There’s a famous story about Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting under a tree engrossed in a book of mathematical equations when a marching band came by. Soon after, a young man approached Sir Isaac and asked which way the band had gone, to which Newton replied, “What band?”
The story illustrates the intimate and mysterious association between existence and presence. Anyone who explores this will soon find himself deep in the land of paradox and philosophical curiosities of the most fascinating sort. For example, there’s another famous bit about a tree falling in the forest with no observer anywhere that poses the seemingly innocent question, “Does the tree make a sound?”
This question is first and last about presence and its relation to existence, for if by sound one means a certain kind of experience—namely an auditory one—and as the hypothetical stipulates, there’s no one around to have the experience, then technically the tree doesn’t make a sound, but if by sound we mean only a disturbance of the air that could be heard if an experiencer were present to experience it, then it seems that the tree indeed makes a sound, and we’re spared the strange imagining in which a large tree comes crashing to earth in silence.
This is usually as far as the conversation goes around the old question about the falling tree, but it’s really only the tip of the philosophical iceberg, because in the same way that the word sound may be taken as semantic shorthand for a certain kind of experience, so the phrase “tree falling in the forest” may stand for an experience (a visual one, perhaps), and so presuppose an experiencer.
Taken to this next level, the question begins to reveal its paradoxical infrastructure: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to experience it, is there a tree and does it fall?” With no experiencer, not even an imaginary one, we don’t have sufficient presence to establish even the hypothetical conditions, viz., that there is something called “tree” (which presupposes an experiencer for whom it is a tree) and that this tree is in the act of what we experiencers describe as “falling.”
It appears that disallowing the subjective side of things simultaneously disallows the so-called objective side, so that in a roundabout way, the question eliminates its own ontological prerequisite. If there’s no experiencer, then you can’t posit the question, not even hypothetically.
We may presume that there are many things during the day that never reach the threshold of our awareness. As far as we’re concerned, they don’t exist; that is to say, there is no “they” that we can talk about as existing or not existing. There is a great deal in this worth exploring, but for our purposes here, it’s enough to recognize that there is a close and ineffable kinship between presence and being according to which a thing only comes into being insofar as it becomes present—at least for some observer. A thing that could not be observed then, cannot exist, and strictly speaking couldn’t even count as a “thing.”
All well and good, all intriguing philosophy—but how can we make use of it?
Well, first, we need to discount any solipsistic interpretation of this association between presence and being. We’re not saying that something doesn’t exist if some particular person doesn’t observe it; only that a thing exists only by virtue of being observable. So, the fact that you or I are not observing the streets of Paris right now (ruling out of course any readers who are observing the streets of Paris) doesn’t mean that those streets don’t exist, for they meet the ontological requirement by being observable. Indeed, “Paris” already points to something observable, and that which cannot be observed could never be named.
Second, having qualified the issue to avoid the solipsism problem, we may note that we can deny a thing existence in some real and useful fashion by denying it presence. We deny a thing presence by refusing to give it attention. As attention is withdrawn, presence withdraws. I’m not alleging here that ignoring a thing neutralizes its existence, as there would be significant problems in a claim of that sort. I am saying, however, that there is a connection enforced by what Field training calls the “nonlocal effect.” In the most practical way, this means that the Particle tendency to lock onto problems, to figure them out, wrestle with them, and so on inadvertently supports and sustains and perpetuates those very problems.
Attention, as the Course tells us, is the venue of intention. The more we attend to something, the more reality it takes on. Many problems can be solved quickly simply through the withholding or withdrawing of attention. This is not the same thing at all as psychological denial. The deliberate use of our power to attend to a thing or not involves no denial of the thing, but only the refusal to continue granting that thing presence, and this has a mysterious effect on that thing’s existence.
There is an opportunity here to conduct a remarkable experiment. Confucius writes, “Great is the man who overcomes the world, but greater still in the man who overcomes himself, for he shall have the world spinning on the palm of his hand.” The object or fact or condition or situation that exists for us, that has presence, arises and is sustained by our granting it attention and presence. The more attention and presence we grant to problems, the more real and present and pressing they become. We can make the experiment of withdrawing our attention and credence from something that’s troubled us rather than dwelling on it, for what we dwell on, we dwell in, ontologically speaking.
So, for example, if some health issue has come up, we can see to it without giving it the power to define us. Remember that the selective granting or withholding of awareness that diminishes a thing’s presence and so, its existence, has nothing to do with psychological denial. So, we’re not saying, “ignore it and it will go away, ” since as long as there’s an “it” to be ignoring, “it” still has presence. No, the art lies in acknowledging whatever has presented itself, whatever has acquired presence, but without forsaking our power to participate deliberately and wittingly in the presence of that thing.
This means that we don’t allow a thing to have presence by default. When our participation is witting and selective, we have moved that much more into our creative authority. So, I may go to the doctor, but not be so focused on the symptoms that prompted me to see a doctor that those symptoms have the power to define me. Stephen and Ondrea Levine, in their work with people who had been told they had terminal cancer, said that the greatest challenge in their work was to break the patient’s identification with the disease—as though the moment they received the diagnosis, suddenly they became cancer patients, and little else. And yet, no matter what the facts say, we always have the last word in who we are.
This week, instead of allowing situations and worldly conditions to steal presence from you, why not explore deliberately granting or withholding attention and presence, and find out what difference it makes? Many things that quickly would become problems for us pass by during the day unnoticed simply because we don’t notice them. If we did, they might, in their newfound presence, gain a handhold in our consciousness and spring forth into expression, but our failure to notice them protects us. Who knows how many hardships we’re spared by the innocence of our attending? If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no observer, does the tree make a sound?
Without an observer, is there even something that can be called “a tree” that can be said to be doing something called “falling?” We are free to pick not only our battles, but the extent to which anything is present for us. What might happen if we took up this freedom to choose, so that the presence of things came not to us, but through us?
http://www.fieldproject.net/realities/?s=field+theoryhttp://www.fieldproject.net/realities/?s=field+theory
