the posture of spirit
jargon for a new century
‘Spirit’ can be understood in contrast with ‘self’. When I say ‘self’, I mean those aspects of your mind which are relatively voluntary, directed, constructed, and responsive to direct intervention. When I say 'spirit', I mean those aspects of your mind which are relatively involuntary, organic, spontaneous, and unresponsive to craft or direct intervention. Spirit is subpersonal, subagential, but not necessarily subconscious. Expressions of spirit are experienced more as happening to you, or being shown to you, and less as being authored by you.
Spirit throws many shapes and traces many paths. It is an inexhaustible source of variety. However, there is at least one activity of spirit which is, in your waking hours, constant. This is the activity which, when the self stays very still, makes the mind more simple, whole, and unified. I will call this activity 'the posture of spirit', by analogy with the posture of the body. The subtlety of posture can make it appear not to be an activity at all. You may see a neutral posture as a sort of negative space. However, there is no activity which encompasses the body more fully, or in greater detail. Not one muscle is spared from participation. Though posture can be obscured by other behaviours, it cannot be terminated except when behaviour is terminated altogether.
The neuroscientists and embodied cognitivists will have their own thrilling third-personal accounts of the posture of spirit. I am interested in giving a first-personal account, because it is in the first person that we must reckon with spirit every day. From my cushion, it seems that the posture of spirit is a dynamic process that works on objects in the world of experience to one main effect. Objects, as we perceive them, bear meanings which seem to beg for full expression, and expectations which beg to be met. The world of experience is a mosaic of intentionality. Fragmentation, complication, and disunity are aspectual properties of this mosaic. When expectations are unmet, the world of experience does not hang together as a whole, but rather appears as disjoint, incomplete, bristling with loose ends. The posture of spirit works in complementary ways to the same effect: it ties up these loose ends. Either it produces met-expectation (1), or it dissolves unmet-expectation (2). It does this either by transforming the objects of experience (a), or by transforming the expectations manifested in the objects of experience (b).
Your-love-for-your-partner expects that you will give them the fullest possible attention. This expecation might be met either by total absorbtion in your partner (1a) or by your love softening to demand less (1b). Your-craving-for-that-chocolate expects that you will eat it. This unmet expectation might be dissolved either by withdrawing awareness from the chocolate (2a) or by detaching from craving itself (2b).
The b-process is not a typically epistemic matter. It does not work at the level of belief. What changes is how we perceive the meanings of objects. The a-process is not a typically practical matter. It does not work at the level of action. What changes is the arrangement of the world: whether, where, and to what degree each object is held in awareness. In either case, the world of experience transforms so that expectations are met. Met-expectation is the axis with which the posture of spirit seems to align. (There may be multiple axes, I don't know.)
Typically, the self is motivated to imitate the posture of spirit, to bring about alignment by the coarse means of thought and action. However, motivation may come only in a trickle and imitation may get sloppy. It might be true that, for action to qualify as such, it must imitate the posture of spirit to some degree; some might say that action, to qualify as such, must aim to meet some expectation. And if all action is (to some degree) bent on met-expectation, then it may be that imitating the posture of spirit (to some degree) is psychologically or even anatomically necessary. However, this is compatible with profound misalignment. Even if the self makes a gesture towards alignment along one dimension, it might in doing so contort beyond recognition. Posture can get lost in translation.
If you do feel called to more perfect alignment, there are two paths available to you: either you may craft the self so that it imitates the posture of spirit more faithfully, or you may suspend selfhood so that your behaviour emerges as a spontaneous expression of the posture of spirit. And it seems that the resounding consensus of the sages is ¿Por qué no los dos?