Richard Kearney speaks of Anatheism. In Greek "
ana" means again, or retrieval. He is speaking of something that precedes both theism and atheism.
What is this understanding of what-we-call-God that flows through, or takes place, before any belief or non-belief occupies our way of speaking about this primordial experience?
A friend sends an article about panpsychism and consciousness. It speaks to the debate taking place about whether or not consciousness (not thought) can be said to be part of non-sentient beings in a way that it is, differently, in sentient beings.
The experience of consciousness need not be continuous or maintained as an individual self or subject. Nor is it necessarily extinguished when the smaller constituents of matter combine to make more complex systems, like brains. The human sense of being a self, along with an experience of continuity over time through memory, may in fact be a very rare form of content. Is it possible that alongside the conscious experience of “me,” there is a much dimmer experience of each individual neuron, or of different collections of neurons and cells in my body and beyond? Could the universe literally be teeming with consciousness—with content flickering in and out, overlapping, combining, separating, flowing, in ways we can’t quite imagine—ruled by physical laws we don’t yet understand?
Perhaps the term panpsychism, because of its history and associations, will continue to pose obstacles to progress in consciousness studies. We might need a new label for the work in which scientists and philosophers theorize about the possibility that consciousness is fundamental. However, we’re so far from having a working theory that it seems premature to label it with an “ism,” and perhaps it’s more helpful to simply give a name to this category of theories, such as “intrinsic nature theory” or “intrinsic field theory.” At the very least, it seems clear that the current incomplete picture gives us good reason to keep thinking creatively about consciousness—and specifically to continue entertaining the idea that it perhaps goes deeper than our intuitions have led us to believe.
(--from, Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered, Think of consciousness like spacetime—a fundamental field that’s everywhere. BY ANNAKA HARRIS, FEBRUARY 27, 2020, in Nautilus)
Perhaps a working theory might center around awareness.
We might say that awareness is the ground of existence. But, even with that foundational root of existence, it doesn't mean that sentient beings awaken to that awareness. To realize the ground of being, to manifest the root of reality, seems to require an awakening to it, an awakening with it, an awakening as it.
But, we might say, awareness dwells as the ground of being/existence for both the sentient and the non-sentient. If such is so, everything is teaching its core reality by dint of existence as and in being.
"
Ana" is a turning and a returning, says
Kearney, back to something after the event. It is a returning to something before theism or atheism, but that which precedes the choice between them. It is the moment of choice, he says, the hovering, the wondering, marveling, prefacing any deciding.
Jean Gebser, in ch.1 of his
The Ever-Present Origin, gives his perspective of what it is we might be looking at/as/for:
Our concern is with a new reality - a reality functioning and effectual integrally, in which intensity and action, the effective and the effect co-exist; one where origin, by virtue of „presentiation,“ blossoms forth anew; and one in which the present is all-encompassing and entire. Integral reality is the world‘s transpar-ency, a perceiving of the world as truth: a mutual perceiving and imparting of truth of the world and of man and of all that transluces both. (--final paragraph, Part 1, Ch 1)
Due to the way we concretize time, giving it spatial distance and memory reference, we choose to lop it into a triadic past, present, and future.
Rather, things arise and withdraw at the same time. This present, this undifferentiated instant of manifestation and disappearance, is the now that has no fixed abode.
But a more detailed look at Buddhist teachings on impermanence, especially Mahāyāna teachings, changes the initial impression. Impermanence, it becomes clear, doesn’t mean that things last for a while then pass away: things arise and pass away at the same time. That is, things don’t exist as we imagine they do. Much of our experience of reality is illusory. And this is why we suffer.
In effect, what these teachings are telling us is that impermanence is time itself, being itself, and that time and being are not at all as we imagine them to be, they are utterly otherwise. To really understand and fully embrace this point is to live in a radically different world — a world of awakening, inclusion, and love. Time is the lock — and the key! — to Buddhist teachings, and our lives.
(—from Foreward by Norman Fischer, in Being-Time, A Practitioner’s Guide to Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō Uji, by Shinshu Roberts, 2018)
What then are we looking at?
That which originates and that which obviates is the self-same (or, selfless-same) appearance/disappearance underlying immediate experience of existence and (what we consider to be) the going beyond (some say, loss) of that very immediate experience of interchange.
And awareness?
Awareness is winsome riband.
Winsome: What is./ now / simultaneously / origin / manifesting / eternity.
Riband: Recollecting / interchange / before / after / no / difference.
