Assessing Direct Awareness of Being

EXPERIENCE OF BEING

I’m facing an interesting challenge in my phenomenological research on the Experience of Being.

In my interviews, I explore people’s awareness of the Experience of Being – a code-term for aspects of experience that they describe as constant, stable, and ever-present. In other words, what they perceive as a background of being that remains unchanged through the fluctuations of thoughts, emotions, and sensations.

My challenge is to assess the degree to which an interviewee is directly aware of and in contact with this background experience, rather than merely describing a belief, acquired interpretation, or conceptual understanding of it.

Established phenomenological approaches (specifically, Gendlin’s Focusing framework and Vermersch and Petitmengin’s micro-phenomenology) offer ways to assess how directly someone is experiencing what they describe. We look for indicators such as pauses, shifts in attention, spontaneous bodily gestures, concrete sensory descriptions, and the emergence of words that capture something previously difficult to articulate. But these indicators are suited to experiences that arise, change, and pass away, not to the ever-present Experience of Being.

What happens when the experience we’re investigating is precisely that which does not change?

Someone who is effortlessly and continuously aware of the background of their being may exhibit none of these indicators. And asking them to direct their attention toward it may create a temporary experience of attending, rather than reveal their ongoing awareness.

I’m therefore seeking to develop a rating scale that would enable independent researchers to assess, objectively and consistently, the degree of someone’s direct awareness of their ever-present Experience of Being. I’d welcome insights from researchers working in phenomenology, contemplative science, and first-person methodologies.