Meaning what you read

Facts or beliefs, once formulated, are in the public domain; but their actual meanings cannot be made public.

Only you personally can mean, at the moment, the sign you are reading. You can do that by investing in it your own experience of the object of the sign. That is the water of life which can revive the dry bones of a published text. But that’s a third-person view. From your point of view as reader, what you do is to let the text speak from experience. Without this ‘letting it mean’, the text is just a bag of tricks and traps – canned information, facts, opinions, stories and so forth. Reading those things into the text, rather than ‘letting it mean,’ is another kind of trap, though. For a maxim that might avoid both traps, try this: Let your body mean the text.

Real learning can occur only in dialogue with one’s body.

— Gendlin (1981, 160)

Gendlin’s ‘focusing’ technique requires the practitioner to let the answers to her questions come from her body, rather than getting caught in a repetitive verbal routine. The body, then – rather than some external authority figure, or some ‘visionary’ projection – is trusted as the source of revelation which can turn into new guidance. Once this has been grounded in the practice of attending to the immediately felt body, then the habitual boundaries we draw around what can be felt as ‘body’ can fall away. Perhaps it is only when the whole earth is your body that you can really learn from scientific inquiry. And only when precepts are realized in the practice of interaction with other earthlings can you really learn what they mean.

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