The relationship between indwelling and field being will be explored via first-person inquiry.
Indwelling is a concept scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi developed. The idea of indwelling is to illustrate that we relate to objects, events, or other matters by a merging process that in effect extends our being into them so that they operate as tools and are perceived as an extension of the physical and subtle bodies. That process could be for better or worse depending on its context and meaning.
Lik Kuen Tong, the founder of Field Being Philosophy, developed an ontology and an accompanying epistemology based on the central idea that the most useful way of understanding reality is to consider it as an interplay of fields rather than as a set of objects and perceptions. In this way he sought to bring together Chinese and Western philosophical perspectives.
Combining indwelling with the notion of fields opens the way to overcoming the misperceived separation between being and experience, providing “inside knowledge” of fields of experience as extensions of the body. By “zooming in” and “zooming out” via indwelling, experienced fields become personally meaningful fields of experience. The meaning is embodied rather than limited to impersonal conceptualizations.
To explore how (personal) experience intersects with fields, three examples will be drawn from personal and professional life, beginning with the original physical referent of all fields, the cultivated agricultural fields; extending that metaphor to works of art and the opening of fields in general; and the indwelling of other persons’ personal fields to dominate them, whether consensually or coercively.