“…like me a believer in total immersion…” Elizabeth Bishop writes of the seal who “regarded me / steadily, moving his head a little” in “At the Fishhouses.”
What is total immersion, and what does it mean to be “a believer” in it? It’s something we seek and pay money for, as in the “immersive” Van Gogh projection show you can do yoga to; it’s a swimming technique in which your body rolls like a slim kayak with the flowing twists of each stroke; it’s the opposite of distraction, but also of concentration. Or maybe concentration is a form of immersion that comes over us when thinking shutters the lens, like the darkling scene, seen from a dark room, of a wooded lake through an oversize window…
…that’s so captivating, magnetic, it obscures the surrounding realm of experience. Being lost in thought is one kind of immersion, but it’s also a form of distraction, in spite of having such centrality in the life of the human mind.
Immersion, from in- “into, in, on, upon” + Latin mergere “plunge, dip,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “probably rhotacized [i.e. formed from a defective pronunciation of r especially a substitution of some other sound for that of r] from PIE *mezgo- ‘to dip, to sink, to wash, to plunge.’” The intransitive meaning “sink or disappear into something else, be swallowed up, lose identity” is from 1726.
So merge subtly splits off in meaning around the Enlightenment, when the transitive sense of “cause to be absorbed or to disappear in something else” begins to become more prevalent. This split in the 1720s marks a divergence between the sense of something dipping or plunging into a medium and yet retaining its integrity, and something that loses its identity and boundaries, becoming one with the medium into which it plunges and maybe losing its thingness too.
The difference between dipping or plunging and being absorbed is the difference between the lost-in-thought immersion that is really a concentrated distraction busily reinforcing identity with its self-referential narrativizing, and total immersion in experience—embodied immediacy, present awareness, rigpa.
Is it a coincidence that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England, when merge took on a loss of identity boundaries, the concept of personal identity, of self, and of soul, were going through an identity crisis? First, John Locke eroded its foundations in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), by suggesting there was no soul but only psychological continuity holding us together. Later, David Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), obliterated not only soul and self but also continuity by suggesting the common conception of identity is a fictional string on which we hang the beads of discontinuous moments of experience. (He suggests “making merry” with friends and playing some backgammon when this becomes too frightening.)
For many, losing the notion of bounded self or singular ego—experiencing total immersion—signals an emergency.
But what is an emergency—an “unforeseen occurrence requiring immediate attention” from the 1630s—but a signal emergence? From Latin emergens “to rise from or out of anything that surrounds, covers, or conceals; come forth; appear, as from concealment,” 1560s, from Latin emergere “bring forth, bring to light,” intransitively “arise out or up, come forth, come up, come out, rise,” from ex “out” + mergere “to dip, sink.”
An emergency is an event that ruptures the illusion of smooth-flowing time, of immortality and limitlessness. We think we’ll get another chance at everything, and really we only experience everything once. An emergency means someone may die. Life may be cut off, obliterated in an instant, and in fact, it will be. An emergency arises, as its history shows, out of obscurity, out invisibility or its subjective side, unseeing.
Immersion is where you must go after you realize that emergencies are inevitable—an emergency is inevitable. Stay lost in thought and you’re only taking a dip, experiencing in only one mode of what Buddhism refers to as the five aggregates—form/matter, sensation, perception, concepts/mentality, and consciousness—each one of which we cling to but which don’t add up to or arise out of an essential self, belief in which is the cover-up out of which emergency comes to light.
Total immersion is being awake in the moment; there is no adverbial form of awake, which describes being and only being. To be awake is to be immersed in being, to merge, through and through, with being. To be being; to be. Not to plunge into the obscurity of egoism.
I’m a believer in total immersion. I swim laps, I meditate, I practice. But like most of us, I’m too often like Elizabeth Bishop’s immersing and emerging seal, which would
…disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Quotes are from:
Online Etymology Dictionary, immersion.
Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”