Immediate boundary awareness

Immediate awareness is a state of mind that a person lives but does not make. It is not experienced as produced by something, nor is it a representation. It is our alertness as we live, and as such is particularly at issue in sickness or health. It is an individual's open sense for the limits of who he is and for the limits of selfhood. This reduces the threat otherwise experienced when encountering the boundaries with other vastly different kinds of awareness. Recognizing the boundaries in mind, has the effect of freeing the person for boundary awareness, for experience of radical otherness, and for all the contingencies in being. Such immediate boundary awareness is always intuitive, as distinct from conceptual objectivity, and is often affective. Such states may be approached by following feelings, remaining uncritically alert with affect, or giving focus to emotions. These states find expression in directions of all sorts: innuendo, irony, style, images, fantasies, depth feelings, desires, etc.

Immediate awareness is that region of awareness that is neither moral nor immoral, that is not fixed by any overarching law, but that is nevertheless alert and alive as the occurrence of many relations of regions and things variously and finitely constituted. A person opens to immediacy of awareness by allowing his thinking to be centered in openness, disclosure, or transience. Each moment then dissolves as it happens. There is then a freedom in transience, a translucence and lightness in things in contrast to normal material heaviness. This awareness is lost when the person imposes desires on the occurrence of things, allowing insistence and holding to dominate as the mediation of desires that provide connections between things through which they may be constructed. Environments are thus constructed as mediated realities which may absorb attention to the point that the existence of the unmediated regions is forgotten. These regions can be understood as distinct from conscious processes. They can be viewed as not susceptible to description or else precede observation and thus are already past when seen or spoken of. They may be considered as nonconceptual and fundamentally changed when grasped conceptually.