From Perceptual Surplus to Awe
Feeling, Memory, and the Formation of the I in the Relational Landscape
Introduction
Human beings can perceive more than they can shape. This essay asks why this asymmetry makes sense and follows its consequences through the formation of the I, crisis, and awe.
The guiding thesis is that perceptual surplus is meaningful only if it allows us to grasp the structure of the space of possibilities well enough to generally stabilize the particular form of human existence. The imprecision of this grasp finds expression in feeling. From this initial thesis emerges a coherent model in which memory, the I, thinking, trauma, and beauty become intelligible as moments of a single movement.
The argument develops step by step. The first sections establish the asymmetry and interpret feeling as an imprecise apprehension of structure. They are followed by memory as landscape and the I as a relational landscape, then by attention, thinking, and the attitudes with which we meet our feelings. The later sections address the opening of trauma, the tension between the perspective of the I and the inner perspective, the figure of the wounded healer, affirmation as a sustaining attitude, and finally awe and beauty.
The argument connects findings from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and ethnology with positions from the philosophical tradition. Where images are used, they serve to make the ideas tangible, not to establish the argument.
1. Perceptual Surplus
The asymmetry between perceiving and shaping is well supported by empirical evidence. Zheng and Meister estimate the human sensory information influx at around 1⁰⁹ bits per second, while the throughput of behavior is approximately 10 bits per second. We take in orders of magnitude more information than we can express through action.
Cybernetics helps explain why this asymmetry makes sense. According to the Good Regulator Theorem formulated by Conant and Ashby, any system that successfully regulates another system must be a model of that system. Acting means selecting one option from a limited set; to select correctly, however, we must be able to distinguish among many possible states of the world.
Perception is therefore broad, action is a bottleneck, and a model stands between them. The surplus of perception is worthwhile only if it is condensed into a structure that reaches beyond the individual case. This structure is not a representation of what is real, but a model of what is possible.
2. Imprecision: Feeling as an Apprehension of the Space of Possibilities
Perception is, from the outset, perception of possibilities. James J. Gibson showed that we do not first perceive objects as such, but affordances: what can be walked on, grasped, or what is dangerous. Within the frameworks of predictive processing and active inference (Friston, Clark), the brain builds a generative model of the hidden causes of its sensory data, and such a model always describes what might be the case.
Anil Seth takes this thought further. On his account, the feeling that an object is really present arises from counterfactual predictions about what would happen if I moved. Presence is then an apprehended space of possibilities. Heidegger expressed the same insight philosophically: “Possibility stands higher than actuality.”
This apprehension is necessarily imprecise, and its imprecision appears in feeling. Leibniz spoke of petites perceptions, which combine into a whole that is “clear but confused.” Baumgarten founded aesthetics on this basis as the science of sensory cognition and attributed to it an “extensive clarity” capable of holding more richness than a distinct concept.
Related positions can be found in Polanyi (“We know more than we can tell”), in Gendlin’s concept of the felt sense, and in Whitehead’s understanding of feeling as a fundamental relation to the world, including to pure possibilities. More recent neuroscientific models interpret affect as a signal about the quality and reliability of one’s own model (Joffily and Coricelli; Hesp et al.). Feelings would then be compressed summaries of a high-dimensional space of possibilities.
Imprecision is not a deficiency here, but a function. In information-theoretic terms, it is lossy compression; in learning theory, it is generalization. A model that is too precise adapts to the individual case and is no longer useful for what is possible. Feeling is the form in which a space is present, rather than a single point.
3. Memory as Landscape
With memory, time enters the picture. The snapshot of the space of possibilities becomes a landscape that takes shape over time and accumulates perceptual surplus. The landscape image is more than a metaphor.
In Hopfield networks, memories can be represented as valleys in an energy landscape. An incomplete stimulus moves toward the nearest valley and is completed into a full pattern; the landscape thus shows where the system tends to move from any given point. Waddington independently used the same image to describe cell development, speaking of canalization. The mechanism by which a pathway deepens is Hebb’s rule: each passage digs the valley a little deeper.
Persistent structures in particular become more deeply embedded. According to the complementary learning systems theory (McClelland, McNaughton, and O’Reilly), the hippocampus rapidly stores individual episodes with high fidelity, while the neocortex slowly extracts only what recurs. Through consolidation, details disappear and what remains invariant is retained.
Philosophical counterparts include Freud’s concept of “facilitation” (1895) and Wittgenstein’s image of the “riverbed of thought” in On Certainty, in which some propositions have become fixed and form channels for the fluid ones. This leads to an important connection with the previous section. Imprecision is the condition that allows structure to emerge: a landscape that preserved every detail would be jagged and have no valleys; its topography becomes visible only through smoothing.
Intensity of feeling shapes the landscape alongside repetition. Emotional arousal modulates consolidation through the amygdala and noradrenaline (McGaugh). What is felt intensely cuts more deeply.
4. Feeling as a Structuring Force: The I as a Relational Landscape
Feeling does not merely assign weight to an already existing structure; it brings structure into being. Repetition alone would produce a frequency map: it would show what occurs often, but without depth or direction. Feeling gives the landscape its relief — attraction and repulsion, value and meaning.
Repetition and intensity are therefore two different forces, both of which create structure. Repetition slowly and cumulatively maps the regularities of the world. Intensity suddenly and incisively maps what those regularities mean for the self.
Together, the two produce neither a map of the world nor an image of the self, but a relational landscape: an “I in the world.” Several thinkers arrive at this image from different directions. For Whitehead, the subject does not precede its feelings; it emerges from them and is therefore a “superject.” For Damasio, the core self arises as a wordless feeling of how the organism is changed by an object.
Merleau-Ponty describes, through the “intentional arc,” how past experience is deposited in the body and projects a world that matters to us. Hermann Schmitz calls the “personal situation” an internally diffuse whole of meanings — imprecise, yet sustaining. Thomas Fuchs understands the brain as an organ of relations that does not store images of the world, but mediates established relationships between organism and environment.
Three conclusions follow. First, neither the I nor the world exists first; the I and the world are two readings of the same topography: read as form, it is the I; read as content, it is the world. Second, feeling is older than the I that feels it. In process thinking, this apparent paradox dissolves because the I is not a bearer but a pattern that stabilizes through repetition. Third, changing oneself always means changing one’s relationship with the world.
5. Attention and Tension
The image of a celestial body that curves the spacetime through which it moves can help make this tangible. John Wheeler summarized general relativity as follows: spacetime tells matter how to move, and matter tells spacetime how to curve. From the body’s own perspective, its path is straight; a force becomes perceptible only when something interrupts its free fall.
The image does not carry the argument, but it makes three things clear. The I shapes the relational landscape and follows it at the same time. Its own deeply ingrained pathways are not experienced as conditioning, but as self-evident. And other agents, with their own landscapes, form shared systems in which collisions and stable relationships are both possible.
The image breaks down at one point, and that is precisely where attention becomes important. A planet cannot choose its orbit; attention, by contrast, makes it possible — with effort — to deviate from a familiar path. More fundamentally, in predictive processing attention is modeled as precision weighting (Feldman and Friston): it helps determine which experiences receive weight at all and go on to shape the landscape.
Attention is thus the model’s meta-level. Repetition and intensity shape the landscape; attention also shapes what is repeated and what is felt intensely. William James expressed this in a single sentence: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” The directing of attention is itself learned, and this makes the development of thinking possible.
Tensions arise between repetition and intensity — for example, when a sustaining but not very intense relationship is confronted by a single overwhelming event. Such tensions must be dealt with. Piaget described the basic forms: assimilation incorporates the new into the existing structure, while accommodation reshapes the structure. Pierre Janet showed that overwhelming experiences can also remain unintegrated, distorting the landscape without becoming part of it.
6. Reconsolidation and the Task of Thinking
The process of reconsolidation makes the task of thinking visible. In 2000, Nader and colleagues showed that when a memory is retrieved, it becomes malleable again for a short time and must be stored anew. More recent studies (including Sevenster, Beckers, and Kindt) have clarified that this happens only when a prediction error occurs during retrieval — that is, when something differs from what was expected. Findings in humans are less consistent than in animal studies, and older, deeply entrenched memories are harder to destabilize. Nevertheless, the basic principle is considered well established. Mere recollection without a difference only reinforces the trace.
This leads to a distinction. Rumination retrieves the same trace again and again in the same state; it is repetition, and it deepens the valley. Thinking retrieves a trace while introducing a difference — a new perspective, a concept, a different emotional state — and thereby makes the structure malleable.
The philosophical tradition anticipated this connection. In 1896, Freud wrote to Fliess that memory traces undergo “transcription” from time to time; in Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914), he contrasted working-through with repeating in action. Hannah Arendt describes Socratic thinking as the thawing of frozen concepts. Heidegger connects thinking with memory and remembrance; in myth, Mnemosyne is the mother of the Muses.
Thinking can do this work because it allows distance. It calls up an experience without requiring us to relive its full intensity. Putting feelings into words has been shown to reduce affective arousal (Lieberman et al.), and expressive writing has measurable effects (Pennebaker). In this sense, thinking is controlled reconsolidation.
Two dangers must be kept in view. Thinking can become rationalization, supplying old pathways with new justifications. And it can try to translate imprecise feeling so completely into concepts that its extensive clarity is lost. Thinking should rework feeling, not replace it.
7. Four Ways of Relating to Feeling
How we approach feeling is decisive, and several attitudes are possible in response to tension. Three of them change our position in relation to the landscape without touching feeling itself: avoidance goes around the valley, understanding maps it, and intervention changes the terrain. Only a fourth attitude — turning toward feeling — makes the landscape itself malleable.
Avoidance brings short-term relief and is sometimes necessary when intensity exceeds what can be endured (Siegel’s window of tolerance). In the long run, however, it becomes repetition in its own right: every act of avoidance deepens the path around the valley, and the avoided territory expands through generalization. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Hayes), experiential avoidance is considered a central factor in the entrenchment of suffering.
Understanding stabilizes the tension. Antonovsky counts comprehensibility among the pillars of a sense of coherence, and without the distance that understanding provides, no reshaping is possible. Yet understanding alone can also hold the landscape in place; Anna Freud described this as intellectualization, a form of defense operating at a higher level.
Intervention seeks to remove what is presumed to be the external cause. Because one’s own curvature is experienced from within as an external force, arousal is often attributed to the wrong causes (Schachter and Singer; Dutton and Aron). Removing the supposed external cause then leaves the curvature intact, and the pattern repeats itself. If the cause really is external, intervention is appropriate; the essential task is to distinguish between the two.
Turning toward means staying with the feeling, with attention, but without avoiding, explaining, or intervening. This attitude meets the conditions for reconsolidation: the trace is reactivated together with the feeling, and the difference arises because one stays and the expected event does not occur. Michelle Craske has described the effect of exposure in similar terms — as learning through the violation of expectation.
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The difference comes from the present, which is always richer than the memory. Here, the perceptual surplus from the beginning returns. Related attitudes include Keats’s negative capability, Gendlin’s Focusing, and Heidegger’s releasement (Gelassenheit).
8. The Opening of Trauma
The ideas developed so far help explain why trauma can open up. The surplus of feeling grows, while the capacity to stabilize diminishes in relative terms. This has two effects: increased sensitivity refines the landscape outside the traumatic area, while the failure of stabilization leads, in a collapse, to the bottom of the valley, where the original feeling is reactivated.
This thesis has empirical support. Britton and colleagues (Varieties of Contemplative Experience) and Treleaven (Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness) document that heightened mindfulness can open up buried traumatic experiences. In older war veterans, trauma symptoms sometimes return decades later when stabilizing structures fall away (Davison et al., “Late-Onset Stress Symptomatology”).
Brewin’s dual representation theory helps explain why the original feeling returns during collapse, rather than a weakened memory of it. Traumatic experiences, according to this theory, are stored primarily in sensory and fragmented form, without temporal and spatial context. They are therefore not remembered so much as experienced in the present.
The two effects depend on one another. Collapse opens the window for reconsolidation, but whether this leads to integration or retraumatization depends on whether a difference is introduced. That difference is supplied by the more refined landscape outside the trauma: feelings, relationships, and experiences of safety that were absent at the time of the original event.
Trauma therapy works according to this principle. Peter Levine describes pendulation between trauma and resource, as well as titration — the opening of experience in small doses. Janet and later Judith Herman developed phase-based models involving stabilization, confrontation, and integration. When one’s own capacity for stabilization fails, it can also come from a relationship; attachment research and polyvagal theory speak of co-regulation.
Opening trauma is not inherently healing. It is an opportunity, not a guarantee, and every repetition without integration can deepen the valley further.
9. The Perspective of the I and the Inner Perspective
The opening of trauma is an extreme form of development, and the tension between the perspective of the I and the inner perspective is fundamental to how it works. The perspective of the I is the landscape in its stabilized form: it surveys, understands, orders, and narrates. The inner perspective is feeling from within, older than the I and richer than the I can encompass.
The perspective of the I stabilizes; the inner perspective exceeds it. Helmuth Plessner described this dual position as “eccentric positionality”: the human being is their lived body and at the same time has a body, and this tension cannot be resolved; it is constitutive. Hermann Schmitz distinguishes primitive presence — in which, in intense fright, here, now, being, and I collapse into one — from developed presence, in which the person gains distance. For him, a person’s life oscillates between personal regression and personal emancipation.
Development therefore takes place as a pulse. Feeling grows beyond the form of the I; that form begins to falter and then develops further. Robert Kegan describes every developmental step as a transition in which what one was embedded in becomes something one can look at. Kazimierz Dąbrowski, in his theory of positive disintegration, sees heightened sensitivity as the driving force of development that passes through the disintegration of existing structures.
This yields a continuum ranging from small disturbances that are integrated with ease, through developmental crises, to the opening of trauma, in which the I initially falls back completely into the inner perspective. The difference lies in degree, not in principle.
One distinction is indispensable. The traumatic event is not development, but injury. Only the later opening of the experience and its integration can become part of development; research on post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi and Calhoun) shows that this is possible, but by no means the rule. Suffering is not valuable in itself.
Awareness, therefore, cannot mean that one perspective replaces the other. It is the growing ability to sustain the tension: to be in the inner perspective without losing the perspective of the I, and vice versa.
10. The Wounded Healer
In traditional societies, where traumatic events were not exceptional, some people developed a surplus of feeling that caused their landscape to be shaped more by the experience of the inner perspective than by the I. This could give them the ability to survey human landscapes. Ethnology knows this figure as the wounded healer.
Mircea Eliade described, across many cultures, the pattern of the “calling illness”: severe crisis, visions of dismemberment and death, and the collapse of the familiar personality. What matters to him is that the shaman is not simply the sick person, but the person who has healed themselves. Georges Devereux took the opposite position, seeing shamans as mentally ill; the debate touches precisely on the distinction between crisis and integration.
Communities developed containers for such openings. Van Gennep and Victor Turner describe rites of passage as a three-part sequence of separation, liminality, and reintegration, in which the previous form of the I is dissolved within a containing framework. The community provides the stabilization that the individual I could not achieve alone.
Tanya Luhrmann’s cross-cultural study of hearing voices also shows that the same inner experience may be perceived as threatening or familiar depending on the cultural context. The surplus of feeling is unevenly distributed. Elaine Aron describes sensory processing sensitivity in around 15 to 20 percent of people. According to the differential susceptibility model (Belsky and Pluess), sensitive people suffer more in unfavorable environments, but also benefit more than others in favorable ones.
The model itself helps explain why this can lead to a wider perspective. The perspective of the I is individual; the inner perspective from which it emerges is shared by human beings. Someone who has been at the bottom of the valley knows the topography of collapse, which is similar across people. And someone who has lost and rebuilt their own form of the I can see the forms of other people’s I’s as forms.
One point recurs in shamans’ own accounts: none of them chose this path voluntarily. It is not the crisis but its overcoming that makes them valuable to the community. In many traditions, the crisis begins to subside only when those called to the role begin to act on behalf of others; the process of overcoming is completed in relationship.
Someone who has passed through the valley becomes, for others, the difference they need in their own valley — and becomes a container themselves. Chiron, the mythical archetype of the wounded healer, remains incurably wounded. The valley is not closed off; it becomes traversable.
11. Consent, Affirmation, and Attitude
Many shamans report that they were forced to choose between following the call and dying. The movement comes from the inner perspective: those affected are repeatedly pushed in a particular direction, often against considerable resistance. Among South African sangomas, this phase of the calling is known as ukuthwasa.
The involuntary nature of this process is not incidental. The I cannot will its own transformation, because it can choose only from within its existing curvature, and from there any fundamental reshaping appears threatening. For the old I, both paths end in death: either the death of the whole person or the death of the form. Eliade speaks of initiatory death.
At the extreme point, there is no choice. There is no I that could choose, and no difference in experience — only dying, primitive presence in Schmitz’s sense. The decision comes afterward, when the I returns and must take a position toward what has happened.
This yields a three-part structure:
1. Pressure: The inner perspective repeatedly forces movement in a particular direction, against the resistance of the I.
2. Dying: The form of the I collapses; there is neither choice nor distance.
3. Affirmation: The I subsequently affirms its own experience and thereby acknowledges life and the inner perspective.
This consent is a distinct form of freedom. Simone Weil calls consent to necessity, consentement, the highest form of freedom; Nietzsche speaks of amor fati; Kierkegaard describes despair as the refusal to become the self one is. Karl Jaspers called such moments “limit situations,” in which existence first awakens.
The final step must be consciously taken because it must become a sustaining attitude. Here the relationship within the model is reversed: until now, repetition and intensity have shaped the landscape without the I’s intervention. Now dying was the intensity that broke open the old landscape, and affirmation must become repetition so that a new, sustaining valley can form.
For the first time, consciousness thus directs repetition itself. Aristotle described virtue as hexis, an attitude formed through repeated action that then becomes sustaining. In Repetition, Kierkegaard distinguishes recollection, which looks backward, from repetition as “recollection forward,” in which life is received anew. Repetition thus becomes a taking-up-again of life.
Integration begins with affirmation. Tension eases because resistance ceases, and what has been experienced becomes bearable. Once the attitude has become established, it sustains itself.
12. Awe and Beauty
With integration, what suffering had pushed into the background becomes increasingly accessible: awe and the feeling of beauty. There is also the ability to be overwhelmed in a positive sense, and to allow something that is much greater and subtler than oneself. The perceptual surplus from the beginning returns, no longer as a threat but as awe.
Keltner and Haidt defined awe through two features: the perception of something vast and the need for accommodation, the reshaping of one’s own structures. Structurally, this also describes trauma. Both exceed the I and force the landscape to change; the difference lies in the attitude with which the overwhelming experience is received.
The surplus of feeling that triggered the crisis does not disappear; it becomes the capacity for awe. This corresponds to differential susceptibility, except that the sustaining condition is now one’s own attitude. It follows that awe emerges only after resistance has ended: as long as energy is bound up in stabilization, there is no room for what is subtle.
The two qualities, “greater” and “subtler,” correspond to Kant’s distinction in the Critique of Judgment. The sublime exceeds our capacity to comprehend it and is first experienced as displeasure, then as elevation. Beauty allows us to sense an order without being able to grasp it conceptually, as “purposiveness without purpose.”
This closes the circle with the initial thesis. If feeling apprehends the structure of the space of possibilities imprecisely, then beauty is the feeling of apprehended structure. In the First Duino Elegy, Rilke wrote: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are still just able to bear.” The path described here runs in the opposite direction: someone who has lived through and affirmed the terrible can allow beauty to enter to a degree that would previously have been unbearable.
In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates say that wonder is the beginning of philosophy, and Goethe called astonishment the highest state to which a human being can attain. In this model, it is both the result of integration and a new beginning. In awe, the space of possibilities is experienced as open once again — as something that exceeds and sustains the I.
Conclusion
Perceptual surplus makes sense because perception does not reproduce reality, but models the structure of what is possible. This apprehension is imprecise, and its imprecision is experienced as feeling. Over time, repetition and the intensity of feeling form a relational landscape whose form is the I and whose content is the world.
Attention helps determine what receives weight in this landscape. Thinking can reshape it when it returns to its valleys and introduces a difference, while turning toward feeling makes it malleable. There is a tension between the perspective of the I and the inner perspective; this tension drives development as a pulse and reaches its extreme form in the opening of trauma.
It is not the crisis that has value, but the overcoming of it, and this process is completed in relationship. At the extreme point there is no choice; the decision comes afterward, as a conscious affirmation of one’s own experience that becomes a sustaining attitude through repetition. Within this attitude, it becomes possible to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by something greater and subtler than oneself.
Trauma and awe share the same structure: an overwhelming experience that exceeds the I. The difference lies in whether it is imposed or allowed. In this sense, awareness is the path from one to the other.
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· Zheng, J. & Meister, M. (2025): The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? Neuron 113, 192–204.
