As if for the first time…
One of the 4 Attitudes in Sophrology we focus on the body always being in present time, and reacting as if the mind is also in present time!
A French phenomenological philosopher and public intellectual, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose main interests was the constitution of meaning in human experience, author of ‘Phenomenology of Perception’, expanding on his thesis of ‘The Primacy of Perception’, was considered to be an important contribution to phenomenology, particularly in the relationship of the body to spatial awareness and sexuality.
Born in Rochefort, France in 1908, he could be considered as one of the Grandfathers of Phenomenology, where perception and perceiver are one in the same thing when it comes to the experience of living.
Similarly, Sophrology is about the body always being in present time and reacting as if the mind is also in present time. He describes that as ‘being-for-itself’ where his analysis of time is itself our living relationship with the world – we always exist as a ‘living synthesis of past, present and future’.
His summary of perception is never to be a master of judgement or qualification, just as Sophrologies 1st Attitude is ‘Freedom from judgement’ – from me and from others, and I quote;
“A consciousness or embodied subject’ is a ‘field of presence’, in other words being continuous from himself into the outside, as such a presence has potential for the meditation in time, between the for-itself and for-others.”
He also reviews ‘perception‘ calling it a ‘pre-reflective experience’ in which our body and the world around us are ‘immediately present and inter-related’ as if in One Body. His belief ‘to perceive is not to remember’ is what the 2nd Attitude in Sophrology means to ‘Put in brackets’ any pre-conceived ideas or assumptions.
He mentions in his book that awareness of the body as incarnated intentionally, which involves a shift, from viewing the body as an object to understanding the body as experience, which could be compared to Sophrologies 3rd Attitude of, ‘As if for the first time’, seeing with curiosity and wonder.
He also touches on sensation as a structure of ‘being-in-the-world’ as it is seeds of a dream when we sleep better from Sophrology practices, the phenomenological study must situate the human experience between the physiological and the psychic. Being-in-the-world consists in a body time – past, present and future, just as the 4th Attitude in Sophrolology, ‘Aliveness repetition’ noticing all the physical sensations through the cells of our skin from creation, to present, to our future!
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
-Alan Watts-
For Merleau-Ponty the body is not an object because the body is always present without a person’s ever being able to observe it as an object.
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