Immanence and the Mental Matrix
Universum - C. Flammarion, Holzschnitt, 1888, Creative Commons
Wilfred Bion meditates upon the depths of the psyche and “ultimate reality”. Bion uses the symbol “O” to denote this “ultimate reality”. He says it is “the essence of the unconscious as well as of the Unknown.” O is the real which lies outside our preconceived notions of reality. We can consider O in terms of the “unknowable thing-in-itself.”
Immanence is that which lies outside our preconceived notions of reality. It is a truth beyond the boundaries of the mental matrix. Immanence, like Bion’s O is an “unknowable thing-in-itself.” It is that O from which all of life arises, that ‘something’ which is immanent to life, and yet which we can never quite articulate.
Immanence, or’ ultimate reality’, is to be distinguished from the ways in which a particular person transforms and experiences reality. Each of us experiences a given moment in slightly different ways. If we take two individuals in a given moment each person will perceive their own particular variation of the moment; one person may experience sensations of tension, while the other experiences sensations of peace. The variations in a given person’s perceptions of a moment is not due to variations in the nature of immanence, but instead is a product of the way a particular person transforms immanence.
Jennifer Lilla MA, PhD, BCC
I was lucky to find your immanence.net website.
You sure can write and teach and inspire. Keep writing – I’ll keep reading.