David Michael Levin (Redux)

[Balder]

On the previous IPS forum, I started a thread on the work of David Michael Levin -- primarily based on his book, The Opening of Vision.  [You can find an archived copy of the discussion here.]  Recently, I just picked up another of his books, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change, and the Closure of Metaphysics, and I have continued to appreciate his articulation of an embodied, postmetaphysical approach to spirituality (as well as psychological and social well being).  In The Opening of Vision, Levin explored the 'spiritual' possibilities inherent in the transformation of the field of vision or seeing; in The Listening Self, he approaches the transformation of the self (and society) in the context of a phenomenological hermeneutic exploration of the evolution of our listening.

 

As in The Opening of Vision, he traces out a developmental sequence which involves an hermeneutic recovery, and 'integration,' of a primordial form of embodied experience.  Here is his summary of the four main stages of this developmental process:

 

"Stage I

 

The first stage is one I am calling our Zugehorigkeit.  Taken from Heidegger, this word will refer to the fact of our inherence in, belonging to, and attunement by the dimensions of the auditory field as a whole.  Since this field, an utterly open, incommensurable matrix of sonorous energies, is how the Being of beings primordially manifests itself for the organs of our hearing, Zugehorigkeit is a pre-ontological understanding (or an ontological pre-understanding) of Being.  Heidegger never recognized in this Zugehorigkeit a pre-ontological understanding of Being.  Although he introduced this term into his texts because he wanted the auditory significance it carries (horig, gehorig) to resonate within the discourse he was setting in motion, he did not in fact use the term as we shall here, namely, to describe the hearing modality distinctive of our earliest infancy, when our hearing is minimally complex and is functioning with relatively little figure-ground articulation and little differentiation of the positional being of the listener from the encompassing being of the whole auditory field (the sonorous topology of Being) as a whole.

 

In this 'first' phase, our hearing may be said to inhere in, and be attuned by, the field of sonorous Being as a whole: the infant lives in a bodily felt inherence in the openness of the sonorous matrix and hears with -- hears through -- the entire body.  The infant's ears are the body as a whole.  Hearing in this rudimentary phase is global, holistic, syncretic, synergic, ek-static; it is an elemental hearing, deeply, symbiotically embedded in the elemental ecology of nature.  Our experiences during this phase are constellated under the influence of familiar feminine archetypes: the 'uroborus,' roundness, wholeness, openness, receptiveness, embodiment, feeling, communion with the matrix of soundings.  During this earliest phase of our lives, our hearing is pre-personal and pre-egological: since no selfconsciously continuous centre of experience has yet coalesced and no strong-boundaried ego-logical identity yet emerged, the auditory situation is not yet structured as subject with object.

 

By grace of this initial state, the gift of a primordial openness to the sonorous dimensionality of Being, the infant may be said to 'enjoy' the gift of a pre-ontological understanding of the Being of beings.  Naturally, the infant is not (much) conscious of this relationship with Being; nevertheless, this experience of being so related, with which, as a hearing being, the infant is always and already graced, is at work in all motivations, movements, and gestures: it is an understanding borne entirely by the auditory body as a whole.

 

In the next chapter, I shall tell this story -- about the embodiment of our pre-ontological understanding and the development of this initial gift -- in more detail.  Heidegger tells us only that there is a pre-ontological understanding of Being always assigned to us, and that we have an inveterate tendency to 'forget' it, to conceal it from ourselves.  He gives no account of our self-development in this regard; nor does he explicitly embody this pre-ontological understanding, although he writes of the fact that Dasein is always embodied.

 

In the process of socialization, we inevitably lose touch with this pre-ontological relationship to, and understanding of, Being; and as we mature, the utterly open dimensionality of our hearing is increasingly repressed -- sometimes getting psychotically split off.  This 'renunciation' of our primordial ecstasy is in fact a necessary condition for the further development of our auditory capacity.  What is unfortunate is not its Aufhebung, its sublimation, in stage II, but our continued abandonment of Being, in the time of our maturity.

 

Stage II

 

In the second phase, extending from later infancy to adolescence or adulthood, our hearing is gradually developed.  In the course of our socialization, the biological potential naturally manifests; by the time the infant is a year old, there is already, in fact, a well-developed auditory competence: the child can discriminate between and recognize many different sounds and sources of sound; can recognize different patterns of sound; can accurately imitate tones of voice.  Stage II culminates in a hearing that is personal, adequately skillful in meeting the normal demands of interpersonal living, and ruled over by the ego, which habitually structures all the auditory situations in which it finds itself in terms of subject and object.  In the modern age, this structuring has become peculiarly willful and oppositional: the auditory Gestalt, manifesting the distinctive character of our present historical situation, accordingly becomes an enframing -- a Gestell, obliterating the ontological dimensionality of the field.

 

Stage III

 

As adults, we are capable of assuming responsibility for our hearing; hearing is a skillfulness we can develop beyond what normal living, normal socialization, minimally requires of us.  In stage III, the individual is committed to further training, a practice of self-discipline.  By virtue of this commitment, this work on oneself, the self-responsible individual grows beyond an ego-logical identification and begins to live the more creative becoming of a Self.  Recognition of the difference between (the being of) the ego and (the being of) the Self is crucial.  Whereas the ego is a defensively adaptive structure identified with an essentially fixed, socially conforming content, the identity which begins to form in the work of stage III, the way of living I am calling the 'Self,' is an ongoing process of self-development, a structure of individuation creatively open to change, a structure organized by, and identified with, processes that carry forward learning and growth.

 

There are many different goals that can motivate such work on oneself.  We shall be considering four specific fields of self-disciplinary practice: in Chapter Four, the ecology of nature, the art of music, and the interactions of psychiatry; and in Chapter Five, the discourse of politics.  In Chapter Four, I will argue that, in the third stage of listening, we are essentially involved in developing our listening as a practice of compassion, increasing our capacity, as listeners, to be aware of, and responsive to, the interrelatedness and commonality of all sonorous beings.  (Although distinct from this compassion practice, the development of hearing as an aesthetic skill both contributes to, and is in turn advanced by, the development of hearing as an organ of compassion.  For the aesthetic is precisely the cultivation of sensibility, a deepening of our capacity for sensuous and affective appreciation.)  In Chapter Five, then, I will argue that the development of a deeper awareness of the reversibility dynamics in all auditory situations -- an awareness necessary for the emergence of a sense of justice, an understanding of reciprocity principles, and participation in rational processes of consensus formation -- is a third-stage development; and, moreover, that it is a developemnt which must take place, if our capacity for hearing is to be fulfilled in the good life of a just and democratic society.

 

Stage IV

 

Borrowing a term from Heidegger, we will be calling this stage 'hearkening' (das Horchen).  Very few people ever attempt to continue the development of their hearing beyond the kinds of skill belonging to stage III.  Even fewer attempt to do the kind of work necessary for the achievement of 'hearkening.'  Hearkening requires the disciplined practice of Gelassenheit, i.e. letting-go and letting-be, as a mode or style of listening.  In learning Gelassenheit, the art of 'just listening', listening without getting entangled in the ego's stories and preoccupations, one learns a different way of channelling, focusing, attending.  There is a restructuring of the figure-ground difference, with an awareness that it manifests the appropriation of the auditory field by the double tonality of the ontological difference.  Hearkening makes, or lets, this ontological difference -- the difference between beings and Being -- be manifest, be audible, within the Gestalt of the auditory situation. 

 

The Gestaltung of stage IV is a distinctively spiritual accomplishment.  The work of this stage begins with the practice of Gelassenheit and gradually performs an ontological recollection, a recollection of the utterly open dimensionality of the auditory field, as which the sonorous Being of beings manifests for our (properly) listening ears.  Though never finished, this recollection realizes and fulfills our potential as human beings in relation to the Question of Being.  With the achievement of this ongoing recollection, not as a cognitive operation separate from our listening, we may enjoy an authentically ontological relationship to, and an existentially meaningful understanding of, the Being of beings: in particular, (1) Being as such and (2) the dimensionality, the radical alterity, of other human beings.  The pre-ontological relationship and understanding that we once inhabited (during our infancy), and that we subsequently lost touch with in the course of our socialization (our ego-logical development), we begin to retrieve in stage IV, getting it back, this time, in a highly conscious, thoughtful, and articulate experience, meaningfully integrated into the auditory situations of our daily lives.

 

Our practice at stage IV is a practice that needs to take place under the influence of the feminine archetypes: there ust be an appreciation of and a recovery of experiencing modalities that, in our culture, have been traditionally constellated through these archetypes.

 

By virtue of our existential work, our channelling is opened up.  In this state, it 'invites' a gathering of all sonorous, audible beings from all sonorous dimensions, bringing them into a Gestalt that we will call, again borrowing from Heidegger, das Geviert -- the Fourfold.  Whereas, at stage II, the auditory Gestalt is enframing, is a Gestell, here the structure becomes a gathering of sonorous Being: a gathering mindful of its utterly open dimensionality, attentive to the primordial difference by grace of which all auditory structures are possible, and respectful of the incommensurability of the Being of sonorous beings, letting the inaudible be inaudible.

 

... The developmental model I am proposing in this study -- and not only the model, but also the design of the table [see below], which cannot accommodate a hermeneutical time-dimension -- will be open to some very destructive misunderstandings unless, anticipating them here, I can successfully ward them off by clarification.  That is what I shall now try to do.

 

First of all, it is essential to understand that the developmental process is not a straightforwardly linear progression, but rather a dialectic of sublimations and sublations: a dialectic for the evolution of which Hegel introduced the term Aufhebung.  In other words, each phase of the process is carried forward: not only transformed, but also preserved, as transformed, by the subsequent stage.  Thus, the first stage, Zugehorigkeit, is never entirely left behind, nor is it ever totally split off, when the infant undergoes the process of socialization.  To be sure, socialization gradually installs an ego-logically boundaried centre in the 'place' where an ecstatically open centre once functioned; but the auditory body always continues to bear within it some 'traces,' or an echo, of this primal experience with the sonorous dimensionality of Being.

 

In this regard, it is crucial to keep in mind that the 'primordial relationship with Being' attributed to infancy is a past that has never really been present -- a past that never was what it now, i.e., from the vantage point of stage IV, presents itself as having been.  Zugehorigkeit is a projection, a reconstruction, an understanding constituted after the fact, redeeming an experience that 'from the very beginning' fell short of itself; fell short, I mean, of being 'the beginning,' a primordial experience of the pure and total presence of Being...

 

...Even though there never was an 'original' experience with Being as absolutely pure and total presence in the first place, the advances of stage II are not achieved without a loss: a loss that we may call, using Heidegger's phrase, a 'loss of Being,' or a loss of contact with ecstasy (ek-stasis) of Being -- 'Being' understood here as the utterly open ek-static dimensionality of the auditory field, the sonorous field.  And yet, this loss of contact (which, as noted, never was an experience of pure presence) is not total, and therefore not irrevocable and irremediable: by grace of our embodiment, echoes of our earliest experience with the Being of sonorous field are preserved and continue to resonate, so that, later in life, after the ego is firmly established, it becomes possible to 'return' to these echoes, not only making contact with our bodily felt sense of that pre-ontological openness -- whatever sense of that 'primordial ecstasy' we may now, by virtue of some directed exertion, be able to feel -- but also 'retrieving' it and freeing it for an ongoing integration into present living.

 

In principle, then, the infant's experience of Zugehorigkeit, a 'primordial' inherence in the openness and wholeness of Being, is always to some degree retrievable.  And when it is retrieved, it is always also more than retrieved, as well as less, since it is only nachtraglich, after the fact and belatedly (as Freud would perhaps have wanted to suggest), that this experience, which the infant lived through without (much) consciousness, gets to be recognized for what it was (is) and accordingly comes to be understood as an ontological relationship.  The 'retrieval' therefore retrieves in two senses:  it brings back what was 'forgotten'; but it also redeems it by 'making' it what it never was.

 

The recollection of Being -- the very same movement by which we grow beyond our ego-logical identifications -- is a hermeneutical movement: we must first 'go back' to Zugehorigkeit, 'back,' as it were, to the 'beginning,' in order to develop beyond the ego-logical stage of ontological forgetfulness in listening.  Or rather, to state this point more accurately, since in truth this 'beginning,' this 'origin,' can never be retrieved now as it actually was then, we must first generate within ourselves a presently felt sense of our 'pre-ontological beginning.'  This movement forward, this growth, requires a hermeneutical movement backward: a movement, however, that must not be confused with an infantile or psychotic regression.  It is essential to understand the difference between this hermeneutical 'return' and a pathological regression.  Regression is a movement in one direction only; it repeats what came earlier instead of redeeming it; and it is always a movement, therefore, that closes the process of personal growth.

 

We are always free, of course, to continue living in the stage II reality of anyone-and-everyone (das Man), virtually deaf to the dimensionality of Being that resounds all around us.  But after we have achieved the maturity of stage II, we can still continue to grow, committing ourselves to a practice of the Self by virtue of which we begin to grow beyond the ontologically alientated condition of being-an-ego to find ourselves more opened up to this dimensionality of Being and enjoying a spiritual wholeness not otherwise possible.  The hearkening of stage IV, a gathering embrace of whatever may be given to our ears for their hearing, is an achievement that brings with it a self-fulfillment altogether different from that which comes at stage III: a self-fulfillment that is not possible at all in stage II."  (Levin, 1989, pp. 45-56)

 

[I will include Levin's table of the stages of listening here later this evening, once I have a chance to copy it out]

 

 

[Edward theurj Berge]

As you know I was quite interested and active in the previous Levin thread, and incorporated much of Levin into my own cross-paradigmatic IPN understanding. I also referenced Goddard and Washburn in that thread, as there are some not surprisingly similar themes on this integration process. But does Levin prescribe new technology for attaining this process? As we're discussing in the IPN thread, will the old methods suffice?

[Balder]

Yes, I remember; that was one reason I was inspired to type up this passage from his book. And, interestingly, I was just thinking about this thread in relation to your IPN thread and your discussion of the need for new methods. I don't know the answer to your question, yet, but will let you know once I've read a little more of this book.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Levin gives some clues to a new methodology above.

Hearkening requires the disciplined practice of Gelassenheit, i.e. letting-go and letting-be, as a mode or style of listening. In learning Gelassenheit, the art of 'just listening', listening without getting entangled in the ego's stories and preoccupations, one learns a different way of channelling, focusing, attending.

I am reminded of the practice of vipassana, just observing the breath, listening to the sounds that arise and fall away, watching thoughts float by on scudding clouds. And perhaps more importantly, observing the self that observes all of that, the ego turned on itself, allowing for awareness to disidentify with a self, at least for a moment or two. In this sense the method is not new but rather is ancient. So what makes it different?

Our practice at stage IV is a practice that needs to take place under the influence of the feminine archetypes: there ust be an appreciation of and a recovery of experiencing modalities that, in our culture, have been traditionally constellated through these archetypes.

I am reminded of Lakoff's metaphors for the differences between contemporary political parties, the stern father and the nurturing mother. That we are moving from the former conservative to the latter liberal "archetype," if you will. And the mother is much more apt at unconditional love for her child, much more apt to listen without judgment, to accept and nourish whatever the child brings home from its adventures. So perhaps our contemporary contemplative practice per above is different in that it is not so much above focus and concentration as it is about openness and allowing. As a sage once sang:

Mother Mary comes to me
speaking words of wisdom
let it be, let it be.

But again, this is not a return to the former matriarchical mode that arose with horticulture. It is not a return to the kind of Goddess worship akin to witchcraft and paganism. It is as Levin notes:

It brings back what was 'forgotten'; but it also redeems it by 'making' it what it never was.

As Meredith Brooks once sang:

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover
I'm a child, I'm a mother
I'm a sinner, I'm a saint
I'm a bitch, I'm a tease
I'm a goddess on my knees

[Edward theurj Berge]

Along the lines of hearkening a feminine that never was I'm reminded of John Caputo, from The Weakness of God (IUP, 2006):

"The name of God is the name of an event rather than of an entity, of a call rather than of a cause, of a provocation or a promise rather than of a presence.... I shift from the register of strength to that of weakness, from a robust theology of divine power...and omnipotence to the thin theology of the weakness of god, from the noise of being to the silence of an unconditional call" (12).

[Edward theurj Berge]

And hearken back to this discussion of Lady Gaga, how she is a postmodern, postmetaphysical, nondual hermaphrodite, an old kind of feminine in a new way.

[Balder]

I skipped around in the book a little to get a sense of where he was going, and whether he offered any specific "practices." You've already hit on two of them -- hearkening, which he likens to Gendlin's focusing or Zen shikantaza; and a renewed emphasis on feminine archetypes.

Regarding the former, he writes:

Since hearkening, the fourth stage, or centre, of listening, is a recollection that demands of us the greatest openness to Being of which we are capable, it is a mode of perceptiveness that we can only achieve by cultivating our capacity for feeling and restoring the connection between feeling and listening. This means, in the important terminology that Eugene Gendlin has introduced, not only that we need to listen to our body's felt sense of its Befindlichkeit (how we are faring in the various situations of life in which we find ourselves), but also that we need to learn a listening which listens with this bodily felt sense. In other words, we need to cultivate a listening that is deeply rooted in our body's felt sense of situated being.

He also touches on a few other practices, including a social communicative practice (a la Habermas) and a proposal to seek, in this context, the conditions of an "ideal listening situation" to complement H's ideal speech situation -- which is first broached and cultivated at stage III, apparently, and then deepened at stage IV. Other suggested practices relate to the cultivation of aesthetic dimensions of listening (through music and cultivation of attention to natural environments).

In one of his endnotes, besides referencing Zen in several places, I notice he briefly discusses Tarthang Tulku's TSK vision:

I especially recommend Tarthang Tulku (1977) Time, Space, and Knowledge, Berkeley, Calif.: Dharma Publishing. This book contains a treasury of practical exercises, based on ancient Tibetan Buddhist wisdom, to facilitate the transformation of our habitual way of experiencing ourselves as living in time. I would add that, because of the connection between listening and time, and the way these two figure in the identity of the self, the development of our capacity for listening can change our experiencing of time -- and, conversely, changes in the way we live time, changes in the way we experience ourselves as being-in-time, or being-timed, can affect the way we listen, e.g., increasing our listening patience and our tolerance of silence.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Indeed practices of the body in situated space are key to the cogscipragos of American pragmatism, of how more complex metaphor is built upon more primitive image schemeas of exactly this kind. Mark Johnson, one of those cogscii, in his new book also emphasizes the aesthetic element related to this, as in dance. And of course they've always been about the nondual relationship of self-other and inner-outer that is interactive, i.e., a social communicative practice a la Habermas, who got a lot of this from Mead, another of the cogscii. (Btw, Johnson considers Levin as part of this tradition.)

Which brings me to the shift in emphasis of meditation per se from a strictly individual event to more of an interactive event. The former is more of the rugged individualism type that still posits an individual ego self that arises in response to the other-outside whereas the latter recognizes, like the cogscipragos, that it arises within the matrix, if you will. Hence more "feminine" and interactive meditative practices are developing like insight dialogue and what Jana is experimenting with instead of the typical individual meditation practice of sitting in a room, alone together, doing our own practice but not interacting.

All of which reminds me of dance as one of my interactive meditative practices. Even in couples dancing there are those that dance alone while together, not dancing together as a unit. And the latter is the key to partner dancing, to creating an event-performance that is more than the individuals alone, that is about connection and communication, about felt sense, about the body in space. And not just the physical body but also about creating emotional and aesthetic bodies in their own spaces, in time, with knowledge. It is a most delicious TSK practice.

[Balder]

In a previous post, I mentioned I was going to type up Levin's table depicting the Four Stages of Listening (correlated with several other developmental models). I can't get it to copy here with the correct formatting, so I am attaching it as a document.

[Balder]

Here's a rather poetic passage from his section on Hearkening:

"When I hear a flock of geese flying high over the lake, there is a sense in which I am there where they are, as well as here, in my house. Perception spans the distance of space; it reaches out in all directions around me, forming a ring, a sphere, that extends as far as I can perceive. And I am everywhere within that sphere -- to the extent that I am attentive, alert, caring. But in any case, our hearing is always a gathering.

Always -- but also not yet. For, as I have argued, our hearing is a gift that we can cultivate and develop. Our hearing can always become more responsive, more caring, more compassionate. We can become more concerned about -- or take more of an interest in -- a more extensive world, extending the reach and range of our listening, making this extension a practice.

Then we would hear things we had never heard before. And we would begin communicating with people we had never listened to before. We would find ourselves affected by these people, these strangers very near and very far, and our lives might be correspondingly changed. When we make our way through city streets, we would gather up into our ears all the sounds of city life: beautiful sounds, ugly sounds, painful sounds, joyful sounds, threatening sounds, peaceful sounds, sounds of human kindness, sounds of evil -- people conversing, crying, shouting, fighting, greeting, and parting; the sounds of fire trucks and ambulances; the engines of cars, taxis, buses; trucks loading and unloading; doors opening and closing; the sounds of radios and television sets; the laughter and music of bars and restaurants; the sounds of an old building being torn down and of a new one being built; the sounds of a piano drifting through an open window; airplanes humming overhead, taking us with them to all parts of the world; the horn of a tugboat in the harbour ... The sounds of human life, a song of mortal existence, gathering all sounds, without exception, without passing judgment.

Leaving the city for a while, we would begin a kind of communion with the animals of nature. We would hear, as never before, the wild song of nature's world: the wind whispering through the pines, the creaking of an old oak, the waves breaking on the rocks, a muskrat jumping into the lake, a night heron about to take flight, the mating call of the tree frogs. We would hear all these sounds, all these soundful presences, gathered into the ring of a melodious song -- a mandala of resonant beings, each one a centre of vibrant energy, each one, alive with its own song, contributing to the ring of a gathering.

The gatherings of sound I am trying to evoke here are gatherings that are possible only when our listening suspends its normal and habitual judgments -- liking and disliking, approving and disapproving, accepting and rejecting. Since this gathering is always happening, whether or not we are present and aware, one may say that it is already taking place -- that when we become aware of such a gathering, we realize that it has always and already been happening. Nevertheless, the 'already' must be followed by 'not yet,' or 'not at this moment,' because there is a world of difference between the gathering already taking place without our awareness and understanding, and the gathering that can take place only by virtue of a guardian awareness and an ontological understanding, relating the gathering to the song of Being as such. The gathering we are thinking through, here, is a gathering that comes as a gift to our ears when we have developed the art, the skill, of 'just listening.' It is a gathering that comes only when we let go and let be, letting whatever sounds forth have all the time-space, all the silence, all the openness and otherness of being it wants.

Only when we are able to give soundful beings this openness will they sound forth in a gathering of their songs. For it is the embrace of our openness, our silence, which gathers them into a great ring of sound, the melodious Gestalt that Heidegger called the Geviert, the Fourfold, a cosmological, cosmophonic mandala in which gods and mortals, earth and sky come together, echoing each other's songs. It is our embrace which gathers them; and it is our letting-go, our letting-be, which lets them sing with the resonance of the field as a whole, gathering into their ring the song of Being itself. There is, of course, a time and a place to be judgmental, accepting and rejecting. But there is also great value, a wisdom we can bring into daily life, in learning a Gelassenheit that embraces all sonorous beings and welcomes all sounds, regardless of their nature. If, even once, we have experienced this gathering of sound, all our listening encounters thereafter will benefit from the ontological spaciousness we would give to them" (Levin, 1989, pp. 255-257).

[Edward theurj Berge]

I am reminded of listening to and conversing with birds as a young boy. On Saturday mornings I would get up early before sunrise and walk over to a neighbor's house that had a enclosed entryway where sounds were magnified. I'd listen intently to a nearby bird's song and then imitate it with my good whistling skills. I'd imitate it so well that the bird would look askance, as if to say "he understands me," and he would then vary his song by a note or two. I would again imitate it to his delight, whereupon he'd try another variation. After I'd imitate that one I'd try a variation of my own to his surprise, and he would try to imitate mine. This would go back and forth for what seemed like hours. This is how I learned music.

I still do this practice on occasion in the mornings when I walk out to my car before work. I take a few minutes to just go back and forth with the nearby birds. These Texas birds definitely have an accent with which I'm not accustomed. Then again, they are a bit surprised by my own repertoire from various parts of the country. I often imagine that when I'm dying the singing birds will be what I last perceive. Not a bad way to go.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Mark Johnson discusses Gendlin in Chapter 7 of Levin's book Language Beyond Postmodernism. (Parts of it are available in the free Google books preview.) Apparently much of it is repeated in Chapter 4 of MJ's own more recent book, The Meaning of the Body. Since I have the latter at home checked out from the library I'll peruse this later and report.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I get the feeling that Genlin thinks/believes that we can directly access some, if not all, of what is considered inaccessible by the likes of L&J, i.e., the cognitive unconscious. I've looked into Gendlin's methods on his home page and am reminded of some of the nonsense we learned in massage school in the 80s, that the "body's" wisdom can speak to us directly in language. For example, one exercise is to feel into our stomach and ask it what it's feeling and then let it "speak." As if what we say it is "thinking" will be accurate. It's like that nonsense applied kinesiology, where our bodies can read a piece of paper naming a vitamin and choose the correct one and the correct dosage. Same ridiculous principle. And I'm really, really into my bodies, including the very subtle (though not the so-called causal, at least as it's metaphysically formulated).