Where to begin…
This in itself is both the intention and the mystery as I sit to write this post. Many different things have come together to form the intention to write something about phenomenology today: the invite to write a chapter on Buddhist phenomenology; the ending of another academic year with its wrapping up tasks and new ones to come on the not too distant horizon (including lecture preparation); recent client work; and more personally, realisations and revelations about my relationship to time and space – for me, the two main anchors for the therapist in their trade of an existential-phenomenological practice.
More accurately, the two main anchors for all beings-in-the-world.
The third week of July always takes me back in time to childhood; this was when summer began! The promise of long weeks ahead, the release of all commitment. I witness school aged children in those early throes of this freedom…and the parents I have as clients who greet this time of year with some ambivalence. A child’s gain in freedom, the parents’ loss of it. As a childfree woman, I hold my childhood experiences of summer and those now: for the latter “me”, summer started many weeks ago. A sense that this summer has been long (and hot) already. Just the other morning, I went on an early morning bike ride and already there felt something autumnal in the air – it was still warm, and I believe that sense-of was relative: from hot to warm, and my bodymind noticed the drop change and gave meaning to this as “autumn on the horizon”. Words, ideas even of “simple” categories like “summer” are not straight forward if we foreground lived-experience.
Currently, I experience “summer ahead” with some excitement and some trepidation. Much needed rest, yet this same space can leave me betwixt and between. Taking on a new role in the autumn, I know there is busy-ness ahead. I am also anticipating news from reviewers on my book proposal. My present is populated by past experiences of summer (distant past, recent past), full of expectations (the need for rest, nice things to experience), and many anticipations on the horizon.
When Walt Whitman penned his “Song of Myself”, his poetic expression “I contain multitudes” hoped to capture the person as complex, vast, and capable of holding many diverse, changing, or even contradictory thoughts, feelings, and identities at the same time. I have found the phrase a helpful invitation to re-ground me in possibility at times my insecurities have told me otherwise. As a Buddhist, I might conceptualise this as moments I have lost my faith in my buddhanature; a reminder of my basic goodness. As a Buddhist and phenomenologist, I might also fold in that the “I” is merely an expression of a withinness; I am but a node in an intraconnected life. Life contains multitudes, and I am within that field. We might say, I am situated, spatially within.
And yet recently, what is coming to the fore for me is a situatedness temporally too. I take great confidence in the Enneagram teachings and how I identify with Type Six process (as I have explored and shared on this blog many times). Like other Types in the mind triad (Five and Seven), I have a very particular relationship to the future. Especially for the self-preservation subtype (that again I identify with), an anxiety about my (really) existing “strives to become fear”, because (as Tillich* continues to explain) the human mind cannot endure the open, objectless threat of nonbeing, seeking instead a concrete object to fight. I know my flight into the future, to guarantee an existence that is not experienced here in the present. I have often used an image of Spiderman, firing thoughts out like webs to buildings to secure the path forward. This future orientation is known to me. The real revelation recently – found through the exploration of “summer” and what it means to – is to see-feel how much of past is in future; and in the throughline, Helen is present-ing.
“It’s nearly August…where has the summer gone?”
“When I was young, this was only the beginning of the summer”
“Why can’t it be April or May again, when the summer had yet to start?”
“Next year, I need to live April and May differently”
The more I explored this tendency to-lament-a lost-past and to-recapture-what-was-lost-in-the-future did I recognise the throughline that manifested as Helen in the present.
Helen DOES contain multitudes. She is always-and-already, she is neither entirely within nor is the world entirely without (her). She is both a being and always becoming; a becoming that cannot be separated from the past. Our being IS time and space**.
Embodied and embedded. To appreciate the Korper and Leib*** inherent in existing; and that this bodymind totality is not apart from the world. Neither are our multitudes constricted by our current co-ordinates. We are temporally and spatially, infinite.
There is nothing like being an educator to challenge one’s knowing of their field. I mention above that one input into today’s blog was “things on the horizon”, and there is one lecture to prepare on my mind in particular. The task ahead (and this post is taking on an aperitif quality, whetting my appetite) is to provide our incoming students with an introduction to phenomenology. My hope is to open a vista onto this anchoring within time and space; to include and go beyond the basics (and fundamentals) of lived experience; distinctions of sensation / meaning making / perception; core concepts like intentionality, epoché, and the lifeworld. I also want to invite a curiosity beyond the forefathers Husserl, Heidegger; beyond the popular contemporary writers like Spinelli, van Deurzen; to bring less well known (like van den Berg, Fuchs, Jaspers) and certainly more critical phenomenologists (Fanon, Guenther).
Ultimately, I want to convey the release and relief that comes when we realise our nature as multitudes. I believe this is what the task of a humanistic therapy really is: to welcome ourselves back to wholeness; to expand into the potentialities of being. If I can play a small part in inviting our trainees in this direction, this can only ripple out into their own client work…and who knows how far those ripples will reach out and similarly move.
—————
* Tillich’s 1952 classic, The Courage To Be
** And yet, as I explore in the chapter I am writing, the Buddhist phenomenology, as a non-dual phenomenology, points out our being in time and space is only one aspect of our nature, a relative nature (I exist relative to). When we meditate, we come to see that “I” is actually a cluster of processes: where nouns dissolve into verbs; including the Helen “having” experiences. The “fourth moment” is nowness; now is outside time and space: of past, present, future.
***The biological body and the subjective experience, respectively