Denise Ferreira da Silva: “The main distinction I think is about how we approach the world in general and everything that is in it. In modernity, we are trained to approach the world always with an instrumentalizable sensibility: apprehension, comprehension, and instrumentalization. They are very tied together in this technology-driven society in which we live. Now the centrality that modern philosophy gives to Understanding has to do with this instrumental view of knowledge, for which observation aims at capturing the way things work. The objective of learning is to be able to emulate how they work. It should allow us to create machines and other things that allow us to reproduce what happens in nature toward some kind of gain. In reiki, which is all about the body and about relating to the body in a completely different way, intention refers to the moment of apprehension—not apprehension in the sense of seizing something, but apprehension in the sense of paying attention. So when you direct your attention to anything, the relationship moves, and attention just stops there. There is no move toward comprehending and then instrumentalizing. It’s just attending. Intention here is not the same as the will. It is not about having an effect on, being the efficient cause of something. It is more about paying attention, focusing on something, which is to acknowledge something that has already taken place—“an effect” that has taken place because everything is deeply implicated, that is, entangled at the elemental level. But I also want to answer the question about dancing!
[laughter]
Even though I’m not a performer, I am from Brazil, and dancing is something that I had to learn since I was very small, and I would be punished or teased for not dancing samba appropriately. So dancing has a lot to do with other things I do and don’t do. I’m saying that because of the element of communication. I remember people asking me to teach them to dance samba, and of course people could repeat the movements, but it was difficult to explain to them about the intention. Every movement is about a conversation, whether it’s a conversation with people who are dancing with you or somewhere else. And that’s very hard to explain to people who just view it as a spectacle. Because it is about communication that does not require the second moment of actually having it sent back to you. Yuki was talking about that before, about the expectation.”
