From a certain kind of perspective that is an aspect of the witness, movement as it is normally perceived doesn’t exist. Everything is where it can be, nowhere is there a tension which could force a thing to move. The usual perception of time alters as well, of course.

Still, it doesn’t feel right to say that motion doesn’t exist in that view, it’s more like distance doesn’t exist. Because the field that this view oversees is unbounded, distance and separation don’t make sense anymore, and therefore it’s not possible to move from A to B in C amount of time. It seems like movement is usually ordered hierarchically (I want to get there, it would be better to be there than here). From the witness perspective, there is no there and here, because everything is where it is; and there’s no order: the world is one flat field, one experience, without boundaries but with a kind of coincidental, horizontal organization (the word Gliederung would be better), but that’s a thoroughly non-hierarchical kind of organization.

At first, the aspect of this perspective where the body becomes reduced to a collection of experiences (that to the usual mind feels threateningly immobile) seems unhealthily dissociative, but in practice the loose relaxation and the deeply simple feeling of having the space to let the body have a pleasant experience of movement feels quite nice and natural.

Tags: Add new tag, field, movement, witness