This paper develops a comparative understanding of the role played by affect in contemplative insight. It works out the role of affective “sensing,” or intimating, in the unfolding of contemplative insight, the way that cultivating and remaining in a specific basic affect creates the conditions under which sudden contemplative insight can occur. It does so by examining specific instructions of the “preliminary practices” (sngon ’gro) of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition Dzogchen (rdzogs chen, “Great Completeness”). Dzogchen’s preliminary practices cultivate intensive affective states in highly specific, self-conscious fashion, using these states to evoke recognition of rig pa (“awareness”)—the simple, primordial, unconditioned ground of awareness. The preliminaries habituate the affective state which allows rig pa to dawn, first momentarily (at crucial moments in the practice) and then more stably. I will also point out how this process closely parallels what my co-panelist will develop out of the fourteenth-century Christian instructions in the Cloud of Unknowing and Book of Privy Counseling, giving us a surprising, fresh connection between the Cloud author and Buddhist practices beyond obvious parallels others have drawn between his instructions and some Buddhist mindfulness practices.
The paper’s first part develops a general understanding of the relation of insight and affect. By “insight,” I mean shifts in understanding, moments when one understands what one previously did not. “Understanding” includes the nonconceptual and inarticulable, and so includes many contemplative insights. Dzogchen commentators have implicit theories of affect and understanding in these settings, and I develop them further with Eugene Gendlin, Claire Petitmengin, Iain McGilchrist, and others. I intend this as a theoretical mediation which, in comparative theological settings, helps us correlate contemplative practices otherwise enshrined in their home traditions’ irreducibly different theological-explanatory frames. It identifies for us a cognate human process of shifting affect and insight which each tradition theologizes differently. Further comparative-theological work can take off from that non-reductive correlation.
First, insight is affectively mediated. Although insight occurs spontaneously when conditions are right, conditions do indeed have to be right, and our affective state is perhaps the most important enabling condition of insight. Our affect sets the horizon of what we can be open to attending to and understanding. This is true both of transient affective states, and of basic habituated “moods”—underlying, mostly unconscious affective profiles “out of which” we experience and engage. Thus much contemplative training enables new insight by shifting our habituated affective horizon. These shifts create the affective conditions under which new insight can recurrently arise—insight which, under the former affective regime, was either intimated but affectively unwelcome, or was simply too remote from our ordinary affective and cognitive schemes to have been intimated at all. Shifts in affect shift our “palate:” there arises a felt openness to reality being otherwise than we have known, and a taste for those possibilities as acceptable. Concretely, then, the process of opening to new insight is the process of developing and allowing new affects, until they are habituated into new affective schemes.
Second, some insights (including contemplative insights) are insights into meanings so subtle or all-implicating that we cannot articulate them, although something in us has understood. Following Eugen Gendlin, we understand far more than at present we can say, and that region of our understanding is available to our experience as what he calls a “felt sense”—a highly specific but complex affect. I will call these kinds of insights “intimations:” something in us has understood, and yet that understanding is not available to us as an articulable meaning, only as an affect. Precisely because intimations are available to us only as affect, unfolding this order of our insight into deeper understanding is, concretely, a process of opening to and allowing specific affects. Some felt senses can eventually be resolved to words as we attune to them. But the contemplative processes I and my co-panelists discuss here are processes of opening onto intimations which their respective traditions say are intrinsically inarticulable (because so primordial and all-encompassing)—though they are highly specific, and can be subtly distinct from near counterfeits.
The paper’s second part examines the Dzogchen preliminaries in light of part one’s account. What I suggest is that the preliminaries aim to provoke insight precisely by awakening the right felt sense, one which intimates a deeply primordial and inarticulable meaning (don)—namely, rig pa. In the practices I highlight (refuge and Vajrasattva), this specific felt sense arises in a four-part motion: (1) outer safety, (2) inner safety, (3) dissolving, and (4) resting. (1) The practitioner first summons an affective surround of total safety embodied in “external” sources of refuge by imagining the “field of assembly” (tshogs zhing). This huge, multi-sensory space is filled with “outer” devotional deities gazing on with kindness. The practitioner is to feel total safety, that the focal guru in the field knows them utterly. (2) The outer refuge sources then send light into the practitioner’s body, purifying and activating affective centers (the cakras) and soaking the body completely before the deity itself melts into the practitioner’s body. The practitioner becomes the deity, and is instructed to feel in their own body, speech, and mind all the deity’s complete and inexhaustible qualities of buddhahood. This is an embodied, felt sense. All that was first felt as outside is now felt as the practitioner’s own body (as “inner”), in a feeling of completeness, fullness, purity, lightness. The immanence of one’s own auto-affection (Michel Henry) is now felt as the source of safety and fullness. (3) This whole felt sense of fullness and safety is then expanded to encompass the entire universe of beings in its auto-affection, then all dissolved into “expanse” (dbyings). (4) Then one “rests” without thought in this “natural state” (gnas lugs) for as long as it remains. I suggest that, for Dzogchen commentators, this specific but utterly simple affect—total safety released into expanse—is an intimation of rig pa, and that allowing and attuning to it (by gradual cultivation) creates the affective conditions under which recognition of rig pa can occur.
This paper develops for comparative theological work an understanding of the role played by affect in contemplative insight. It works out the role of affective “sensing,” or intimating, in the unfolding of contemplative insight, the way cultivating and remaining in a specific basic affect creates the conditions under which sudden contemplative insight can occur. It does so by examining instructions in the “preliminary practices” (sngon ’gro) of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition Dzogchen (rdzogs chen, “Great Completeness”). Dzogchen’s preliminary practices self-consciously cultivate intensive affective states, using them to evoke recognition of rig pa (“awareness”)—the simple, primordial, unconditioned ground of awareness. I suggest that, for Dzogchen commentators, there is a specific but utterly simple affect which uniquely intimates rig pa’s qualities: a felt sense of total safety released into expanse. I use Eugene Gendlin’s account of how implicit meanings are present to us as affects to understand this facet of Dzogchen.