On Direct Experience
And the Hunger to Be Intimate with Being
Dear Friends and Family,
Today, we bookmark a months-long series on the ancient practices of silence, solitude, and simplicity. And well, I’ve written and re-written this letter to you several times. Each draft has been a recognition that every letter I write is just another beginning. This letter surely is.
At the heart of these practices is an intimacy with being. In silence, we enter the absence of speaking and of sound and encounter a companion Presence within and beyond us. In solitude, we enter inner communion and encounter the primordial Self. In simplicity, we enter the inner experience of poverty and come to the plenitude of all that is.
I have come to imagine these practices as the pretext, subtext, and intertext of life lived ever closer to who and what we are.
They avail us to the subtle perceptual language of what is always quivering beneath the buzz and hum of what’s right in front of us, that inner something that, in our quietest moments, we most hunger for. They touch our innermost, and they are portals to the Unseen.
We were given the hunger to become intimate with our innermost and the Unseen. It is surely a sacred expression of inner generative desire that asks for tenderness toward the innocence intrinsic in yearning.
Perhaps today’s reflections—more touch points—usher us a little closer, in time, to the experience of inner hunger, generative desire, tenderness, yearning. . .
and silence, solitude, and simplicity.
With love,
Renée
Forthcoming
~ Gathering in Silence + Conversation
Next Sunday, September 1, noon–1:30 pm ET, via Zoom~ Conversation on Silence, Solitude, and Simplicity, a Continued Exploration
Saturday, September 14, noon–1pm ET, via ZoomEmail or DM me here on Substack if you have questions and to register for either/both. reneeeliphd@substack.com or reply to this email.
On Direct Experience
If you’ve read more than a few of these letters, you’ve seen the word phenomenology. It is a mode of philosophical inquiry. But don’t let that intimidate you. Phenomenology explores the direct experience of something (a phenomenon).
Before philosophy became a field of inquiry about . . . just about anything, it was wonderment about the cosmos and our place in it, birthed of a sophianic love of wisdom—the Divine wisdom in all that is, reflected in and through the human, seeking our presence, contemplation, and understanding. It was an endeavor to consciously live this wisdom. Gnothi sauton. Know thyself. Sacred traditions emerged.
Although phenomenology seems fairly new to philosophy—introduced by the Austrian-German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, in a 1907 paper—in many ways, it goes back to the beginning. The Greek, φαινόμενον, phainómenon, tells us that the ancient ones who gave birth to this tradition were besotted with wonder at that which appears before our consciousness. For Husserl, by the late 19th/early 20th century, philosophy needed to get back “to the things themselves.”Phenomenology would be a ‘rigorous science’ of direct experience of that something which appears before our awareness.
We can go further and say a phenomenology of being is an exploration of the direct experience of being.
. . .
It occurred to me these weeks of exploring silence, solitude, and simplicity that as much as we have an inner hunger to experience the heart of being, we have little experience being present to the experience of being.
There’s fear here. In our quietest moments, who does not fear the fullness of sorrow, of pain, loneliness, loss? Are we not fearful of not knowing what comes next? Of fear itself? Tell me who is not terrified of letting a moment of joy, awe, or bliss, a warm wave of love have its fullest expression.
For all the absence and emptiness we’ve explored these weeks, it can be terrifying to experience silence, solitude, and simplicity for reasons as plain as the light of day. They call forth intimacy with being.
Phenomenology lets us in . . . at our own pace . . . exploring the direct experience of this next something right in front of us. The something (phenomenon) can be a dried piece of bread, the right hand touching the left, kneading dough on a wooden board. The something can be silence itself. It can be the pain of a stubbed toe, a joy, a moment of vulnerability, the death of a loved one, and so on ad infinitum.
And it begins by setting aside any preconceived notions or stories about this something. We abide with naked intent in the experience. We unknow ideas of the experience and let what appears come through with purity.
It’s that simple. And difficult.
Mindfulness and Intimate Presence
You may be wondering how phenomenology is distinct from the practice of mindfulness. In the way that mindfulness invites our attention to what is happening right now, the two are similar. Both ask us to let go of preconceived notions and narratives that surface.
Mindfulness invites us to be observers of what comes to our awareness, be it a thought, a breath, a joy, a pain. In mindfulness, mind observes what transpires, watching it appear and recede from awareness, like a cloud moving across a blue sky.
Phenomenology asks us to be intimate with the experience of what appears—to come closer. We descend into the body of experience, our presence inviting the experience to come alive. Phenomenology asks us to walk toward and keep walking into the full wave of it.
As practicing phenomenologists, we need to know we can retreat from the experience while developing capacities for “a sympathetic presence and affective intimacy” with the experience of our own being.1 It’s ok to come up for air.
And so, as practicing phenomenologists, we begin by exploring the seemingly insignificant, not the emotionally charged agonies of life. The seemingly insignificant is anything right in front of you, garnering your attention, calling your name. Maybe you notice you’re wondering about a tangerine, a ray of moonlight, the morning call of a Carolina Wren, the green of dew-covered grass.
Wonder is a spark that might then follow with:
What is the experience of. . . ?
Where is the experience alive in the body? . . . Now? . . . Now?
(Experience is fluid and wavelike.)
What is the feeling tone of this experience? Where?The body is the site and thruway of the experience, and so, we keep coming back to the body. This includes the experience of feeling. The organ of the heart is itself an organ of sensory perceptivity. Much of direct experiencing can be centered in the organ of the heart. . . .
Insight may come as the experience comes to its completion.
Over time, we become more sensitive to the perceptual promptings of experience as language.
Silence in a Sacred Text, Solitude in Small Talk, Simplicity in the Complexity of Touch
Recently, working with a sacred text while conducting research for another project, I noticed a slight hiccup in my body as I read a certain passage. It was subtle but enough that it caught my attention. I returned to the passage, turning toward the experience of reading, and there it was again, the slight interruption in the body.
After three or four passes, it became clear that the text had a structural pause that was not immediately obvious. Read phenomenologically, the structure seemed intentional. Silence was textual. The interruptive structure had as much to say as the content of the passage, albeit different, so much so that it was the embodied perception of silence in the text that invited a closer read.
Staying with the phenomenology of experience brought interpretive insights.
I’ve never been one for small talk. It shines a neon light on my soul, and I want to go home. Phenomenologically, the loneliness is an invitation. The ache is a perceptual signal to lean toward.
If, for a few moments, I can quietly walk into the experience of loneliness—no stories here, just the homesick emptiness in the center of the chest, the yearning for connection—the experience of loneliness turns 180º. Now I’m in quiet communion with self. I’ve entered a mini-retreat into solitude. The loneliness follows the arc of lived experience, and it releases its grip—not because I want it to. The loneliness turns because it has been presenced.
Not always, but often, this inner turn opens a sympathetic presence with the person or persons I’m with. I have met my own humanity. I might be more present to meet theirs.
When the right hand touches the left hand and the left hand is touched by the right, only one hand perceives the touch. A gap appears between the perception of touching and the perception of being touched. Come a little closer and the experience brings us sensorially to an inner experience of a simplicity that is, at once, a profound complexity imbued in our flesh with the flesh of the world.
It’s all right there, between one hand touching, another being touched, and the ever-so-minute-but-infinite chasm between the two. 2
There would likely be little awareness of this phenomenon without leaning into the phenomenology—and may I emphasize, childlike wonder!—of our two hands touching and being touched simultaneously.
Becoming intimate with direct experience, we become phenomenologists of our inner lives. We come to silence, solitude, and simplicity without the need to find silence, retreat into solitude, and empty into simplicity. We must do those things, too, to come closer to who and what we are. And, surely, the more intimate we become with being, the more insistent being becomes at emptying our lives of the insignificant. That, too, is a journey.
Peggy Whalen-Levitt, in The Place of Our Belonging: A Work for Children and Educators Mentored by Thomas Berry, edited and introduced by Peggy Whalen-Levitt (Greensboro, NC: The Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World, 2023), p. 7.
This experience is explored thoroughly by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press, 1969). Merleau-Ponty explores this chasm as a chiasm, the chiasm as the flesh of being.
I’m familiar with phenomenology because I used to study 19thc and Edwardian literature. I have to admit that I didn’t give it much thought as a graduate student in my 20’s, just another theory or idea to connect with a particular text, the result being a paper.
So I absolutely love your description of it here, particularly as it compares to mindfulness. I’ve been writing this week about the difference between mindfulness and contemplation. And so I can add phenomenology to that conversation.
Thank you Renee!
Thank you, Renée. Such beautiful and illuminating writing. At essence, this helps me to hold more deeply this journey into phenomenology. I too, have always disdained “small talk”. Somehow this grief that has tenderized my heart feels warmed and comforted by the slow fire of your wonderful offering. After all, I remember Francis Weller (and perhaps you) saying that the heart is the organ of perception. Somehow I feel as if this is another way of returning home. Ah, my heart hears my words. I feel a warming, an ache, a quickness of breath and such tenderness.