Breathe! The Experience of the Body in Passive Contemplation

Abstract

Phenomenological research has focused on embodiment. This paper examines how the body is experienced in passive contemplation, understood as a finite province of meaning in Alfred Schutz’s sense. The six features characteristic of any province of meaning (epoché, form of spontaneity, tension of consciousness, sense of self, temporality, and sociality) function distinctively in each province of meaning and alter one’s experience of one’s body. In the foundational province of pragmatic everyday life, one transforms deliberately and bodily the surrounding world, but this experience undergoes modifications in the religious/spiritual contemplative province. To clarify passive contemplation, the paper develops, as a contrast, active contemplation, the active, restless pursuit of chains of appresentational symbols and images. In passive contemplation, one separates from everyday life, orients toward unity rather than dialogue with God, refrains from following appresentative chains, and relaxes one’s tension of the consciousness/body (e.g., through breathing), single-mindedly attending to God’s presence. One can trace passive contemplation genetically to a primordial entwinement with one’s mother’s body, in which subjective/objective boundaries are blurred (as in Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh”). In passive contemplation, one assumes an often-wordless social role (child, lover) toward God and abides tranquilly in the present rather than moving distractedly toward any future.

1. Introduction

“What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.”

Thomas Merton (1981, p. 41)

Over the past decades, there has been a renaissance in phenomenological studies of religious/spiritual experience, including the French “theological turn”, which has envisioned methodological routes through hermeneutics (Ricoeur) or through analyses, for example, of the following: the experiences of life (Henry); the ethical encounter with another (Levinas); or a loving encounter with God, not as Being, but through an icon or the Eucharist (Marion). Others have focused on the experience of transcendence (De Roo), of an object more akin to the invisible givens of quantum theory (Louchakova-Schwartz), or of nature and wilderness (Ó Murchada, Nitsche). Classical phenomenology a la Max Scheler has emphasized the religious act and its relationship to its object (God). This paper, more in Scheler’s line, is based on a central essay by Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities”, which describes how diverse experiences of different objects occur within encompassing finite provinces of meaning, in contrast to William James’s view that there are distinctive ontological sub-universes. For Schutz, such provinces appear within the “life-world”, understood as a vast domain of experience preceding the adoption of the phenomenological reduction. In his essay, he treats specifically the finite provinces of pragmatic everyday life, dreaming, phantasy, and theoretic science. Provinces of meaning consist in overarching conscious attitudes (similar to the “natural” or “phenomenological” attitudes), with each province exhibiting, in different ways, six features of a cognitive style. Therefore, each province commences with an epoché analogous to the formal phenomenological epoché. For instance, one enters the province of dreaming when one falls asleep or the province of drama when the curtain opens and recognizes that the rules of pragmatic everyday life no longer govern. Other features include a form of spontaneity, tension of consciousness, experience of oneself (in a role), temporality, and—of importance for Schutz—unique types of social relationships. Schutz’s essay can be understood in the same terms that he describes his magnum opus The Phenomenology of the Social World, namely as a phenomenological psychology. In his essay, such a phenomenological psychology describes varieties of human experience (phantasy or dreaming), which can be illuminated by kinds of scientific analyses (such as anthropology or psychology) that themselves proceed from within the theoretical-contemplative province of meaning and that can also provide examples and insights on which phenomenology might draw critically.

Schutz himself mentions, but never develops, the idea of the finite province of meaning of religious/spiritual experience, and there has been little work in this area. However, I have developed, in recent publications with Springer Press, a phenomenology of religious experience as an emancipative province of meaning and a phenomenology of religious ritual. Continuing this trajectory in this paper, I utilize Schutz’s idea of finite provinces of meaning to describe two different types of religious contemplation, active and passive contemplation. After presenting how one experiences one’s body in pragmatic everyday life according to Schutz, I will focus on the different ways in which one experiences one’s body in these two types of contemplation, which, in effect, represent two distinctive sub-provinces of meaning within the religious-contemplative province of meaning. In active contemplation, a clear example of which appears in Schutz’s account in “Symbol, Reality, and Society” of the episode of Jacob’s ladder in Genesis, Jacob finds himself bodily keyed-up to follow a series of rapid, symbolic, appresentative linkages passively suggesting each other and culminating in the transcendent itself. However, one experiences one’s body differently in passive or infused contemplation in which one seeks to refrain from movement and activity and to rest in the presence of the transcendent, as has been articulated in accounts of “centering prayer” (Merton, Pennington, and Keating) and Christian meditation (Main and Freeman) (Ryan 1995, pp. 40–41, 64–65). Given Merton’s understanding of the place of the body in passive contemplation, which he finds exemplified most clearly in a particular mode of “breathing”, as will be explained below, and which he encapsulates in the epigram stated at the outset of this paper, it seems fitting to include the term “Breathe!” in the very title of this essay.

2. Experience of the Body in Pragmatic Everyday Life

The form of spontaneity in pragmatic everyday life Schutz (1962c, p. 212) denominates as “working”, that is, “action in the outer world, based upon a project and characterized by the intention to bring about the projected state of affairs by bodily movements.” Schutz (1962c, pp. 209–28) tells us that we seek to dominate the world, modifying and changing its objects and their relationships and that this attempted mastery of the world entails striving to overcome obstacles, to draft projects, and to realize them. One’s body is extraverted toward the object-world, subordinated to some longer-range project, and instrumentally involved in modifying objects in the outer world for the sake of that project. It is a body that is tensed, geared up, and ordered toward exercising control over its material environment.

Following on this form of spontaneity, one can see a distinctive temporality at play in pragmatic everyday life. While one might find one’s body engaged in the present tense with the sub-acts that lead to the realization of the future purpose that governs and gives meaning to those sub-acts, all the sub-acts have a future orientation about them that may lie on the horizons of one’s present attempts to realize the sub-acts. One can never take one’s eye completely off the future, and one has to monitor continually whether the outcomes realized by sub-acts are suitable for the long-range project, whether alternative new sub-acts may need to be implemented, or whether the whole project itself needs revision. Therefore, one could say that a concern, more or less anxious, about practicability plays a role in choosing a project of action from the start, as well as at every stage of carrying out that project (Schutz 1962a, pp. 74–77; 2011, p. 156). Here, the body exhibits an ongoing alertness, responsiveness, and flexibility toward unforeseen contingencies and outcomes.

It is no wonder that Schutz, in spelling out the features of everyday life’s cognitive style, considers its tension of consciousness, whose conception Schutz (1962c, p. 213) borrows from Henri Bergson, to be the highest, a matter of what Schutz (1962c, p. 213) calls “wide-awakeness.” Such a tension of consciousness converges with Bergson’s idea of perception actively engaged with matter, which, according to Matter and Memory, stands at a pole opposite to memory, particularly pure memory. At the pole of “matter”, paralleling Schutzian wide-awakeness, Bergson (1920, p. 94, see p. 93) claims that we are so busily engaged that we are not allowed to turn our eyes to the left or right or “even, for the most part of our time, behind”; that we minimize any uninhibited flow of memory images in favor of relying only on motor memories; and that we keep our aim at the future and “dart” ahead of ourselves to grasp what might be anticipated—all at the service of our willingness to realize the project (Bergson 1920, p. 155, see also pp. 179–80, 185). By contrast, in pure memory, the restraints imposed for the sake of the project to be realized are taken off, and “pure memory” is released and emerges as a flow of rich, lively, colorful images, surfacing often from one’s past, and rushing “along with a dizzy rapidity” (Bergson 1920, pp. 130, 155; Bergson 1950, pp. 195, 223). Such images provoke associations with logically unconnected and passively synthetically elicited images, as might happen in the finite province of meaning of dreaming, when daisies on a green lawn evoke the image of a billiard table (Bergson 1920, p. 128; 1950, p. 217).

Because Schutz (1962c, pp. 210–11) never dissociates consciousness from the body and conjoins them, for instance, in his discussion of essentially actual experiences, we are entitled to assume that any tension of consciousness would be experienced holistically, encompassing one’s body, which in working would find itself constrained by the overarching project, phantasied in future perfect tense, and by the need to focus on anticipated outcomes and revise one’s sub-acts or the project itself insofar as new, perhaps project-threatening, data come to light. In other words, one must be ever alert to whatever new adjustments might be called for, ever a step ahead of oneself, with one’s body accordingly more tensed than in pure memory or dreaming.

By contrast, if one gets out from under the restrictions of a governing purpose (as it defines everyday life’s form of spontaneity), one’s correlatively more relaxed tension of consciousness would permit the unleashing of rapid spontaneous activities, as Bergson suggests. For instance, in the finite province of religious/spiritual ritual experience, one would experience a more fluid unconstrained tension of consciousness, such as might appear in appresentative chains, as when symbols like candles, vestments, or food evoke passive syntheses with each other or with the transcendent. Schutz (1962e, pp. 337–38) provides an example of such an appresentative chain when in “Symbol, Reality, and Society”, he recounts the story from Genesis of Jacob’s ladder. In that narrative, which not coincidentally occurs within a dream, a stone appresents a pillow that appresents a pillar that appresents God’s house, and the entire chain appresents God, who was in that place even though Jacob knew it not. Furthermore, one would no doubt sense one’s body as being correlatively relaxed in this religious/spiritual province of meaning in which one’s consciousness is uncoupled from the need to realize a future project and one glides from one not necessarily logically linked image to another.

One’s experience of oneself, another of the features of the cognitive style of everyday pragmatic life, involves living in one’s ongoing working acts directed toward the objects encountered and purposes pursued. One experiences oneself as the originator of one’s actions and as one who is undivided, uninterrupted by reflecting on oneself, refraining from indulging in loosely connected phantasies, or putting in place any epoché that might separate oneself from pragmatic everyday life (Schutz 1962c, p. 216). When one implements such an epoché to enter into a non-everyday province of meaning, such as falling asleep to begin dreaming or walking in a procession to commence a ritual, one finds oneself (when reflecting on oneself) bifurcated insofar as one occupies another province of meaning over against that of everyday life from which one has just departed. Therefore, by contrast, to preserve the unity of everyday working, it makes sense that the epoché of the natural attitude is a matter of refusing to doubt everyday life, to ward off any movement that might take one away from everyday life and divide one’s attention (Schutz 1962c, pp. 216, 229). Such single mindedness and self-regimentation leaves a body directed and tightened up.

In the place where Schutz (1962c, p. 222) in “On Multiple Realities” treats most specifically the body, in subsection number six of Part I on the “strata of reality in the everyday world of working”, his mention of working (everyday life’s form of spontaneity) would lead one to consider the treatment of the body in this section as pertaining to the feature of the form of spontaneity, although this section also seems to be getting at how one experiences oneself also. Following Husserl, Schutz (1962c, pp. 222–23) endorses the idea that, in working, one’s body is at the 0-point of a system of spatial and temporal coordinates, in relation to which spatial loci, such as right or left and up and down, are situated and out from which segments of temporality, such as future and past, extend. From this 0-point, the manipulatory area, the world within reach, takes precedence, since it makes possible immediate contact with the objects that everyday working life engages. The body at the center of all our experience, however, is not static, but active, able through locomotion or bodily movement to reach distant objects, which, if they prove to be optical illusions, are not really existent, and, when we reach them, “do not pertain to the world of my working” (Schutz 1962c, p. 222). In addition, Schutz (1962c, p. 222) discusses how one is able to shift one’s bodily location through locomotion and thereby to reach worlds within restorable reach (return to places where one had been before or, in parallel fashion, retrieve, through memory, moments one has already lived through). Likewise, one can move in a future direction toward worlds within attainable reach, traveling into spaces one has never inhabited, or imagining in the future a time to come (Schutz 1962c, p. 225). The practical character of accessing these different spaces and times becomes clear insofar as Schutz (1962c, p. 226) states that, because I had inhabited a space or time before and already have my own experiences of that world, I have a maximal chance of restoring it. Thus, my past experiences help me to anticipate what the future will be like, and on their basis I can “weigh the likelihood of carrying out my plans and estimating my powers” (Schutz 1962c, p. 226). Actors moving into distant worlds appear to be concerned about how well they will be able to pragmatically navigate in different settings. The farther the spatial and temporal distance from the actual center of my world of working is, the more uncertain are my anticipations, and the less predictability there might be about their project and the less “practicable”—a key word in pragmatic everyday life—it might come to appear (Schutz 1962c, p. 226).

This ability via locomotion or movement out from where the 0-point of all my coordinates is located into places and times that are distant, in which I can and often do discover my ability to act successfully there as I did here, strengthens the idealization that “I can do it again” (Schutz 1962c, p. 228). Likewise, whatever objects or situations I encounter in action will often continue to behave or respond as they always have (“and so on”) (Schutz 1962c, p. 228). Granted, on some occasions, I may not be able to repeat what I did before or things might not behave as before, the preponderance of confirmation of these idealizations gives me a sense of myself as one who can do what I have done before, a confidence in my ability to encounter novel, unfamiliar situations and to subject them to my mastery. The entire self (and its sense of self) of pragmatic everyday life is based on this deeply rooted and repeatedly enacted idealization that “I can” (Schutz 1962c, p. 226), and that in my acting I can master the world that I confront and subject it to my power, however attentive and tentative I may feel I need to be in case unforeseen outcomes might lead me to change course. This sense of “I can” is not limited to my consciousness but pervades my bodiliness that has acquired repertoires, whether in speaking, moving, walking, gesturing, touching, and interacting, that equip it to do again with confidence and without question or hesitation what it has already done so many times before.

As far as sociality is concerned, Schutz (1962e, p. 294) denominates everyday life the paramount reality among all other provinces of meaning “since only within it does communication with our fellow-men become possible”. All such communication takes place through bodily working acts, speaking, gesturing, and expressing oneself facially—all aimed at achieving practical goals, as when one asks an interlocutor where the ink is located that one needs to complete a project, such as filling out a written form (Schutz 1962b, p. 23; 1962c, p. 258). Such bodily working acts are so basic and pervasive that, when we occupy non-pragmatic, non-everyday provinces of meaning, we, like children playing make-believe or art beholders sharing insights before a painting, must revert to such acts of communication drawn from everyday life, even though these acts are “seen through” (Schutz 1962c, p. 257) from the non-pragmatic provinces that subsume them. As the example of asking an interlocutor about where the ink is indicates, bodily acts of working serve the pragmatic purposes central to the form of spontaneity of everyday life, just as they can also often subserve the purposes of the non-pragmatic provinces in which they are embedded, enabling children to carry out together a make-believe dinner or facilitating interlocutors’ mutual appreciation of a painting. A key thing that should be noted about everyday life is that one is bent on pragmatic purposes and one’s communication is ordered to such goals, but that does not mean that one must subordinate in an unethical way another to one’s own ends. One does not reduce others to one’s tool, as Schutz thought Sartre mistakenly thought (Schutz 1962d, p. 201). Instead, one can cooperate with others to realize pragmatic purposes, as do businesspersons when they adjust their policies in relationships to clients and competitors (Schutz 2011, p. 157). Nevertheless, in pragmatic everyday life, communication through working acts and the social relationships one enters into with others are aimed at some pragmatic purpose, and social relationships with others are seen as means to achieve some pragmatic goals, cooperatively, with a place being kept open for the other’s free collaboration. The pragmatic purposes then take precedence over the social relationships themselves, even though one’s partner can still be respected and remain an autonomous free center of activity (Schutz 1962d, p. 201). In the domain of spiritual/religious experience, by contrast, the bodily conveyed communicative relationships actually become themselves the purpose of communicating; furthermore, one seeks union with God or one’s ritual community as the overriding purpose. Here, one’s body plays a central role in entering a relationship with another, where the relationship itself is the focus and not some means for achieving some pragmatic purpose together with another or others. For the primary purpose of forming a relationship with another, one will comport oneself differently and shape one’s bodily orientation differently.

The picture that emerges from our quick review of how the body functions in pragmatic everyday life reveals a body that is extraverted; oriented toward a project that requires bodily engagement with one’s material environment; occupied with present acts that, though they are part of a long-range future directedness, require continual responsiveness to possible unforeseen contingencies; disciplined to minimize distractions and leisurely diversions; experienced as the origin of its initiatives and implementing them single mindedly; confident in its ability to repeatedly control its situation and monitor for unexpected eventualities, though also expecting that the world will usually function regularly; and pointed toward pragmatic projects in cooperation and communication with others in such a way these projects take precedence over the intersubjective relationships involved, without precluding that these others act as autonomous centers in their own right.

3. The Body in Active Contemplation

Thomas Ryan (1995, pp. 49–50, 122) explains how Thomas Merton distinguished active from passive or infused contemplation, the latter of which he describes as a gift of God in which one finds oneself emptied of feelings, images, and ideas, and God as more present and intimate to us than ourselves. This section will describe how, in accord with the six features of the cognitive style of the finite province of religious experience, one experiences God in active contemplation and concludes with a discussion of how one’s body is given to oneself in such contemplation.

Ryan (1995, p. 66) describes the break with everyday life for the sake of meditation as happening when we unhook “our minds from that amalgam of images, ideas, concepts, words, and thoughts which normally occupy us mentally” and when we look out beyond ourselves and break out of closed systems of self-consciousness and self-concern (Ryan 1995, p. 66). We seek to let go of the “nagging worries of the day” (Ryan 1995, p. 183) and to slow down our mind, which, “revved up by the day’s activities, is bouncing ideas and thoughts around like balls in a squash court” (Ryan 1995, p. 197). This shift in attitude involves an epoché analogous to that of the phenomenological epoché, although in this shift to the attitude of religious/spiritual experience, one often marks the change by a sensible bodily marker—one enters a temple, one lights a candle or burns incense, one assumes a posture, or one embarks upon a ritual with others when a processive entourage enters a church, with special vestments and musical accompaniment. While such an epoché might isolate one from everyday life and separate the sacred from the profane, Mircea Eliade (1961, p. 183; Barber 2017, p. 99) argues that the outcome of sojourning within this religious province of meaning ends up transfiguring everyday life such that even the most habitual gesture, household utensils, and daily routines take on religious, spiritual significance. In this metamorphosis of everyday life through adopting a new attitude, the religious epoché resembles its phenomenological prototype, which, as Husserl (1970, p. 151; 1973, pp. 60, 160, 225–26) observed, enabled practitioners to see what they had not previously seen.

The form of spontaneity in the sphere of religious/spiritual experience in active contemplation involves a turning away from extraversion and the everyday life of attempting to realize pragmatic goals through mastering our material environment by bodily actions. Rather, as Ryan (1995, p. 66) repeatedly mentions, one turns away from oneself toward God, seeks “to encounter” (Ryan 1995, p. 101) God, and pursues a “relationship of intimacy” (Ryan 1995, p. 103) with God. While relationships in everyday life are entered into for the sake of pragmatic goals in concert with others, in active contemplation it is forming of a relationship itself that takes precedence. In fact, not only is the relationship itself of ultimacy, but it is a relationship with that which multiple religions characterize as an Ultimate Reality, or the Absolute, as Max Scheler argues. Whatever may be one’s highest ranked pragmatic relevances, they are subordinated to this Absolute, which resists being subordinated to any other finite reality, under pain of idolatry, according to Scheler. This displacement of finite objects from the ultimacy they might have in everyday life releases one to a degree from the tension of going after such everyday goals insofar as they are no longer ultimate. In addition, insofar as the Absolute, in Scheler’s view, is considered personal, loving, and willing to accompany one as one strives for such pragmatic goals, one can have the sense that, even if one fails to realize these subordinate goals, one would still be valued by God, who would still remain as one’s ultimate goal. One experiences, then, a diminishing of fear and anxiety about reaching such secondary goals, and, paradoxically, is able to try to realize pragmatic goals with greater ease and possibly greater success—a point that even non-personalist religions make also. Finally, as the mystics and William James (1958, pp. 98–99, 173–74, 196, 216–17), in his cataloguing of the types of mystical experience, both affirm, one cannot make the relationship with God happen by one’s exertion, but rather it depends on God for God’s crossing the divide between oneself and God. In Scheler’s words (Scheler 2010, pp. 147, 250, 261), all knowledge and love of God are from God. While one might find oneself spending time to anxiously and tirelessly “achieve” a relationship with God, there is a further kind of letting go when one realizes that one must wait passively for God’s action and rejoice gratefully when God overleaps the gap. Generally, one can say that having the Absolute as the ultimate goal and personal companion certainly relieves one’s anxiety and tension, and one can certainly imagine a more relaxed body than one would find in one struggling to achieve pragmatic goals as if they were absolute and as if one had to act completely on one’s own (Scheler 2010, pp. 248, 251–54, 268–69, 283, 335–36, 339–40).

One’s effort to master is greatly diminished by religious/spiritual experience’s altered form of spontaneity and replaced by the endeavor to have an intimacy with God that one discovers cannot be wrested from God but rather given by God. In addition, insofar as God’s accompaniment with one in everyday life relieves one of anxieties about succeeding at one’s pragmatic projects, one can imagine that one’s tension of consciousness is further lowered and one’s body, in turn, is more relaxed. In such a state, the regimentation of working in which one calibrates and monitors every sub-act leading to its long-range projected action, pressing memory to limit itself to motor recollections only—refraining from even “turning our eyes to right and left, and even, for the most part of our time, behind” (Bergson 1920, pp. 93–94)—is suddenly sidelined to the horizon, and the lid is, as it were, taken off. As happens in dreaming, according to Bergson (1920, p. 155), one experiences “consciousness disport itself with no care for life, that is, for the action to be accomplished”, and, as in pure memory, images “rush along with a dizzy rapidity” (Bergson 1920, p. 130).

In active contemplation, this release appears, as we have seen in the instance of Jacob’s ladder in which, beneath the level of rational control, for Jacob, a stone refers to, or in phenomenological terms, “appresents”, a pillow. Appresentation appears in Husserl’s thought when, via passive synthesis, the front side of a house or ball appresents their backside toward which one’s perception is drawn, and of which one will have an immediate perceptual experience if one moves around to the backside of what presents itself in the frontside. Analogously to such perceptual appresentation, the stone appresents a pillow and the pillow a pillar and the pillar God’s house (Schutz 1962e, pp. 337–38). In this appresentational chain, one material object appresents another horizontally, and the entire chain appresents vertically God, as Jacob comments “Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not” (Schutz 1962e, p. 237). It should be noted that, in this vertical appresenting, in a direct encounter with God, Jacob describes the meeting as involving a direct address to him that the Genesis author summarizes in several propositions as follows: “I am Yahweh, the God of Abraham your father and Isaac. I will give to you and your descendants the land on which you are lying…Be sure that I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go and bring you back to this land” (Genesis 28: 13–15). William James describes similar repeated passive associations or appresentations that announce another reality and that act upon one bodily and sensibly without one’s rationally inferring them. For instance (James 1958, p. 303), watching butterflies or staring at the Milky Way become visits of the Holy Ghost in Amiel’s journal. Similarly, for the post-conversion Jonathan Edwards, the divine glory appeared in everything, including the sun, the moon, flowers, trees, and even thunder, which formerly had threatened him (James 1958, p. 199). Liturgical celebrations spread before participants a panoply of sensual stimuli, music, incense, various foods, vestments, dancing movements, statues, and images, which tick off appresentational chains that appresent each other and God. In addition, verbal appresentational chains appear in various Scriptures, such as, for instance, when the waters of the Jordan part as the Israelites are poised to enter the Promised Land, reminding them of the divided Red Sea and strengthening their faith in the God who had rescued them at that Sea from slavery in Egypt (Joshua 4: 10–18; Exodus 14: 15–31). Or, hundreds of years later, when Israel’s captivity in Babylon ends, their crossing of the Babylonian rivers and the desert journey back to Israel remind them of the Red Sea episode and give them hope (Jeremiah 16: 14–15; 23: 7–8). Here, present moments touch off via passive syntheses linkages between past, present, and future, with the past here playing a greater explicit role than that found in everyday life that is future-directed (despite being unreflected-upon because motives influencing actors from the past). These movements of the appresentational mindset presuppose a relaxed tension of consciousness and body that are unfettered from the need to realize future projects and that allow themselves to be stimulated to draw connections that are not rationally predictable but, rather, surprising.

When one inhabits the framework of such active contemplation, one’s senses and body are passively disposed and susceptible to be solicited by objects and symbols that appresent God or launch one into an appresentational sequence that culminates in an experience of God; however, at the same time, one, to some degree, must become reflectively aware of such appresentational patterns. Jacob draws together a series of appresentational references, all of which culminate in the insight “The Lord was in this place and I knew it not”. After a series of passive linkages, one might become reflectively aware of how the crossing of the Babylonian rivers on the way home links with the Jordan and Red Sea, all referring to the presence of a protective, faithful God. Or one becomes cognizant of how the organ music, sparkling vestments, and slow-paced procession—all taken together proclaim the majesty of God. Heightened lighting, golden sunlight diffracted through clear windows, and golden vestments converge to heighten the sense of joy and glory of a feast at a special liturgical event. One does not only allow oneself to be led passively by sensibly given symbols and objects, but exercises a degree of reflectivity, interpreting, thinking about connections, and this alertness and ongoing interpretation distinguishes active contemplation from one’s experience within the province of dreams in which there is pure association and little, if any, interpretation (until one has left the sphere). Correlatively, in active contemplation, the tension of one’s consciousness and body are not completely relaxed.

This semi-relaxedness of active contemplation resembles the tension of consciousness that one experiences in music, according to Schutz. In a brief description of the tension of consciousness in the province of meaning of music, Schutz (1996, p. 258) describes the epoché of the conductor’s raised baton and the alteration of the pragmatic form of spontaneity and then touches on the tension of consciousness, as follows:

“But when the conductor raises his baton, the audience has performed a leap (in the sense of Kierkegaard) from one level of consciousness to another. They are no longer engaged in the dimension of space and spatial time, they are no longer involved in the maze of activities necessary to deal with human beings and their things. They accept the guidance of music in order to relax their tension and surrender to its flux, a flux which is that of their stream of consciousness in inner time.”

However, when listening to music, heeding the non-conceptual communication of interlocutors, the composer and performers of the composer’s music, the listener is not only relaxed but also active, following step by step the ongoing articulation of the music-makers’ musical thought, participating in simultaneity with it, and experiencing an “interplay of recollections, retentions, protentions, and anticipations which interrelate the successive elements” (Schutz 1964, p. 170, see p. 171). It is no wonder, then, that Schutz (1996, p. 258) argues that, on the different plane of consciousness of music, one is engaged in an intensity of listening and that one can experience an even “greater intensity in listening to music than in the performance of his daily routine work.” Bergson (1960, pp. 7–8), likewise, acknowledged the difference between the “intensity of effort”, involving the muscular sensation linked to the perception of an external object, and the kind of intensity that comes with deep joy, reflective passion, or an aesthetic feeling. As in the case of active contemplation, one’s consciousness and body are relaxed, allowing one to be led by a surf of sensual stimuli, and yet one is alert and focused on the communication that takes place through that surf and that one interprets in active contemplation as coming from God.

One’s temporality has much more to do with inner time here than the outer time that predominates in everyday life. In addition, one’s sense of self is that of someone poised to interpret another’s communication. Instead of beginning with one’s own body as the 0-point of all coordinates from which one exercises one’s power to bring within reach, to feel one’s sense of “I can”, in active contemplation, one find’s oneself in active contemplation situated within the purview of another, God. Schutz (1967, p. 138), proceeding on the basis of the distinction between subject and objective meaning, points out that the origin of belief in God lies in our tendency to view everything in existence and history as being given meaning by some (other) mind, which is an objective point of view outside of our subjective one. Instead of us setting out from our 0-point as the center from which we reach out and bring the world under our dominion, our world, existence, and history proceed from a divine 0-point in which we are impelled to try to interpret the meanings given by another. Therefore, we encounter sensual objects, art, music, ritual artifacts, and symbols taking on their meaning as appresenting and announcing God and God’s revelation. Therefore, our sense of self, displaced from its 0-point from which it subjects the world to its meanings, now finds itself surrounded by the meanings God gives. This sense of self in active contemplation fits then with the greater passivity of the form of spontaneity and the relaxed tension of consciousness, which is also active in interpreting the vast spread of promptings to which it is exposed and vulnerable. Here, one’s body is accordingly more relaxed and under less pressure to master one’s environment, although there is still intensity in reflecting and discerning the meanings of patterns, more like the body in music and unlike the body experiencing the extremes of dreaming and pragmatic mastery.

4. The Body in Passive, Infused Contemplation

As we have seen (Ryan 1995, p. 49), Thomas Merton and several other authors distinguish between active contemplation, discussed in the last section, and “passive, or infused contemplation”; between the kataphatic way, which affirms of God all the perfections found in creatures; and the apophatic way, which resists the view that “thoughts, ideas, words, images, or symbols can express God’s innermost reality” (Ryan 1995, p. 44). In passive, infused contemplation, one enters the presence of God bare-handed, without conceptual gloves, and enters the darkness of prayer with love (Ryan 1995, p. 44).

One initiates this quiet, passive prayer by implementing various forms of epoché as one does in active contemplation, as follows: one lights candles, burns incense, retires to an isolated place and time of solitude, or assumes a posture—all of which are also employed in group rituals. In addition, the literature on active contemplation, which was discussed in the previous section, demonstrates that such an epoché has been put in place by constantly contrasting the overarching attitude that one takes up in contemplation with pragmatic everyday life. Those engaging in such prayer turn their backs, at least temporarily, on “what is useful and productive in society” (Ryan 1995, p. 14); unhook themselves from the thoughts, ideas, and concepts that normally occupy us (Ryan 1995, p. 66); cease to judge the value of things by their performative and productive worth and refrain from spending all their time in pursuit of accomplishments (Ryan 1995, p. 101); let go of the nagging, urgent worries of the day (Ryan 1995, p. 183); and slow down their mind, which, “revved up by the day’s activity, is bouncing ideas and thoughts around like balls in a squash court” (Ryan 1995, p. 197). In discussing the immersion in flesh, which, as we will see, is pervasive in infused contemplation, Anne O’Byrne (2015, p. 183) observes that such immersion runs up against obstacles similar to those that active contemplation must resist, namely “the demands of utility and the epistemologies of the natural attitude.”

The form of spontaneity in passive contemplation, however, differs clearly from pragmatic everyday life and even from active contemplation. Like active contemplation, passive contemplation is no longer directed to “ends we have chosen ourselves” (Ryan 1995, p. 98) that lie in the future and that are so important for working, but rather there is an orientation toward a present “surrender to God” (Ryan 1995, p. 98). In active contemplation, one orients oneself toward God, but opens oneself bodily to passive syntheses that sensible incitements, symbols, objects, and events in life elicit, as they appresent God or appresent a chain of appresenters that appresent God, as the story of Jacob’s ladder suggests. Active contemplation retains something of the active orientation of pragmatic everyday life in that one opens oneself to the things surrounding them, but it allows oneself to activate us rather than actively intervening to transform them for the sake of pragmatic purposes. Passive contemplation goes even further insofar as, as St. John of the Cross asserts, in such contemplation, God moves the one praying away from mental prayer that is rooted in forms, figures, and images to a kind of prayer empty of such images and thoughts (Ryan 1995, p. 54). Such passive contemplation contrasts with the more active spiritual contemplation of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises that invites one to make mental images of the place where a Scriptural event occurs, seeing, hearing, and touching what goes on and allowing spontaneous feelings, desires, tears, joy, sorrow, etc. to emerge (Ryan 1995, pp. 52–53). In passive contemplation, one turns rather completely away from exterior things and from the orientation to the future so prominent in everyday life, and, instead, one quiets one’s body in interior peace, quiet, and repose, as one becomes lovingly aware of God’s presence (Ryan 1995, p. 55).

In fact, the ultimate purpose of passive contemplation defines its form of spontaneity. Passive contemplation neither seeks to modify practically the external world nor even to enter into an active dialogue with God (as in active contemplation) but instead it pursues union with God (Ryan 1995, pp. 62, 90, 99). One refrains from following appresentative chains as they move, often rapidly, from point to point, and one lets go of compulsive routines, including any compulsive impatience with one’s inability to let go of one’s interior activities, which, in the end, results in an even greater quiet (Ryan 1995, pp. 54, 55). This “effort” of passive contemplation to approach God with receptivity and awareness includes avoiding “thinking” or developing, discursive, scientific knowledge about God (Ryan 1995, pp. 53, 54, 91, 98). It is not so much a matter of engaging in a conversation with God as simply enjoying God’s presence, as entering a “wordless darkness” (Merton 1973, p. 176; Ryan 1995, pp. 49–50). One undergoes, as Merton (1979, p. 361; Ryan 1995, p. 49) explains, “a simple intuition of God, produced immediately in the soul by God and giving the soul a direct, but obscure and mysterious experiential appreciation of God.” For instance, one can imagine that, in passive contemplation, instead of conversing with God, one might envision one’s breathing (which is often central to the tension of consciousness of such passive contemplation) as inviting God to enter one’s heart every time one simply breathes in, just as one imbibes the surrounding air into one’s lungs. By contrast, the story of Jacob’s ladder, which is characterized by a rapidly flowing appresentational sequence and so belongs to active contemplation, culminates in a dialogic interchange with God, standing over Jacob, distinct from him, and speaking to him in a proposition, “I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying (Genesis 28: 13)”. In passive contemplation, no clear proposition-like formulation is experienced, just a wordless presence. These types of active and passive contemplation, though, can be blended, and one might imagine someone attending a ritual with its multiple sensible solicitations also pausing in a moment to become absorbed in a quiet experience of God.

The tension of consciousness in passive contemplation is more relaxed than that of active contemplation, which, in turn, is more relaxed than that of everyday life in which one actively engages and transforms the material objects and persons in one’s environment. In active contemplation, one allows one body/consciousness to be moved and stirred by symbols, images, and sounds. One does not act on objects, but disposes oneself to be acted on by them, and yet one finds oneself to some degree active, following strings of appresentational references as they rapidly conduct one down a progressive movement from one image or symbol to another to what is finally appresented. By contrast, in passive contemplation, one’s aim is not to allow oneself to be diverted from God as present, not to permit oneself to be scattered, and not to let one’s mind wander in such a way that one’s consciousness and body are left restless (Ryan 1995, p. 184).

There are various aids to keeping one’s focus on God as present, not venturing down an appresentational path, and preserving one’s reduced tension of consciousness, and these aids all have to do with disposing oneself bodily for passive contemplation (Ryan 1995, p. 55). One can position one’s body in such a way that one can be still for an extended period of time and be restful and yet alert, as, for instance, can happen with a yoga asana posture that one leads into by a series of gentle, slow, graceful movements that prepare the body and nervous system for meditation (Ryan 1995, p. 185, see p. 130). One yoga practitioner describes the end effect of such yoga exercises as leaving her feeling, as the psalmist says, like a child at rest in it mother’s arms (Ryan 1995, p. 183)—such peacefulness is to be found also in similar yoga activities that are called for in the Buddhist eight-fold path, in the Hindu rāyayoga, and in Daoist practices (Leder 2018, pp. 220–24; B.K.S Iyengar 1979, pp. 58, 60). The millennia-old tradition of yoga posturing has resulted in such a diversity and complexity of asana positions that B.K.S. Iyengar (1979, pp. 56–429), in his Light on Yoga, takes over 350 pages to describe, in great detail, 202 alternative forms of Yogāsanas. One can also reduce one’s tension of consciousness by repeating slowly and softly a mantra, a kind of speech disconnected from thought, lacking in images and associations, and expressing an intent to wait for God or to abide motionlessly in God’s presence, to resist any dispersion of one’s attention (Ryan 1995, pp. 63–64). The mantra loosens ego control and allows unconscious images or memories to surface, even as one refrains from focusing on them or following the trajectories they may indicate (Ryan 1995, p. 92). Swami Muktananda teaches that the ancient Unpanishadic mantra haṃsa similarly opens up a space where there are no thoughts, a miraculous space of God (Leder 2018, p. 227). The use of such mantras is often employed by Yoga and Buddhist practices that seek to enhance the ability of their practitioners to be silent and listen (Škof 2018, pp. 55–56; Ditrich 2018, pp. 101–2). Furthermore, Tantra, that is, textbooks in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions, collect principles that explain and prescribe practices that often include interaction with the world instead of denial of it and that make use of diagrams, mantras, and creative visualizations as means of attaining spiritual values, such as equality or tolerance (Teasdill 2020, pp. 269–72, 274).

In addition, one can seek to reduce one’s tension of consciousness by concentrating on one’s breathing as if one were taking in the God who surrounds one as one inhales the surrounding air—a taking in of God by one’s body with one of the least effortful actions possible. For instance, Anne O’Byrne (2015, p. 186) describes the practice of “hesychasm”, localized at Mt. Athos, that included a set of somatic exercises, such as breathing, which, paired with repetitive incantation, opposed the Platonic Christian tradition in embodied and interpretive ways. This tradition of “hesychasm”, which means “questing for quietude”, commenced in eleventh century Orthodoxy in the work of Simeon the Younger, abbot of Xerokerkos, and was subsequently centered at the monastery of Athos by Gregorios of Sinai who continued the practice of attuning prayer and breathing to each other (Zola 1968, p. 1). Gregorios contrasted hesychasm with reciting the psalmody, the prayer that was often characteristic of Western forms of contemplation and that conjoined knowledge and the active life (Zola 1968, p. 1). Such prayer based on reciting the psalms resembles the active contemplation depicted in the previous section of this paper. In addition, hesychasm developed features not found in the Roman contemplative tradition, such as a careful attention to mystic physiology by promoting awareness of one’s eyebrows, larynx, chest, or navel (Zola 1968, p. 2). The hesychasts’ alertness to breathing led them to see how inhaling was a matter of breathing in the Spirit, while breathing out resembled expelling one’s personal spirit from oneself; moreover, to allow one’s prayer to become equivalent to breathing was tantamount to abandoning oneself into the hand of God (Zola 1968, p. 3). A commentator on hesychastic practices, Elémire Zola (1968, pp. 3–4, 5 n. 2, n. 4), has pointed out the parallels between such Orthodox and Western breathing traditions and Hindu prayer practices, yoga, and Tantric prescriptions.

Of course, those non-Western traditions of prayer and contemplation rooted in breathing have predated by centuries these similar Western and Orthodox practices. Yoga practices include both asana postures and breathing exercises (prāyāyāma) (Morley 2018, p. 119), and James Morley (2018, pp. 119–20) points out how breathing brings about an immediate, almost inseparable fusion of our inner and outer worlds, converging with what Merleau-Ponty describes as “flesh”. Recognizing the philosophical implications of breathing, Tamara Ditrich (2018, p. 101) observes that “meditation on breath as a soteriological path has arguably been highly significant for most Indian traditions, their philosophies, cosmology, and soteriological praxes from the earliest records up to the present day”. Others have repeatedly asserted that meditation on breathing and breathing exercises themselves can transform our natural life into a spiritual life (Škof and Berndtson 2018, p. xvii) and help us realize our innermost nature (Teasdill 2020, p. 269) to the point that some believe that those thinkers who have not breathed enough are dangerous (Škof and Berndtson 2018, p. xi). Recently, from a phenomenological perspective, Petri Berndtson (2023, pp. 59, 63, 94–96, 122, 141–48) has attempted to found philosophy in breathing by conceiving it as an opening to the world and Being—beyond our capacity to control and beyond the world of things that are susceptible to pragmatic mastery. Such a philosophy might approach a whole range of philosophical questions with an attitude shaped by silence and listening. Berndtson’s work suggests that perhaps breathing is as fundamental to philosophy as it is to passive contemplation. Moreover, when one considers breathing’s centrality to diverse philosophical and religious-cultural traditions across millennia, one can see that the breathing and yoga processes that play a role in passive contemplation appear to be of universal significance.

By the relaxed alertness of the tension of consciousness of passive contemplation, through bodily positioning, yoga practices, repeating a mantra, or concentrating on breathing, one lets go of thoughts, memories, and feelings, and instead engages in “turning of one’s whole being toward Another” (Ryan 1995, p. 197). As God and God’s action and love for oneself occupy the center of one’s attention and one’s own efforts are minimized and diminished to the point of almost disappearing, one has the sense not of praying but of “being prayed” (Ryan 1995, p. 98).

This return, in passive contemplation, to a bodily level, banishing for a while the flow of ideas, images, and thoughts that are more prominent in pragmatic everyday life and active contemplation, has about it not only a kind of “descent” into one’s body, but it also suggests a genetic “return.” O’Byrne (2015, p. 194), reflecting on the umbilical scar as referring us to the genetic precedents we often ignore, comments the following:

“We already know that the sorts of beings we have come to be in our mothers’ bodies, quickened into being in her flesh. Even if, for each of us, it is an immemorial coming to be, the convolution at the very centers of our bodies reminds us that what cannot be called to mind can nonetheless be shown on the body.”

Julia Kristeva, in an illuminating discussion of St. Teresa of Avila’s mysticism, draws parallels between passive contemplation and human genetic origins. Teresa’s “suspension of powers” involves precisely a regression in which the individual loses her identity and below rational, thinking consciousness becomes what psychologist D.W. Winnicott calls a “psyche-soma” (Kristeva 2015, p. 257; Winnicott 1954, pp. 201–2). Kristeva (2015, p. 257) comments the following:

“In this state—which for the psychoanalyst goes back to the archaic states of osmosis between the newborn, even the embryo, and its mother—the relation to self and other are fleetingly maintained by an elaborate infra-linguistic sensibility whose intensity is in direct proportion to the loss of the faculty of abstract judgment.”

Drawing on the use of water and oil imagery found in Teresa’s and her spiritual guides’ writings, Kristeva (2015, p. 258) points out references to mystical prayer as sharing the kinds of feelings one might have had when nursed by a mother or when being in an “embryonic state, touched/bathed/nourished by amniotic fluid.” For Teresa, the mystic, who undergoes what we are calling passive contemplation, experiences the “engendering a new self nestled in the Other, a self who loves the Other” (Kristeva 2015, p. 260). In a similar vein, Jean-Louis Chrétien (2015, p. 113) cites a series of authors who speculate that the posture of kneeling, in adoration, involves bending one’s knees as one had to do in utero, thereby referring to an immemorial past, a past of dependence and helplessness, reminding the Creator of how the Creator formed us in the womb.

In seeking to trace the particular relaxed bodily tension of consciousness typical of passive contemplation to genetic origins, one can also appeal to the evidence anthropologists have highlighted showing that repeated, calming, rhythmic bodily movement such as those of breathing or mantras, both of which passive contemplation employs, appear also in ritual-like behaviors found among social groups experiencing anxiety and tension. Thus, the Manus, as Margaret Mead noted, chant monotonous tones together when cold and frightened, and Trobrianders produce singsong melodies during a terrifying storm, as Bronoslaw Malinowski observed (Dissanayake 2018, p. 92). Ellen Dissanayake (2018, pp. 88–89) goes further in this direction when she identifies a human ritualized behavior that is “biologically-based”, universal, and cross-culturally observed and that involves repeated and rhythmic bodily movements that tranquilize distraught, agitated infant bodies, such as the gestural and vocal interactions that a mother undertakes to soothe a distressed infant. Mothers’ gestural and vocal behaviors with their disquieted child, which borrow from adult contexts of affinity and intimacy and are typical across cultures, include mutual gazes, repeated and rhythmic soft and high-pitched sounds, and sympathetic touching, pats, hugs, and kisses. Roy Rappaport, likewise, compares the ritual nature of the pre-verbal infant’s experience of its mother to the worshiper’s experience of God—a comparison also drawn by Rudolph Otto. For Rappaport (1999, p. 390), the child experiences its mother as “mysterious, tremendous, overpowering, loving, and frightening”, and its trust and calm are restored through regular stereotyped “daily rituals of nurturance and greeting” (Rappaport 1999, p. 390) between itself and its mother. The linkages that these anthropologists point to suggest that one might be able to detect in the religious prayer of adults traces of genetic origins in that primordial mother–infant relationship. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1973, p. 75), citing Melanie Klein, emphasizes the importance of the wordless relationship with one’s mother in human development. In passive contemplation, when one breathes rhythmically and utters a mantra, diving beneath the level of thought, ideas, and language, one bodily experiences God, another person. One emerges from that wordless encounter with a greatly reduced tension of consciousness and a sense of being deeply and gently loved and at peace, and it is easy to trace this experience to the genetic stratum of one’s symbiotic involvement with one’s mother’s body—a point that O’Byrne, Kristeva, Teresa of Avila, Chrétien, Dissanayake, Rappaport, Otto, Douglas, and Klein all seem to be hinting at.

John Manoussakis, though, criticizes the practice of stillness as focusing on inner purification, distancing oneself from one’s body and inhabiting a spiritualized world removed from physical action and from embodied actions such as the Eucharist. He wonders, instead, if it could be the case that the mind does not command the body, but that the body commands the mind, as Manoussakis (2015, pp. 308–11) shows in Augustine’s understanding of the physical hunger of the Prodigal Son that teaches him his dependency on others. In response to Manoussakis, it should be pointed out that, when in passive contemplation, the body silences itself through bodily means like yoga, mantras, and breathing, it takes the posture of one who is listening, and it makes room for experiencing God’s love. Likewise, when one’s breathing becomes a bodily way of welcoming God into oneself in the way that breathing in allows air to enter its lungs, there is no division between spirit and body and certainly no ascetic depreciation of the body; moreover, one’s body in this case does not simply accompany one in praying, but one’s body is praying. Such prayer, also, is intimately linked to the Eucharist for just these reasons. One might say, too, that such prayer overcomes the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, in line with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh (Moran 2015, p. 233). In fact, in such passive contemplation, the subject/object distinction is blurred, as Merton thought (Ryan 1995, pp. 122–23), insofar as one begins by quieting oneself bodily for the encounter in which, however, one feels God’s loving presence, and it becomes impossible to say in reflection whether the reduction in tension of consciousness one feels comes from that presence or from one’s body. Paradoxically, this mutual entwinement between God and one’s body prompts some to say that this peace and reduction in tension is the result of one’s own efforts to calm oneself, such as with one’s yoga, breathing, or mantra uttering. However, it could be argued that such an interpretation falls short of one’s intentional experience in such contemplation, in which one feels the presence of “someone” whose presence one has not produced or constructed but must wait for, whose love is given freely, in accord with Max Scheler’s account of the religious act that receives what it intends and that in its primary intention is already disposed for and concerned with a possible reception (Scheler 2010, p. 254). A discussion of this question, though, would take us too far away from this paper, which is now coming to its conclusion.

We can quickly consider the other three dimensions of the finite province of meaning of passive contemplation with respect to one’s body, as follows: the experience of oneself, sociality, and temporality. However much one may confine to the horizon of one’s experience of the pragmatic world, one, even in passive contemplation, cannot completely ignore that one straddles the two worlds (for instance, in the intrusion of distractions). Likewise, one plays a “role” that pervades one’s bodiliness, even as one does in intimate relationships, as a friend, as a child, and as a lover, the latter of which, for instance, plays a key role in Kristeva’s account of Teresa of Avila’s mysticism. The kind of sociality realized in passive contemplation involves maximally disposing one’s body to receive the kind of communication that the other wishes to give, even if it is wordless. This bodily receptivity to another’s communication provides something of a model for all kinds of other social relationships in which bodily communication is often pervasive without being noticed. One might even imagine that this openness to receiving another’s communication as the other wishes to offer it, without words or in manners that seem different from most other communication, might heighten one’s ability to receive the communications of other human beings or animals, once one leaves the province of passive contemplation. The temporality of passive contemplation restricts itself to the present, refusing to focus predominately on a phantasied future project as in pragmatic everyday life or to follow the sensible solicitations that lead to rapidly journeying down a string of appresentations that can leap back and forth between the past, present, and future. If, as Kierkegaard (1978, p. 74, see also pp. 73, 77) notes, “care about the next day is precisely self-torment”, then the bodily focus on the present in passive contemplation affords us relief and peace.

5. Conclusions

I have argued that passive or infused contemplation involves deploying sensible symbols and images, like active contemplation, to demarcate oneself off from pragmatic everyday life. While pragmatic life involves, as its form of spontaneity, acting on and modifying one’s material environment, in active contemplation, one allows that material environment to act on oneself and pull one forward. In passive contemplation, however, one turns away from one’s external material environment and configures one’s inner materiality, one’s body, toward receiving the presence of God. In passive contemplation, one’s form of spontaneity is directed toward union and not dialogue, as in active contemplation, and one lets go of images and thoughts; refrains from following active appresentative chains bridging back and forth across the past, present, and future; and keeps one’s mind from wandering. One’s tension of consciousness, including one’s body, is more relaxed than in active contemplation and even more so than in pragmatic everyday life. One brings one’s attention to focus on God through bodily practices, such as yoga, breathing, or murmuring a mantra. Following the findings of philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists, one can trace one’s heightened bodily passivity and reduced tension of the body and consciousness in such passive contemplation to genetic sources and to one’s primordial bodily entwinement with the body of one’s mother. In passive contemplation, one approaches what Merleau-Ponty calls the “flesh”, in which the boundaries of subject and object are blurred. In passive contemplation, one experiences oneself also taking up a bodily shaped role of a friend, a child, or a lover in relation to God. One further undertakes a bodily displacement of self for the sake of another, and this “social” stance could be paradigmatic for other kinds of communication, even, and perhaps especially, for those that are wordless. Finally, in passive contemplation, one rests in the present, neither oriented toward future perfect imagined pragmatic projects nor allowing present material impingements to launch one down a future-oriented rapid-fire appresentational chain that darts back and forth across the present, past, and future.