantasies, obsessions, anxieties, fears...) . When these fragments remain unresolved and disconnected from the real world situations we encounter a dissonance. This sense of dissonance then accompanies our experience in those situations. So as not to become slaves to these fragments the idea is to mindfully keep the dissonance in play attentively re-stirring the pool allowing ourselves to be surprised by the creation of some new unanticipated consonance.
I have asked the reader to use their imagination here with respect to metaphorical language. In the end I think that the movement 'Stir The Whirlpool' is itself an excellent metaphor for the imagination, and the faculty of the imagination or the capacity for improvisation might itself be thought of as an 'Inexhaustible Source'. To cultivate a capacity to improvise without artifice in response to the changes we face is to cultivate a capacity to be free.
Here Murdoch advocates for art to serve as the medium in which a similar process might unfold (she calls the process 'unselfing'):
"I think good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves."(4)
Searching for the Needle at Sea Bottom – The Yin may Overcome the Yang
The primary bodily movement now attentively sinks down into that swirling mix towards the point of inner convergence—not directly looking down—but instead maintaining connection through alignment to what might be outwardly liberated. The sea bottom itself is dark and the needle that might pierce our overly self-centered consciouness is not to be found by looking down into it. The conceptual metaphor involves looking with the yin sense—mindful attentive unforced imagination—as opposed to the fantasy of trying to force unseen thoughts into place. Think of gentle open evaluative attention as opposed to forceful rumination which tends toward bias and expects a confirmatory end. The opening that follows is a result of the attentive work.“it is an attachment to what lies outside the fantasy mechanism, and not a scrutiny of the mechanism itself, that liberates. Close scrutiny of the mechanism often merely strengthens its power” (5)
"if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over"(6)
Diagonal Flying/Cross Hands Twisting into Resting Stance – Straight but not Offensive
This movement begins crouched low and contracted and then opens up diagonally with straight lines through the body. The opening entails an extended vision into the distance and then a twisting back to a humble crossed position again close to the ground. One metaphorical image I suggest here is of a plant opening to the light of the sun, taking in light and then sending down new roots and contracting with sun-setting.We could also consider extending the prior metaphor. The prior metaphor involved a whirlpool of thoughts and dispositions mostly suited to the flow of situation being encountered, but still containing some selfish, fixed, unresolved fragments. These fragments had then been stirred up and attended to. Now they are finding alignment, 'unselfing', dissolving into and opening up to the wholeness of the situation, creating a new vision. This new vision is then also released and settles into it's new roots creating an improved capacity for future virtuous expression. Murdoch makes use of Plato's metaphor of the sun as a representation of the 'The Good'.
"The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness....‘Good is a transcendent reality’ means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful."(7)
"What does seem to make perfect sense in the Platonic myth is the idea of the Good as the source of light which reveals to us all things as they really are. ... in the end the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of ‘goods’ and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world."(8)
"True vision occasions right conduct".(9)
I don't think we become enlightened by looking into the sun, but instead we become partially so by attending to world that is revealed through the suns light. Similarly, I don't think our goodness is to be found in some internal location, but instead in the way our cultivated perceptions and conceptions connect us to what lies outside ourselves.
1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9 All can be found in - Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Kindle Locations 6521-6523). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
3- Asma, Stephen T.. The Evolution of Imagination (Kindle Locations 183-186). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
