On Feeling

Notes

1. Synchronicity was C. G. Jung’s name for a coincidence that joins an inner state to an outer event and is felt to mean something. Jung explained such coincidences by an acausal connecting principle, a link made by meaning where no cause runs, and he developed the idea with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli; their two essays first appeared together, in one volume, in 1952. Jung, “Synchronicity.” I keep his description and leave the explanation to him. My own guess, which no test could settle, is that what gets timed is the reaching and not the event: the world goes about its business, the Divine reaches the one who meets the moment from within, and the moment lands at a time that person reads as right. Some such moments turn a life, and many pass without consequence; how each is read depends on which way the one receiving it is turned. The “voice from beyond” is one name for that reaching, beyond perception and heard from within.

2. Wheeler, writing in Gravitation with Misner and Thorne, argued that quantum mechanics retires the classical observer, who watches from behind thick glass without taking part, in favor of a participator; he later pressed the point into what he called a participatory universe. Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, Gravitation; Wheeler, “Law without Law.” To say minds changed about the author the moment the page was written is to read that image from the inside. Two different things share the word observer here. The observer effect in physics concerns a physical measurement disturbing a physical system; it does not mean being perceived by other minds, and it does not require consciousness. What happens when a page is read and its author reconsidered is a fact about people. The borrowing is a figure, and I would rather name it than let it pass as physics.

3. The view that emotions are themselves a kind of perception has a long line behind it. In Richard Lazarus’s appraisal theory, every emotion rests on an appraisal of what an encounter means for a person’s well-being, and each has a core relational theme of its own: for fright, an immediate and overwhelming physical danger; for sadness, a loss that cannot be undone. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation. Jesse Prinz argues that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body that reliably track such themes in the world, embodied appraisals in his term. Prinz, Gut Reactions. Christine Tappolet argues that emotions are perceptual experiences of values, such as the fearsome or the admirable, and that like sensory experiences they have conditions under which they are correct. Tappolet, Emotions, Values, and Agency. Whether what a person knows and expects reaches perception itself, and not only attention and report, is disputed. Firestone and Scholl, “Cognition Does Not Affect Perception.” Journal One takes the stronger reading as the framework’s proposal, on which what a perspective knows and expects “enters the felt quality of the moment itself.” Johnson, Toward a Theory of Coherent Existence, Journal One, “Jays: The Fundamental Unit of Subjective Experience.” Calling a clear feeling a coherent perception is mine.

4. Two lineages meet here. Heraclitus held that a common logos orders all things, though most people live as if each had a private understanding of their own (fragment B2). Kahn, Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Jung gave the idea a modern form: a collective unconscious of shared structures, inherited beneath personal memory. Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. For a soberer, empirical version of the same intuition, see Brown, Human Universals, a catalog of traits reported in every known human society.

5. William James counted a “noetic quality” among the marks of mystical states: they seem to those who have them to be states of knowledge, “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” James, Varieties of Religious Experience. Reading prayer, contemplation, and altered states as different doors into one such clearing is the author’s gloss. The account of the ceremony in the text is secondhand, offered as report and not as evidence. On what is known about the state itself, see Strassman, DMT, and Timmermann et al., “DMT Models the Near-Death Experience,” which documents the experience and its resemblance to near-death accounts without settling what it means. Nothing here recommends that door.

6. Nicholas of Cusa placed the divine where opposites coincide, the coincidentia oppositorum. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance. Jung borrowed the phrase for the psyche’s reconciling of contraries. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis. Niels Bohr reached the same shape in physics through complementarity: a full account of nature can require descriptions that exclude each other. Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Admitted to the Danish Order of the Elephant in 1947, he chose for his coat of arms the motto contraria sunt complementa, opposites are complementary.

7. Heidegger held that Being-towards-death is what individualizes a life and makes an authentic one possible. Heidegger, Being and Time. The Pali suttas teach maraṇasati, mindfulness of death, and the Stoics kept a daily meditation on death that later Christian writers summed up as memento mori. Each, in its way, turns the thought of dying back on how one lives now.

8. Maslow’s hierarchy describes which needs tend to press hardest while they go unmet. It says nothing about putting oneself before others, and belonging, the most other-directed of the needs, sits below esteem and self-actualization. Maslow himself warned against “the false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 per cent before the next need emerges.” Maslow, “Theory of Human Motivation.” Less often quoted: in his later work he set transcendence beyond self-actualization, describing it as the highest and most inclusive levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating as ends rather than as means. Maslow, Farther Reaches of Human Nature; Koltko-Rivera, “Rediscovering the Later Version.” That later tier is the “something far greater than yourself” of the text. The familiar pyramid was never Maslow’s own drawing; the consultant Charles McDermid drew it in 1960, years before Maslow revised the model. Bridgman, Cummings, and Ballard, “Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid?” The advice to look after yourself so that you can look after others is the author’s own.

9. Blake subtitled his Songs of Innocence and of Experience “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul,” and held both to be true. Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Wordsworth asked, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?” and watched it “fade into the light of common day.” Wordsworth, “Ode.” The Gospel keeps the older counsel to turn and become as little children (Matt. 18:3). Calling maturity laid over innocence a superposition is a figure of speech borrowed from physics.

10. Johnson, On Growing.

11. This is the way of negation, the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, which approaches the divine through what cannot be said of it. Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works. Wittgenstein closed the Tractatus on the same threshold: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

12. Boethius defined eternity, God’s eternity, as the whole of unending life possessed at once, tota simul, which is a different thing from endless time. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, book 5, prose 6. To “fall out of the code” as time stops is the author’s extension of that to a human moment: a step out of succession toward something like that simultaneous whole.

13. Montaigne, after Cicero, wrote that to philosophize is to learn to die. Montaigne, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die.” Whitman went further: “And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” Whitman, “Song of Myself.” The gratitude here belongs to that family, a peace made with the end and no hurry toward it. The Grateful Dead took their name from a dictionary entry on a folktale motif, the ghost of a dead man showing gratitude to whoever saw to his burial; hearing the name as gratitude for one’s own death is mine.

14. That the inner condition shapes the experience is an old observation; Huxley made a version of it. Huxley, Doors of Perception. The phrase usually attached to it, set and setting, is associated with Timothy Leary in the early 1960s. Hartogsohn, “Constructing Drug Effects.” Read here as testimony and not as method: a person already at home in love and place reports having little left to be shown.

15. Jung named the single underlying reality of psyche and matter the unus mundus, the one world, a term he found in the alchemist Gerhard Dorn. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis. The Huayan Buddhists pictured it as Indra’s net, a web of jewels in which each one reflects all the others. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism. The Dzogchen term rigpa names an open awareness, recognized and never produced, in which the separation was not real to begin with. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Wonders of the Natural Mind.

16. If you came here to find someone who feels the same way, you found them. There’s always a reason to go on, I promise. If you are in the U.S., call or text 988 (the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or chat at 988lifeline.org, at any hour; anywhere else, findahelpline.com will point you to a line near you.

17. Spinoza held that a thing can be conceived as actual in two ways, as existing at a certain time and place or as contained in God and following by necessity from God’s nature, and that to conceive it the second way is to see it sub specie aeternitatis, under the form of eternity. Spinoza, Ethics, part 5, proposition 29, scholium. Reading the phrase as seeing one’s own life whole is mine. Paul Tillich called God the ground of being, being-itself and not a being among others, which is why “to just be” can carry such weight. Tillich, Systematic Theology. The hope in the text is the Trace in its plainest form: a life’s intent still moving through time after the life is over, carrying forward whatever was faced, the hurtful along with the kind.

18. The Pythagoreans heard the heavens as a harmonia, the motions of the stars sounding a concord; Aristotle reports the view in order to reject it. Aristotle, On the Heavens. The phrase “music of the spheres” came later. “Balancing Jays” is the author’s own phrase for the attunement the image suggests: felt moments, each lived by one person, leaning far enough the same way that a life stays in tune with the lives around it. What passes between the lives is what each moment leaves, its Trace, which the others take up into moments of their own.