Intro Series V: Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Intellect-Embodiment Gap (Section C)
The Intellect-Embodiment Gap: Between Intellectual Understandings and Moment-to-Moment Embodied Realisations of the same, including nonseparation from Bigger-than-Self Reality
This is the fifth post in an Intro Series where I introduce the key concepts and lay out the intellectual grounding of the Bigger-than perspective I’m developing in this Substack. There are a number of interlocking pieces to the Bigger-than approach and it is necessary to go over each piece individually in order to be able to then put the pieces together in such a way that leads to an ability to address bigger-than-self distress and the meta-crisis from this perspective. Here are the links to parts I, II, III, and IV in this series…
The previous two sections in this three-part post on Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Intellect-Embodiment Gap have focused on articulating a synthesised, science-based, naturalistic understanding of the cosmos, the biosphere, and humanity, and how human culture and cognition might fit within this broader, deeper narrative of bigger-than-self reality. This narrative account is useful for our purposes in that it broadens the context in which the meta-crisis is playing out. The meta-crisis, as stated in the opening post of this Substack, is one pertaining to the biosphere and human civilisation, which correspond to certain levels of organisational complexity and cosmological history laid out in the ToK and Big History systems.
From the perspective of these systems and others like them, this biosphere and human civilisation, within this broadened and deepened historical and cosmological perspective, can be seen as part of an ongoing process of evolutionary complexity, punctuated by periods of destabilisation and renewal, with renewal often leading to novel forms of evolutionary complexity. Most recently within this cosmological narrative, physical reality has evolved into biological life, which has evolved on Earth into animal, mammalian, and human life which then evolved complex cognition and culture, which has an evolutionary mechanism of its own in the form of cultural ratcheting. Note that this narrative does not put humanity in a dominant or higher position that the rest of nature in any way: rather, a right understanding of this it puts us in deep continuity with the physical and biological layers of reality out of which we emerged.
However, as Christian (2018) outlines, our culture has evolved in such a way that our influence on the Biosphere is so large that we have become the dominant force on the planet. Seeing as our civilisation (and all human civilisations since the dawn of conventional history) is built on and emerged out of a stable and functioning biosphere, this is deeply concerning to say the least. There is a corresponding need to re-align our civilisational culture with a functioning, healthy biosphere, otherwise the next punctuated equilibria is likely to be highly undesirable and incompatible with the health of humanity as a whole.
We have discussed how one way of contributing to the culture is through our own cognition and that mindfulness can play a role in noticing mis-alignment between our own current behaviours and what might be a more adaptive way of being and behaving. This pattern of noticing and self-correcting mis-alignment will be revisited and expanded on later in the Intro Series, but the current post will focus on a specific and important instance of mis-alignment, which I’m calling the Intellect-Embodiment Gap.
The Intellect-Embodiment Gap
I define the Intellect-Embodiment Gap as the gap between one’s intellectual understanding of the world and one’s moment-to-moment embodied and affective experience of the world. In the context of Bigger-than-Self Reality, Bigger-than-Self Distress, and the Biospheric-Civilisational Meta-Crisis, the Intellect-Embodiment Gap is significant, complex, wondrous, and distressing. That is, to really engage with the implications of the meta-crisis and feel these in an embodied, affective way will, for most of us, involve engaging with some relatively difficult emotional and psychological material. But simultaneously, to realise our at-homeness in and the wonder of the human world, biosphere, and cosmos in a properly reverential way is to experience emotions that are bigger than might be typical to experience in our busy, overworked, phone-addicted “normal” society.
Who wants to contemplate the fact that our civilisation is in crisis, perhaps existentially so? The incidence of eco-anxiety, ecological grief, and eco-anger, would suggest that whether or not we want to think about these things, they are breaking through into awareness anyway, and for at least some people are experienced as significantly distressing. Likewise for more socially oriented forms of bigger-than-self distress: who wants to really feel the sensations associated with the existential of racial hate and discrimination, or with the fracturing of society into different and increasingly discordant identity groups are a feature of affective polarisation that is at historically high levels today?
And concurrently, who takes the time to contemplate the wonder of the picture of bigger-than-self reality that is painted by the likes of Christian and Henriques, which is a derivative of the combined work of generations of careful scientific study and observation of the natural world? To soak in the gratitude of, awe and appreciation of everything that modern civilisation has achieved? Not just the scientific but also artistic, creative, and cultural feats? To realise that we are not at the end of but instead part of an ongoing, still-unfolding humanity, biosphere, and infinitely wondrous, complex cosmos? That we have a unique gift and opportunity to participate in and with all of it? I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t look at a sunset over a horizon line, or gaze up at an un-filtered view of the Milky Way and not agree that it, as does so much of the natural world, evokes wonder - but this is typically far from our moment-to-moment waking experience.
The intellect-embodiment gap in the context of the Bigger-than approach developed in this Substack includes the affective and embodied psychological responses that emerge from mindful, sincere engagement with these and more intellectual understandings of the current state of Bigger-than-Self reality. It links back to the expanded psychological territory and capacity for feeling emotions and sensations discussed in Part II of this Intro Series: that we will have a greater range and depth of emotional, sensory, and meaning-related experience as we learn to engage in a mindful way with our experience. This includes our experience of Bigger-than-Self Reality and the Meta-Crisis.
I suggest that the Experience Gap is closed by yoking together abstract thought and phenomenological experience through the body. At a basic level, this possibility is revealed through an insight that is fundamental to (though not unique within) mindfulness practice: that for each intellectual thought or cognitive appraisal, there is a co-emerging body sensation, and that body sensations, thoughts, and other internal phenomena can be seen as making up affective psychological experience.
The fact that many of us within the dominant civilisational culture have only quite rudimentary embodied awareness of this link between thoughts, sensations, and affective experience is evidence of the Intellect-Embodiment Gap itself. The reasons for this severing of a link between mind and body in Western culture (which is not present or as extensive in many other cultures) are interesting and multifaceted, and have been tackled by a great many contemporary authors, but are not the focus of the current post.
On a psychological level, the Experience Gap is not really meaningfully touched by having a purely intellectual understanding of where the historical split between mind and body might have come from. What does help to close it are effective embodied psychological practices such as mindfulness, yoga, tai chi, and related practices which can be found throughout most human cultures, including Western and Indigenous cultures. Embodied wisdom practices is where a lot of the work is to be done in transmuting Bigger-than-Self Distress and closing the Experience Gap. I will share the kinds of practices that I have found most helpful in this task later in this Intro Series and this Substack in general, as there are some starting points that I think can reduce the difficulty and increase the effectiveness of this, but this is a large topic and one that many people (Daniel Thorson’s Emerge Podcast, the Monastic Academy, and John Vervaeke’s After Socrates series are exemplary instances of this) are focusing a lot of attention on today.
The rest of this post will focus on outlining some key (embodied) thinkers in areas related to this conception of the Intellect-Embodiment Gap and its application to Bigger-than-Self Distress. I focus on the literature of embodied and enactive cognition, as this literature provides some useful intellectual distinctions and findings that can help to accompany embodied and enactive psychological practices for closing the Experience gap.
Cognition as Embodied and Enactive: Yoking Together Abstract Thought and Phenomenological Experience Through the Body
The view of cognition as embodied and enactive, first put forward by Varela et al. (1991), can help to tie strands together that have been so far left open at this point in the Intro Series. The enactive approach builds on ideas within phenomenology, particularly the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 1962), who viewed the dual-mode of body as something that was both lived within and that appeared to us as an object of perception. The Big History narrative discussed in Part III of the Intro Series presented cognition, or information processing, as one of the defining features of life.
Maturana and Varela’s (1980) theory of autopoiesis is another pre-cursor to the enactive cognition approach. In this theory a defining feature of cognition is that living organisms are cognitive organisms are self-authoring systems. They create their own perceptions of their environments and change their structure in respond to changing perceptions of those autopoietically created environments. That living organisms undergo these changes in structure while still maintaining a continuity of organisation makes them autopoietic (Maturana & Varela, 1980).
Another thread that’s been a major topic of discussion in the Intro Series so far is mindfulness training. This gets integrated with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and others, and Maturana and Varela’s work on autopoiesis. Varela et al. (1991) discuss mindfulness at length in their discussion of embodied enactive cognition. In doing so, they provide an account of cognition that, if properly understood, can begin to provide a philosophically and scientifically rigorous viewpoint for responding to the Intellect-Embodiment Gap and Bigger-than-Self Distress.
Central to Varela et al.’s (1991, p. xx) view of embodied cognition, and following on from Maturana and Varela’s (1980) earlier work on autopoiesis, is a calling into question the notion that “cognition consists of the representation of a world that is independent of our perceptual and cognitive capacities by a cognitive system that exists independent of the world”.
Varela et al. (1991) draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962), who as mentioned earlier points out a profound circularity between the double-embodiment of our bodies as both living physical, biological structures and lived experiential, phenomenological structures. Varela et al. seek to link these two poles of the double-embodiment together out of both a concern for cognitive science, that it might benefit from integration of lived experience and the possibilities of transformation inherent in human experience; and for the everyday lived experience of ordinary people, that folk psychology might benefit from a tighter coupling between the sciences of the mind and lived experience (we can see how this precedes and alludes to the current presentation of the Intellect-Embodiment Gap).
Varela et al. (1991, p. xviii) criticise the then current approach in cognitive science, which still predominates in mainstream cognitive science today despite the flourishing of mindfulness as an object of scientific study, that “there remains no direct, hands-on, pragmatic approach to experience with which to complement science. As a result, both the spontaneous and more reflective dimensions of human experience receive little more than a cursory, matter-of-fact treatment, one that is no match for the depth and sophistication of scientific analysis.” They posit mindfulness, as understood within the Buddhist tradition, as a means of studying the mind from the experiential viewpoint that has been lacking in the Western philosophical traditions.
Varela et al. (1991) introduce the concept of enactive cognition, which rejects the subject-object dualism of a self independent of the world and a world independent of the self. Instead, both the embodied brain and environment play a role in enacting our cognition and experience of the world. As an example, they discuss colour perception, and how our perception of colour does not at any stage appear to produce anything resembling a map of some externally existing outside world. Instead, quite a remarkable consistency of perception is maintained even at quite different levels of light being received by the environment: we perceive a red bag as red both in midday sun as well as in hazy dusk light.
This colour perception instance is but one illustrative example of how even the act of perception is enacted by both brain and environment, rather than a passive receiving of some objectively real stimulus from the environment. This does not reduce us to solipsism, nor nihilism: there is still a world out there, and it plays a part in the experience of cognition that is enacted, but our experience of it cannot be seen to exist independently of the cognition that is enacting it forth. And, as Varela et al. suggest and as I argue in this Substack, when correctly apprehended this view can lead to something like the opposite of solipsistic nihilism: even in our cognition, we are nonseparate from the world: there is no self to be found, through scientific nor experiential analysis. This point is a nuanced one, and so bears expanding on.
Addressing Nihilism Through an Enactive Understanding of Cognition
Varela et al. (1991) link nihilism with the grasping tendency of the mindless mind that splits experience into object and subject, self and world. They draw on the arguments of the Madhyamika or "middle way" school of the Buddhist tradition, which expand on the original Abhidharma or five aggregates teaching of the Buddha to extend the arguments against an independently existing self to that of an independently existing world.
This non-existence of an independently existing self is not an abstract philosophical proposition but one that is understood within the context of mindfulness practice: that the mind is actively participating in the formation of our experience of the world, and so, like the self, the world can be seen as having no independently arising existence. Everything is codependently arising, interdependent on everything else. As Varela et al. (1991) point out, this is understood as a precise argument within the five aggregates named in the Abhidharma teaching, not as a fuzzy hand-wavey gesture.
In contemporary cognitive science terms, this argument is situated within an understanding of the mind or cognition within this double-embodiment notion of embodied cognition. To see the illusion of an independently existing self and world can be done in a purely abstract theoretical sense, even when based on empirical evidence, by the mind that has not realised experientially the co-dependent arising nature of the same phenomena.
The gap between the fruits of abstract thought and the experiential realisation of such fruits is, according to Varela et al. (1991) and echoing arguments from Nishitani (1982) is the basis for the kind of nihilism that is so common to the Western mind. Nietzsche (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 9) summed up this form of nihilism in his quote: “Radical nihilism is the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values that one recognizes”. This quote points to the inability to live in accordance with what our best science and philosophy (domains of abstract thought) tells us to be true and good. This inability is one instance of what I am calling the Intellect-Embodiment Gap.
For Varela et al., this nihilism comes from our inability to live without a dualism of self and world, despite our scientific knowledge suggesting the nonexistence of such a boundary. This inability to live in accordance with scientific knowledge (the Intellect-Embodiment Gap) is not entirely dissimilar to the predicament we face when facing the empirical evidence of the reality of climate change and other biospheric facts and social aspects of the meta-crisis: despite knowing what is going wrong, we have so far largely failed to translate this abstract knowledge into phenomenological experience and embodied action in the world.
Understanding and being able to perceive and close this gap through, as has been done within Indian philosophy (Varela et al., 1991) yoking abstract thought to lived experience in the world - and vice versa - is central to the approach I take in this Substack to transmuting Bigger-than-Self Distress.
Enactive Cognition: Implications for Culture and Mindfulness Practice
Varela et al. (p. 22) contend that a correct understanding of enactive cognition (and by implication, how it affords an understanding and potential for resolution of the Intellect-Embodiment Gap) points to the possibility of a “second renaissance in the cultural history of the West, with the potential to be equally important as the rediscovery of Greek thought in the European renaissance”. A possible second renaissance along these lines could have important implications for our culture’s capacity at large to respond to the meta-crisis.
Before moving on from the current discussion of Varela et al.’s seminal (1991) work, there are some important insights into the practice of mindfulness itself that can be added here, and better understood now that the discussion of their notion of embodied enactive cognition has been introduced.
Varela et al. note that mindfulness can be taught in two ways. One is as the development of skills and mental habits: this is present in analogies of training the mind like a muscle that are quite often used in contemporary mindfulness teaching. Another way, which Varela et al. (p. 26) focus more on and which is more concordant with the approach to enactive wisdom development that I advocate for in this Substack, is that “mindfulness / awareness is considered part of the basic nature of the mind; it is the natural state of mind that has been temporarily obscured by habitual patterns of grasping and delusion.”
In this second perspective, as these habitual patterns are seen through, experientially (for example via neutralisation of the deep operant conditioning of the sensations co-emerging with narrative appraisals as in MiCBT; Cayoun, 2011), this natural state of mind can shine forth. This naturally arising experience is discussed as the beginning of prajna, or wisdom, and is not a knowing about anything but rather the coming together of the abstract attitude and knowing with mindfulness of one’s moment to moment experience (Varela et al., 1991). It is this coming together of abstract thought and moment to moment embodied experience in the context of bigger-than-self distress that is the aim of the nondual enactive wisdom development and sensemaking (NEWDS) approach I present in this Intro Series, and which is central to the closing of the Experience Gap.
Furthermore, the development of mindfulness is conceptualised in this view as a letting go, and a discovery of what was always already there (Varela et al., 1991). Although there are undoubtedly skills to learn as part of the process, mindfulness is often presented as primarily an unlearning rather than a learning. This may require a lot of training and effort, sustained over time, but it is a different kind of effort than what might typically be understood by the term.
If the mind approaches the task with a great deal of striving, ambition, and stress, or to develop some sort of special skills and become some sort of meditation expert, then the practice will not tend to work, or at best it will lead to a kind of self-deception that takes one away from the actual practice of mindfulness: one tries to become good at mindfulness or meditation rather than actually being mindfully, sensorily present with what is. Instead, the kind of effort required is that of noticing and eventually seeing through these patterns of striving or desire for specialness and letting them go so that what is underneath can naturally arise. This natural arising reveals the already existing unity and coordination of body and mind. In this way, Varela et al. (p. 31) describe how the committed mindfulness meditator will naturally “discover” the assertions of Buddhism, much as a committed scientist will be able to independently verify solid scientific findings by repeating the same experiments.
It is this stability of the common assertions of Buddhism that differentiates it from introspectionism (e.g., Costall, 2006), for example, where individuals reflect on the contents of their thoughts, which obviously differ widely from person to person and yield no consistent results. When discussing practices later in this Substack, what I try to focus on is practices that have a similar quality to this in that they yield repeatable findings if practiced within one’s phenomenological experience. Internal Family Systems (IFS; Schwartz & Sweezy, 2020), Aletheia Coaching (March, 2021) and Wider Embraces (Deurell, 2022), which will be discussed at later points, while almost incomparably more recent and more nascent when compared with Buddhism, seem to have this quality of leading to similar and reproducible results amongst diverse participants.
Metabolising and Transforming One’s Agent-Arena Relationship via Mindfulness of Bigger-than-Self Distress
The Enactive Cognition approach advocated by Varela et al. (1991), alongside their discussion of the practice of mindfulness, help to tie together methodological approaches towards the integration of embodied experience, that double-embodiment that Merleau-Ponty was pointing towards. In engaging with embodied practices such as mindfulness, our intellect and embodied experience can come together, meet one another.
In the context of bigger-than-self distress, there is a profound gap between our intellectual knowing and our embodied feelings and especially actions in the world. Embodied and enactive wisdom development practices, of which mindfulness is but one, can help to close this experience gap. This closing of the experience gap comes through the bringing of a mindful, embodied attention to the affective and interoceptive qualities that co-emerge with our intellectual appraisals of bigger-than-self reality as we move through our lives. This mindful presencing of this perpetual co-emergence, in combination with other practices, can assist in a process of metabolisation of the doubly-embodied, enactive agent-arena relationship with bigger-than-self reality in such a way that one’s self, cognitive system, and very grip with one’s environment / socio-ecological niche is transformed.
Such transformation makes use of the experience of distress, which is rooted in a concern for oneself and the field of one’s experience, which includes bigger-than-self reality, to orient us towards this latent agent-arena relationship that is constantly there yet obscured by our lack of mindfulness and of cultural frameworks for relating to such aspects of experience. We are seemingly predisposed towards this kind of bigger-than-self concern by virtue of being autopoietic beings, as to be self-authoring biological organisms we need to be concerned with our own survival. As social beings existing within human cultures, this concern naturally extends outwards to include other beings with whom we share identity and common destiny - albeit that this concern is highly culturally malleable.
Mindfulness and other enactive wisdom development practices within the NEWDS approach outlined here can put us back in contact with this naturally arising concern, and re-process it such that our cognition shifts to over time be more in alignment with bigger-than-self concern. In bringing into contact the intellectual sensemaking with the felt bodily and affective responses to the implications of such sensemaking, one is quite naturally transformed, and one’s experience of the world is transformed. This is not simple or easy, but it is possible. It is achieved through a metabolisation of the Intellect-Embodiment Gap, which has been the focus of the current post.
Obviously, the story of how this happens is not complete yet. As this Intro Series progresses, the argument that the duality between the self and world is illusory will be developed further in the context of bigger-than-self reality. That is, the abstract scientific and systems understanding of reality and how human culture and cognition has emerged in a way that is continuous with the emergent complexity of the cosmos and biosphere described in Christian (2018) and Capra and Luisi (2014) will be yoked to an experiential realisation of the same, which in turn can provide a groundless ground that is deep and broad enough for metabolising the Intellect-Embodiment Gap and Bigger-than-Self Distress.
In this way, a more skilfully self-aware cognition can participate in the creation of cultures that can be responsive to the realities of the biosphere and civilisation that we exist within, and the symptoms of the meta-crisis that are so existentially concerning to face. Individuals within this can participate in this via the transformation of their own cognition, which both leads to reductions in Bigger-than-Self Distress and an increased capacity to contribute to human cultures that are responsive to the sources of collective suffering represented within the meta-crisis.