Addendum: The Communion State of Process
Addendum: The Communion State of Process
Addendum: The Communion State of Process
A final distinction must be made.
The aim of descent is not knowledge.
Nor revelation.
Nor belief.
Nor even self-understanding in the ordinary sense.
The aim is communion.
Yet the object of communion is not a deity, spirit, or metaphysical realm conceived as separate from the world.
The object of communion is process itself.
Ordinary consciousness encounters reality primarily as a collection of things.
Objects.
Entities.
Individuals.
The self appears separate from the world.
The body appears separate from nature.
History appears separate from the present.
The dead appear separate from the living.
Everything appears divided into discrete units.
This mode of perception is adaptive and necessary.
Yet it obscures a deeper reality.
For beneath every apparent object lies a process.
The body is a process.
The tree is a process.
The species is a process.
History is a process.
Consciousness is a process.
The self is a process.
The apparent stability of things conceals the continuity of becoming.
The communion state emerges when attention shifts from entities to processes.
The world ceases to appear primarily as a collection of separate forms and begins to reveal itself as an unfolding field of relations.
Nothing disappears.
Distinctions remain.
The self remains.
The tree remains.
The animal remains.
Yet each becomes visible as a moment within a larger continuity.
The emphasis moves from isolated existence to participation.
This state is often described through the language of unity, but unity is an insufficient word.
Unity suggests the dissolution of difference.
The communion state reveals something subtler.
Difference persists.
Continuity becomes visible.
The experience resembles music more than fusion.
Distinct notes remain distinct.
Yet their participation in a larger movement becomes audible.
The melody emerges not from the destruction of difference but from the relation between differences.
For this reason music occupies a privileged place within archaic consciousness.
Music is process rendered perceptible.
A note is not music.
Music exists only through becoming.
Only through unfolding relation.
Only through continuity across time.
The musician therefore becomes a figure of attunement rather than explanation.
The musician does not describe the process.
The musician enters it.
The song becomes participation made audible.
The communion state is therefore not a departure from embodiment but a deepening of embodiment.
The body becomes transparent to the processes from which it emerged.
Animality becomes perceptible.
Ancestry becomes perceptible.
Mortality becomes perceptible.
History becomes perceptible.
The individual organism is experienced as a local expression of a much larger movement.
One does not escape the soma.
One enters it more completely.
The significance of practices such as descent, ritual, sensory reduction, fasting, music, poetry, and other forms of recursive attention lies here.
Their purpose is not merely symbolic.
They create conditions under which process can become directly perceptible.
They loosen identification with static selfhood and allow awareness to encounter the continuity from which selfhood emerges.
The communion state may therefore be defined as the direct experiential perception of reality as becoming rather than object.
It is the perception of continuity beneath apparent separateness.
It is participation in emergence itself.
The self does not disappear.
Rather, it discovers itself as a moment within a larger unfolding.
The result is neither transcendence nor escape.
It is attunement.
The organism enters resonance with the processes from which it arose.
The living body of time becomes directly perceptible.
And consciousness recognizes itself not as an isolated entity but as a local expression of a much deeper continuity of becoming.