Saying Hello

 

Saying hello

There is interaction between world and the body, or maybe you should describe it as transcendence and immanence, so as to not set up a dualistic environment of objects.

In experiential terms there is something received and there is what is received, so if you say “hello”, I receive something, and this something is the word “hello”. So I guess there is a verb, the receiving, and the noun the received.

If you follow Gendlins idea everything has a felt sense behind it, so even the word “Hello” does. Indeed this explains how when we talk we reply to our experience of words, we don’t translate them before replying, as indeed this would end up in an infinite regress.

I can in abstract say a word, for instance “Yesterday” and I can notice my experience of that, what comes to me as a felt sense as I turn my attention inwards having said this word. However when we speak which is much faster than this, there is no felt sense evident. You say “hello” then I may either say “hello” or ignore you, or do something else depending on how I am feeling.

The how I am feeling I may find out because of how I answer, or I could notice inside an emotion, or I could notice inside a felt sense of the all of me in this situation.

How I am feeling I guess is quite an intricate and complex thing. If we think of all things as being in process, we could think of the closed repeating homeostatic processes, of hunger, sleep and breath. We could think of open process, of the development of someone’s life like the tributary of a river, or we could think of the demanded process of someone’s life’s goals.

All of these myriad of processes are in action when you say “hello” and the felt sense would seem to be the feeling of all of this when you do say “hello”. If you think in Gestalt terms them “hello” is the figure and the rest of the processes are the ground. The felt sense of the figure is the outcome of our experience of all of it, of figure and ground. Again in Gendlin’s terms the figure and the ground are all process and are each the result of process of everything that it is interacting, the eveving to use his term.

So out of all of these processes it would seem that the figure “hello” is that which is carrying forward the rest. The thing is the felt sense of  “hello” doesn’t exist until you symbolise it. This symbolisation can happen merely by paying attention to it. So it’s a bit tricksy like this, as if you start looking for a felt sense then you are changing the environment from what in the above instance drew you to say “hello”, now there is all of that, and the desire to find the felt sense.