findingblanks wrote: ↑Mon Sep 30, 2024 3:00 pm As an aside, when you say, "So again, is it faithful to experience to say the subtle inner movements of keeping attention on the leaves was 'always there', as some kind of metaphysical reality..."
I'm not sure what I said that implies noticing the leaves movement is some kind of metaphysical reality. I was merely pointing to an experience of watching the leaves.
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I'm not thinking of intentional states as competing for authenticity in a way that would make me say they are all equal. If I'm going to be fired by not finishing a project in the next 15 minutes, I'm happy to say that the intentional states necessary to finish are of 'higher' value; but it's relative. Some people might say that a higher being has been nudging me out of the job because that's the only way I'm going to meet my future wife next week. I definitely don't want that last example to have us go into metaphysics. I only used it because I want to stress that my willingnesss to talk about which intention state is more important will always need to be tentatively held within a wider context that doesn't carve them up via that critiera.
But, that said, let's assume that the trail of associations that take me away from my intention to read carefully are NOT related to some deeper value that I've been neglecting. In other words, as great as this book might be, let's not assume that I start being distracted by thoughts of an argument with my wife earlier in the day and how that is connected to some bigger conflicts that I've been avoiding in myself. We can assume that I get distracted by random thoughts about what color to paint the walls.
Yes, to be clear, I'm not pointing to what we evaluate as 'more important' or 'more valuable', but what we feel more causally united with along the spectrum of 'intentional states'. Even if we get distracted by thoughts of an argument that could potentially lead to deeper insights about our life situation, the most important phenomenological fact is that of being pulled away from an intuitive curvature quite independently of what was consciously intended. The content of our attentional activity doesn't matter so much as how that activity is modulated by varied inner factors which are quite unknown to us, to begin with. They can't be equated with our mental pictures of them.
This is important because, to gain inner sensitivity to the inner factors that pull us away (like those entangled with our relationships that we have been avoiding), we have to resist the thought-distractions that lead us to iterate over the meaning of the argument. In other words, we have to renounce our focus on the mere content of those thoughts. We can indeed follow the meaning of these thoughts, analyze them, figure out some conflicts that we were avoiding, gain a few insights, etc., but this will never take us deeper than the first-order content, the tapestry of mental pictures. To know the inner factors that give rise to the thoughts as living soul forces (second-order processes), the intentional activity needs to try and make itself an unmovable pillar (or 'laminar flow', as Cleric put it) and experience what inwardly feeds back.
I would say that the first microsecond that my mind shifted from 97% focus to 94% was spontaneous, and probably so subtle that I didn't consciously notice it. And any shifts that finally then opened the door to the color of the walls could be similar. And, as you say, I might spend a few paragraphs mainly focused on thoughts about the walls. Now, I'm in those thoughts. The first microsecond shift back towards "Oh, wait, the book!", agian, I would say could be a 'slower' process of moving back a few percentage points, or it could just jump right back as a powerful thought, mixed with frustration at my lack of will and excitement to get back to the text. I would not have designed the texture of how it comes. Because it could have come with a lot more frustration or maybe not much at all. It could have come with a, "Probably should keep reading...but...maybe I do need to put down the book and figure this out..." My point is that I won't have consciously designed the mesh of implicit and explicit textures that are there when it comes.
"Only now, once awakening from this dreamy associative chain, you can intend your attentional activity to retrace back to where the distraction occurred and try to faithfully fulfill your original intent again."
The most interesting part of that sentence for me is the 'can.' When I think of what it is like when I suddenly am jerked back into my task at hand, I think of the wide varieity of ways that new intentional state can come. Often, it's much like it was when it first arose, and I just grip the book and focus. Although, I notice that I don't design that curvature, even when part of what I'm doing is something like, "Okay, I need to focus more than I just want" and I really 'push' inwardly to ramp up my focus. That isn't always what happens. Even when it does, it is hardly a gaurantee that I'll stay on track. Sometimes a very light 'get back on track' is powerful. Sometimes ramping it up seems to do the trick. Sometimes, I realize that the distractions were showing me that it really isn't time to be reading. Sometimes I ignore that intuition and keep distracting myself by focusing on the book. In that case, I guess we could say that now there is a more important set of intentions that are being sublimated to what was the most important one (at least what I thought was) when I decided to have some very focused reading. In fact, I might say that what appeared as a clean intention to read is now discovered to be 44% distraction from other implicitly functioning experiences.
Gendlin created a technical phenomenological concept of 'occuring-into-implying' which points to how any subjective (not in the not-objective sense) event as always both an occuring component and an implying. I say this because, our typical concepts force us to think of things like 'intentional states' as if they are always acting as themselives alone and we lose sight of how when they are functioning implicitly in the shaping of the experience that is currently occurring they are 'more' than themselves. So, even when my intention to read in a focused manner arose, it crossed with a mesh of intentional (and other states) to becomes exactly what it was in first arising. My conscious mind might flatten it out in a simple meta-conscious explication like, "I strongly intend to read this book", leaving out all of the felt-implicit aspects that are already pushing in other directions. What might be discuraging about my view is that I precludes the possibility of a meta-conscious grasping of a pure state in which I am aware of all of the very real and active implictly functioning other states. This doesn't at all deny the significance of developing practices that help us become more and more clear and senstive to the relation between intentional states and the wide variety of phenomena that they can produce and that can arise and fade within them.
Right, but I think we should also try to notice how a critical part of the practices that lead to inner sensitivity is the renouncing of focusing on the first-order content of our states and their endless phenomenal varieties. This is like trying to move a railway car by pushing on it from the inside. By spreading our attention through the wide variety of phenomenal details within the implicit mesh that accompanies each state, we negate the force of attention needed to resist the inner factors that comprise the implicit mesh and become more inwardly sensitive to them. This is why it's so important to develop the intuitive feeling of causal responsibility within those intentional states that comprise our actively willed imaginative thought-movements, in distinction to those that follow impulses, feelings, distracting thoughts, or sensory impressions.
"Do you agree that we can phenomenologically speak of an overarching intent here in which the thought-states unfold, and that it would be pretty untruthful if, after the fact, we told ourselves the dreamy associative chain was also our intent? In other words, if we say the intentional state of faithfully following the meaning of the text and the 'intentional' state of wandering into other thoughts before we retrace the text to try again, are equally 'intentional states' even though they are mutually exclusive?"
I've addressed this above from a different angle, but I think much of what I said relates to this. I think they are both 'equally' intentional states in that they meet the minimum requirement for noticing that they contain intentional activity. The distractions about painting the walls could be a function of other very important ideas/needs implicitly functioning in their formation. And, this is just from my view and experience, the experiencings that are implicitly functioning are occurring to the extent that they are shaping the texture of what is now unfolding. But, to your point, yes they are mutually exclusive in that I can't focus strongly on the text and focus on the need to paint the walls in a way that allows each to maximize its purpose. In other words, I can agree that intentional states can come into conflict.
They come into conflict, but as also suggested above, more important is why they come into conflict. I think it is precisely because they are not equally 'intentional', in the sense of feeling causally united with the intentional acts. Our house is divided, so to speak, between what is 'given by me' (the concentrated intent to read) and what is 'given to me' (the distracting thoughts). When we unite our concentrated activity within the former, that doesn't necessarily mean we feel like the sole agency and power involved in the activity and its results, but that we feel fully present and conscious within the intentional state and its unfolding in an unbroken way. Clearly, when we are reading through a text and mining its meaning, we are interacting with at least one other agency and its intuitive movements, the author. To be fully present and conscious within this interaction is to be both active in our attentional movements and receptive to the meaning that feeds back on those movements in a relatively unbroken way (of course this is the ideal and will take much practice to enlarge the unbrokenness).
Cleric gave another probably more helpful metaphor for this dynamic to work with (the total interference of intuitive intents that modify our concentrated state is the 'implicit mesh' of that state):
To put that into an analogy, imagine that we are doing pottery on a turntable.
Imagine that we don’t see our hands but only intuitively will their movements and observe the resulting changes in the clay. The latter is an image for the condensing Tetris pieces – the concretizing phenomena of our inner life. Normally we accept the pot for what it is, no matter how sloppy it may be. We say “my pot” just like we say “my thoughts, my feelings”. In reality, however, what is being impressed in the clay is an interference of many forces. We can only know them if we try to focus and sustain a perfect shape through time. Only then do we begin to recognize all the forces that bend the movements of our hands. Initially, we feel the forces only dimly but we certainly recognize how they modify the impressions in the clay since the impressions differ from what we intend. As an analogy, if we suffer from shaky hands, we may be used to the fact that our pots turn out wobbly. Maybe we consider this to be our unique style and even take pride in it. Yet if we attempt to make a smoothly shaped pot, we quickly recognize that the wobbly shape does not reflect our intents and thus there must be other forces interfering that are barely moved by our intended intuitive curvature. It is in this sense that we speak of a ‘negative’ image – we don’t see the forces as things in themselves but recognize how they modify our intents and this is perceptible in the impressions of the total interference. And in fact, we will never find the reality neither of our own, nor of other forces, as contained in the clay Tetris pieces. What happens is that gradually we begin to resonate with and comprehend the intuitive intents that work through the forces, just like we intimately know the intuitive intents of our own hand movements. Initially, we can conceive of such intuitive intents only as far as we feel how the human world impinges on our flow. For example, we can hardly conceive of bodily sensed pressure or heat as having anything to do with intuitive intents. Initially, we can only find such intents in relation to other human beings because we are familiar with the scales of their intuitive activity by virtue of the fact that we experience a human condition too. When we resist the World flow, we begin to grasp in images how our existence is shaped and constrained by the inner activity of other human beings, starting from our closest family and friends, going through acquaintances, colleagues, our nation, and ultimately the whole Earthly humanity. As said, we should by no means imagine that we’re striving for asceticism here, as if we try to extricate ourselves from human life. On the contrary, our meditative resistance to the World flow only serves to make us more conscious of it, and then we can use these insights to seek even greater harmony in our life’s conduct. This meditative resistance attains to a whole new level when we begin to recognize that even the flow bent within the ever greater spheres of our sympathies, antipathies, opinions, temperament, religious sentiments, and so on, can also be considered to be an intrinsic part of the World flow, instead of imagining all these factors as unquestionable and atomic attributes of our ‘self’.
