Open door, threshold, the limen is what is in between, neither one thing nor the other, the place of fuzzy psychological identities. We continually cross thresholds in our life experience: when we go to sleep and when we wake up, in interpersonal relationships and in our jobs. Some of these thresholds, especially those related to transitions from one period of life to another (from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to early maturity, etc.) have a special psychological intensity, these are moments of profound transformation that occur to us spontaneously, and do not depend on our conscious desire to change. We find ourselves in full change, driven by the volition that directs our physical and physiological organism, and we then realize that the change is happening to us, and we think that it is an egoic act, the one directing it, we think that it is my will to personal power the one who wants the change, but that is a reactive thought, an aftermath of the action performed by the egoic. The egoic force adjudicates for itself the act in order to maintain the narrative of the superficial consciousness of the social person, so the fragile personality does not break. The will to power is not personal.
In those big thresholds we encounter the Numen, the Radical Other. There opens up the chasm, the depth, and the individual sinks into a cosmos without limits or measures. There, space and time relationships are suspended, we are in the territory of dark and uncertain borders, we are on the edge, any form is imaginal and virtual flow.
The liminal philosopher-artist1 experiences herself, discovers borders that she did not know as her own, and finds out her individuality extending in Nature and the Cosmos. He or she opens the incurable wound within his/her community, to expose its members to the convulsion of its main values, a general convulsion of foundations that allows the subsequent growth and evolution. Limits are expanded, new experiences are included and the other, the different, the Numen found at the threshold is assimilated. The liminal is what remains open, unfinished, and carries a burden of anomie. Control over this anomie is achieved through a strict rendering of myths in rituals, but above all through the transformation of rite into spectacle, id est, when through, active thinking, feeling and willing live the threshold to its fullest expression. The step from rite to drama is but a small one: it is enough to interrupt a ceremony to give it theatrical content. The step from the liminal to the liminoid occurs when we include in the ritual performance the new and the unexpected, but disarmed of all its anomic content by granting it a very precise space-time for its occurrence. This step historically began with the control of musical dramas that already took place in Athens, all of them coming from choral songs and dances of the dithyrambic type with strong liminal content but in general it is a process carried out by every society at some point on its way to non-tribal social organization and at the individual level by the drives towards individuation.
Through liminal work, new forms emerge from the virtual flow or the already existing ones dissolve in it. This unique two-way process always occurs on the edge of the present, or on a timeless present. What is the meaning of the word “present”, praes-ens”? It means to be before, that is, the notion of present entails, first of all, an obvious bodily dimension: presence is the location of two bodies in a known space and time, facing each other, one witness to the other. Let us examine some verses of Lorca to exemplify presence, let us use the alchemical power of words, of Vaak 2-3, so creative imagination brings to our experience presence.
What do they say? A silence rests, stinks.
We are with a present body that disappears,
with a clear shape that had nightingales in it and now
we see it filled with bottomless holes.( F.G.Lorca Cry for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías)
The expression used, present body, which normally serves to name a corpse to be taken to bury, introduces us to the problem of presence: the corpse is a vanishing body, something volatile and fleeting. Life keeps going on even in decomposition. Something acts and performs in that silence, and shows up in front of us. Life is fleeting, and so is death. Ignacio's body vanishes, like a vague fog of stenches that goes away in silence in relation to hearing but not in relation to smell. The mutable form of a corpse, pierced by death in its incessant activity, was yesterday a hostel of nightingales, the abode of the vital principle. Today, however, it has become somewhat dry and incomprehensible for everyone, since it shows us that what animated the body is different from the body itself. The corpse is the object of contemplation and the poet shows it to us as a mystery: stone and corpse in mutual support, something no longer human, a body fused with the nature that gave it its birth and its death. The corpse is Volitive Soul and shows the incessant activity of nature at the limit, the continuity of the vital cycles in the decomposition of the organism. The present body points towards something absent not only shows the continuity of what is natural in the human, but is focusing all that activity of life in death itself, is intensifying it before us. We face the presence of death as an action that continues life, and it is at the same time that action emptied of the presence of Ignacio, of what animated the body and that we identify with Ignacio, which makes Ignacio present as absence, is not seeing Ignacio in front of us, which reconstructs him in our experience of the corpse as a memory of his presence.
The problem of the corporeality of presence therefore leads to the problem of its temporal dimension: presence is corporeality focused on the present, and more generally, the focusing or intensification of individual consciousness in the here and now, which transfigures it into a broader identity, already detached from any material projection. The corpse presents through our active imagination the immaterial disappearing and appearing. It shows the disappearance of what was Ignacio's identity, his individual and collective psychological configurations of personality. Lying in front of us is the bullfighter who is no longer and the man who no longer acts the mask of a Spanish man. On the other hand, it also shows the appearance of something non-material: the legend of Ignacio, but also of a vast psychic space that has been left empty around Ignacio that is not related to the senses. A silence that goes beyond the sense of hearing. This silence that appears with the presence in us is filled by deeper psychic elements, by layers of our psyche with which the superficial consciousness had no contact. The effect of the experience in personal terms is one of completeness and meaning. We can call this experience inspiration. In a strict sense it is not imaginal, although its contents are in contact with the creative imagination and activate it. Inspiration arises from the presence and from it active imagination is generated, from which the general imagination and spontaneity are derived in turn.
Silence (such as that which occurs in nirvikalpa samadhi) is a generator of presence. The present contains the enigma of eternity, is the rose of the eternal rosebush, is something elusive measured with the imponderables instants. Individual consciousness is grounded on the opening to the nothingness of the moment, whose roots are sighs, breathing that silences the senses, breath-silence that becomes the sense organ for a new realm: inspiration. The moment is what dies and is born continuously, but it is also the door, the threshold to what has not yet been realized, where something different can happen. The opening of the moment is the basis of the opening of presence, and that is why speaking of Presence is analogous to speaking of Absence-Silence: everything that is coming into presence is leaving it at the same time, for the very fact that it is something that appears, and that implies that it will disappear sooner or later. Continuous birth and death, flow, and within that flow an evanescent moment of presence. Presence is stillness within movement, silence in the middle of the storm.
We could then understand the notion of presence as the instantaneous focusing of individual and collective consciousness due to a psychological silence (silence of the senses, silence of the social personae, silence of the Witness) that expands and transforms Soul formations and masks. In Presence, the masks become liminal. Presence is the unveiling of the “I Am”. This is the equivalent to an intensification of the process that leads from the limited to the Unlimited, from Form to the Virtual Flow.
Stillness and movement, silence and storm might appear simultaneously to an individual psyche. The stillness and the movement of presence are simultaneous, but if psychological silence has not been fully achieved, if there is a remnant of active personality in the presence, there is no simultaneous experience, and the inspiration is incomplete. A benign veil that allows our psychic structure to be maintained protects us from simultaneity, from non-duality. When the “I Am” is unveiled masks will burn. Remember Arjun’s encounter with the Absolute (Bhagavad Gita.Chapter 11).
Comments