I wanted to write a cogent response to Jampa’s question on “No View” that came up in this session. The question was something like does lyric culture advocate, or include, or is based on “No View.” I understood the phrase “No View” in the context of Zen, and I have also heard Soryu Forall, specifically, talk about it, and I am assuming that is the context that the question was being asked--- so that was the context I am working with here.
First, I want to say that Lyric Culture itself really doesn’t have much to do with “No View” as a teaching or a practice. Although, as I tried to say in my response, I hope there is nothing in Lyric Culture that gets in the way or, or obstructs the experience or revelation of “No View.” Having said that, I am not a teacher of esoteric Zen, and so do not include it in my work. Having said that I do have a lot to say about “No View.” And I thought I would take the time to explicate that here, and if this is successful --- although I haven’t a clue about what success is in this case --- it might make itself into “the book.” There will be an entire chapter on “No Self” --- which is a teaching I problematize in several aspects, without, I hope, tearing the core out of the teachings.
Secondly, I want to get into this response by making the case for something more ordinary. I used to teach a lot about a-perspectivity. So let’s start there. This will come in two parts --- 1) reflecting on perspectives in the ordinary sense of the word, i.e. first, second, third and forth person perspectives (I know, they have added more!).. and then 2) talking about paradigmatic thinking which is beyond perspectival thinking.
OK. So the baby is born with what Gendlin would call “first person process which is not a perspective.” Call this 0. Then at some point around 9 months old (at the beginning of object constancy) the child learns something about the objective 3-person perspective. They begin to relate to themselves reflexively in this 3-person perspective as “me.” The “me” is the object that exists for the parent, and it reflexes back to the child. Around 18 months - 3 years (the period is long, because it grows in increasing sophistication) the child learns that the other person has a perspective on objective reality, that you don’t have (and vice versa)… Chimpanzees have this, too, because they know when they have hidden the banana from the dominant monkey who is on the other side of the column. Year by year, groan by aching groan, the person learns that people have perspectives on all kinds of abstract things that are different from theirs. Apparently, most people are stunted in this at some point in their lives. But I digress. Eventually the child understands themselves as a unique, 1-st person perspective (the self-other thing kinda arises together). At this point the child often becomes petulant with their parents about voicing their 1st person perspective!
If you listen to a debate between 19 year olds, you will hear that they are constantly switching perspectives. If the “objective argument” is loosing steam, then they will switch to a 1st-person narrative. And if this doesn’t work, they will illicit 2nd-person confirmation. This is the “first tier sliding food fight” that Ken Wilber complained about. So at this stage the person can take multiple perspectives, but they are not really skillful in switching or choosing perspectives. This is where Ken Wilber’s work comes in to play. Teaching people to have choice in their perspectives, and to monitor what are all the perspectives in play. This is called multi-perspectival. It’s what AQAL was about. I won first place in alternative theory at the second Integral Theory Conference for a presentation called “From AQAL to A-perspectival” --- which was an onboarding to “No View” since I made the distinction between perspective and view in my paper. But that is getting ahead of the story.
There are several skill levels beyond multi-perspectival. The first is cross-perspectival. This is basically a meta-move where you take, for example, a third person perspective on a first person perspective, a la cognitive science, let’s say. Or you take a first person perspective on a third person perspective, when a cognitive scientist realizes that their research was biased by some personal self-interest or something.
Next up is trans-perspectival. This is the ability to sense into what is the “home perspective” or “native perspective” that the other is coming from, and to be able to adopt that perspective when engaging them. When the other person switches perspectives, you switch too, basically becoming their “following partner” in a tango.
Now take these last two and switch it to cross-paradigmatic and trans-paradigmatic. Cross-paradigmatic is using one paradigm (let’s say indigeneous thinking) to look at another (say, modernity). Trans-paradigmatic then, is to be able to surf all the paradigms that come your way, including cross paradigmatic, by entering into “their view.”
So far so good?
Now we come to Gebser’s notion of a-perspectival. It begins with the trans-paradigmatic asking themselves a question:
If I am always entering a view to access/meet another’s view,\ then what is the view that I am coming from?
And hear you get to the experience of “No View.” The person who freely and skillfully enters another’s view comes from “No View.” In my “award winning” paper I defined “view” as “degrees of freedom.” So I don’t teach “No View” --- I ask “What are the degrees of freedom in your view?”
When I taught the MA in Consciousness Studies, we followed a kind of survey of topics. One weekend I would be teaching integral theory, and I would answer/advocate from that view. The next weekend I would be teaching Gebser, and I would advocate/anser from that view. Eventually people would ask me “But what do you really believe?” And I would honestly say, “to answer that question, I first experience something like a chess board grid--- I am the queen, I can move in all directions, so which square do I want to move to in order to answer?
Now one might think this is a kind of Burian’s Ass problem. If you are a-perspectival, then how do you choose? Well, that’s easy. You choose because you are in service to the other. What is the other attempting to disclose? How can you support that disclosure?
Second answer. On View. I am skeptical of the Zen people who talk about “No View” because they can never explain it clearly, and I have tried above to explain it more clearly, but maybe I too have failed, and maybe I don’t know what they are talking about. There is an important caveat here. The absence of a perception is not the same as the perception of the absence of a perception This answer succumbs to Buddhistic gobble-di-gook so I won’t spend much time here. Just share an analogy: When I am in deep dreamless sleep, my body goes into sleep paralysis. I can’t feel my body. That is the absence of a perception. By contrast, frequently in the early stages of meditation, I can’t perceive my body. This is not dissocation in the ordinary sense, because I also don’t have much mental activity. I only have this awareness that I can’t find my body. I look to find my right shoulder, or my left knee… and I can’t find it. (OK I have an entire explanation of what is happening here, but that would be a big digression). The point is in this second sense I have the perception of an absence. So map this onto the notion of No View, wherein the absence of view is not the same as the perception of the absence of view. I’ll leave that to the meditators to sort out.
Third (and final, sort-of, answer, where it matters most). I once was off-grid with some college friends. I stupidly cut my left thumb down to the bone while cutting potatoes. When I saw my thumb dangling there, I fainted. A few minutes (??) later, I woke up. More precisely, I experienced the coming-to-consciousness process. I remember “seeing” the fireplace, but it was like I didn’t know what “a fireplace” was. I just was taking in the perceptual information without assigning it meaning “a fireplace.” Then I looked to the right and saw “a person” but really didn’t see them in that kind of gestalt “a person,” and then to the left, another “person.” I would say this is the experience of “No View” but it is not the perception of the absence of view. I wasn’t confused, because I wasn’t perceiving that I had no view, and subtly wondering or pondering that that was the case. There were simply no frames to organize the perceptual experience into. I remember, then I saw my thumb, wrapped up in some kind of towel or something, and an entire frame slowly descended on the scene --- the memory of cutting potatoes, my friends, driving from the school … quite slowly, it all started to supply the background from which the foreground “came into view.”
One last comment:
The entire field of relevance realization has something upside down about it. There is the question of the “mind struggling to find what is relevant in the salience landscape.” But this is not what I experienced. Absent the framework, my mind didn’t struggle at all. It was a mind at peace. It was the body, that slowly, but surely, and willingly supplied the mind with a framing --- a view --- in which it could function and carry forward.
But that is another story.