Lacking Implications
Sensation has been discussed in the series on Searchless Responsiveness. Here, we turn to the fields of the flux of affordances and care.
Sensation, without affordances or care, has no implications.
Affordances, in this context, are the felt-sense of potential action that arise in response to sensation.
For example, seeing a green area in the sensory field of vision, in itself, has no implications. When that green is seen as the fabric of the seat of a chair, it resonates with the potential action of sitting. When that green is seen as a reference color, it resonates with deciding on a paint color for the room. When that green is seen as a location of spilt tea, it resonates with the action of fetching a cloth to clean up. These can all be the same patch of green.
These examples describe potential actions that are clear-cut and legible, but potential action is, for the most part, vague, ambiguous, and inexplicit.
What affordances are available is an individual matter: three people in the same room might each see a different two of the three aforementioned affordances, for example.
Affordances without care have no implications.
The moment is alive with affordances: sit, choose a paint color, fetch a cloth, and a thousand other vague and inchoate possibilities.
Care coalesces a field of potential action into a particular direction. Consider if you were in a group, and one went to sit on a chair, another said “what a perfect color to paint my hall!”, and a third went to clean up a spill on the arm of the chair: each individual’s different care led them to different action.
As with affordances, care is for the most part, vague, ambiguous, and inexplicit, made legible here for the sake of clarity.
The field of the flux of affordances
Affordances often appear in related clusters. As I use the word here, a "view" is a family of patterns for seeing interaction affordances.
A view is not "held" until it is available for embodied action. A master tennis player's sees affordances in the motion of the ball unseen by a novice. Views develop over time, by interacting from the edge of capability: a novice has a vague sense of what the direction of a “more developed” view might be, and as their view develops via interaction, what was conceived of as “more developed” gets partially confirmed, partially refined, and partially revealed as mistaken. This yields a new vague sense of “more developed” (which may be informed by a teacher, or merely by experience), which continues the cycle.
Views vary in effectiveness by context: a master tennis player's insights weaken in usefulness in the domain of pickleball, and collapse in the domain of auto repair. Contextual shifts reveal the limits of any given view.
A view seems like a nicely coherent entity. Why talk instead of a field of flux of affordances?
In any given situation, there are generally multiple, not entirely coherent, views present. For example, when playing a casual tennis game, there may be overlapping views related to playing the game and to relating to one’s opponent socially as part of the friendship. Occasionally, these may come into practical conflict; for example, the relationship view may take the edge off your usual intensity of play if the person is a far weaker player than you.
affordances are continuously in flux, as every moment calls forth different affordances: the moment of the ball being struck, of passing over the net, of bouncing. Affordances coalesce and dissolve.
the two families of affordances, that of the tennis pro and of friend, are both present, and continuously interact with each other, affecting each other. Affordances relate.
Altogether, there is a field of the flux of affordances: not only is there the flux of “Tennis Pro” affordances, and the flux of “Friend” affordances, but there might also be present “Ordinary Physics” affordances, that things fall when dropped (which would not be so if we were in outer space), and “Ordinary Health” affordances, that our body is working as expected (which would not be so if a leg cramp revealed tacit presumptions about the affordances of moving our body).
Like eddies in a liquid, this field of the flux of affordances does not merely flow responsively; it can churn and roil in motion that reflects dynamics of turbulence that diminish congruence.
For example, you might see your friend through the lens of patterns of interaction that you developed with another friend. This might vary in appropriateness moment-by-moment. Without sensitivity to the applicability of these past patterns to the present, and an existential ability to release them into a space of unknowing that allows fresh patterns of interaction to arise, these patterns may diminish the congruence of patterns of interaction with what is actually happening.
This release of the momentum of pattern recognition is not a matter of applying better patterns or explicitly stopping existing patterns…either of these are the imposition of further patterns that have their own momentum, including a pattern that appears as “forcibly without pattern”. The release of the momentum of pattern recognition is a dissolution at the heart of being, an infinitesimal existential release.
The field of the flux of care
Affordances are a seeing of potential action. Care is what moves that potential to actuality. Similar to affordances, we do not experience a singular care.
We see our toddler about to spill juice on the fabric of a chair: there are at least two cares here, perhaps concerning (1) not having the spill and (2) not having the prevention of the spill be a bad experience for the toddler. Perhaps there is a third care, that we do not trip in hurrying over, and many more cares, implicit cares not available to discursive thought. There is no overriding moral code than resolves how these cares interact. Rather, moment-by-moment, each care is in flux, shifting in scope, becomes more vague and more precise, more and less intense, and these multiple cares interact and relate in a field of the flux of care.
This care is simply what we actually care about, not an idea of what we should care about. There is no “I” that controls or generates this care, rather, just as with sensation and affordances, at any moment it simply coalesces, relates, and dissolves.
Care is intrinsically responsive. There can, however, be a loss of presence to care, a loss of sensitivity to the actual felt-sense of care, obscured by ideas such as “what it is good to care about”.
Relaxing into congruence
Searchless responsiveness arises from relaxing the momentum of the fluxes of sensation and affordances and becoming fully present to the fluxes of sensation, affordances, and care.
Momentum degrades the responsiveness of pattern recognition. Relaxing the momentum of the fields of sensation and affordances blossoms a greater responsivity to context,
This is “searchless” because there is no prescribed outcome or state that relaxing the momentum tends toward. With presence, and without momentum, what happens is always fresh and responsive, a moment of clarity that is also a formless satisfaction, as there is no conceivable “better way” that the present might go.
Whatever is happening, is happening, and there is presence to that.
Whichever way interaction arises from the unitary fields of sensation, affordances, and care, there could be no better interaction in that moment (although retroactive consideration may show possibilities for future moments that were not seen in the past moments).
There is no purpose which interactions are trying to move things toward, only whatever seems best for the singular moment. This is another way of describing “Searchlessness”.
Searchless responsiveness can be found in relaxing the momentum of, and entering into the full presence of, the fields of the flux of sensation, affordances, and care — the fields which are the connective web between that which is solely potential and that which solely happens.