Greetings, Friendlies.:)
Dhamma teachers know all about this. Alan Watts says of a candle flame: a candle flame is not a thing. It’s hot streaming gas. It’s activity. And yet we noun it as though it was a thing – a fixed, stable entity.
What might we do to help keep the verb in mind?
In his series “Buddhism Before the Theravada” John Peacock is speaking of Saṃsāra. He reminds us that saṃsāra describes activity, “…we’re engaged in this little activity called Saṃsāra-ing, rather than being in a place called Saṃsāra.“
We can do this – add the suffix “-ing” – to any noun.
Yuka Nakamura, speaking of body contemplation in MN 10 (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta), said we are “contemplating the body as it’s actually happening.” She speaks of “the body body-ing”. The body not as a static thing but as a living process.
Kalyana-Sharon is delighted by “presence-ing”. Reminding oneself that presence is a practice. It’s a thing we’re doing.
Sometimes I notice myself Shannon-ing. It’s one thing to go through the world as a human being. But there are times when I’m not just human be-ing. I’m definitely Shannon-ing.
Circling back to posts 1 and 2:
We considered McGilchrist’s and Treisman’s use of the word “attention”. We saw in Treisman that visual attention is strongly process oriented. Systems that organize, bind, adapt, represent.
What if we were to explicitly frame attention as a doing? “Attention-ing“? What does that make possible?
Instead of a kind of ontological investigation – “What is attention?” – where we are more-or-less-explicitly searching for a tool, we can foreground process.
This will read a little technical, but bear with me: we could reframe Treisman’s definition of attention: “Attention-ing is a series of processes by which perceptual information is organized and triaged in relation to the organism’s present-moment needs.” It’s a mouthful. But notice: there’s no hammer here. There are systems, processes, relationships.
And we can invite this framing into other texts. With Master and His Emissary, instead of just asking “What is attention?”, we can ask: What attention-ing is happening? What is being processed/known? Under what conditions does attention-ing arise? What is being made available – or unavailable – to the being?
We can intentionally use language that helps soften reification. We can allow other kinds of understanding to become available.
Your thoughts?
