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I. Thresholds: Self and the Living Present

As the name implies, Liminalism is all about thresholds. Physical thresholds simultaneously separate and join two spaces, demarcating a boundary but allowing passage between.

The Self as Threshold

Liminalism understands the self not as a fixed interior core, but as a threshold: a dynamic, semi-permeable boundary between internal multiplicity and the external world. The self mediates between impulses, memories, desires, and models within, and stimuli, relationships, actions, and meanings without. It is the place where experience becomes action, where perception becomes narrative. This threshold is not static. It is shaped by relationships, choices, and attention. It must be flexible enough to allow transformation and resilient enough to maintain coherence. To live well is not to “discover” the self as an object, but to tend its boundary, and the aperture through which things pass, with care, maintaining the ability to connect without dissolving and to stand firm without closing off.

Consciousness as Liminal Presence

Building on this view of the self, Liminalism extends the threshold metaphor to consciousness itself. Consciousness is not the passive container of thoughts. It is the threshold between past and future — a continually updating present in which perception, memory, prediction, and response converge. It is inherently liminal: fleeting, unstable, and always in motion.

This present is not neutral. It is shaped by attention. What enters awareness — and how it is held — depends on the orientation, quality, and discipline of attention. In this sense, attention does not simply reveal reality; it actively shapes the experience of being. Since attention plays such a pivotal role in shaping this liminal presence, it’s worth breaking down how we engage with it.

Iterlude: Liminality

Liminality is an anthropological term describing a state of transition, originally used to describe cultures undergoing change. It comes from the Latin limen (pl. limina) which means threshold and recalls a passage through a doorway from one space to another.

Architects can speak of liminal spaces and developmental psychologists of liminal periods, characterizing a place or time’s function, its facilitation of change or demarcation of a boundary, as the reason for its existence.

Psychologists use this boundary definition when they refer to subliminal messages, which infiltrate under the threshold of awareness or attention. The root also manifests in more common words such as sublime and limit, which focus on single, straightforward aspects of its meaning.

But liminal itself retains the subtlety of the concept, one that mixes boundaries and passageways. Existing as it does as a break in a wall, a doorway, and by synecdoche a threshold, cannot represent anything other than a simultaneous separation of two spaces and connection between them. It’s the synthesis of the dialectic of separating and connecting. And perhaps of lumping and splitting.

By adding the -ity suffix, English makes a state out of it. Liminality, the state of crossing a threshold. Along the axis of time instead of space, it adds another layer of contradiction and tension. It freezes the act of transition, trapping the subject in a perpetual instant of change, occupying neither space and both. The state of being between states.

It recalls the tension between nothingness and being, and the resolution to it that we find in becoming.

If we consider the present itself, the now of our subjective experience, as the threshold between the past and the future, serving as both boundary and passageway between them, then we can see being present, being in the now, as the liminality of our conscious mind.

And perhaps we need to fully grasp the concept of liminality to truly make sense of the world.

Regardless, I think there’s something beautiful about the word, not just how it flows off the tongue, but also how it conveys this subtle concept in a parsimonious and elegant and, some might even say, sublime, way.

Practices

Questions

Notes

  • The self is a threshold, a boundary and a passageway between an interiority and the external world. It contains the internal multiplicities but is not identified with them.
  • It is not static and fixed, its shape and position and permeability are dynamic.
  • In addition to being permeable, it has an aperture which is pointed and shaped by attention, a malleable portal through which perceptions enter and actions exit.
  • It represents both a gap and a connection.
  • The interior contains beliefs, impulses, memories, desires and models of the exterior, the interior, and the boundary itself.
  • The exterior produces stimuli, relationships, and meanings without.
  • The self is the Markov blanket that surrounds and separates a subset of the universe from the rest.
  • FEP and surprise-minimization. The perceptions we let through by noticing, focusing and witnessing update our interior models, with the goal of minimizing surprise.
  • Symmetrical. Our perceptions update our interior models of the world and ourselves. Our actions update the exterior models that the rest of the universe generates about our interiority and ourselves.
  • The self is the site of negotiated meaning.
  • It is the place where experience becomes action, where perception becomes narrative. - This threshold is not static. It is shaped by relationships, choices, and attention. It must be flexible enough to allow transformation and resilient enough to maintain coherence. To live well is not to “discover” the self as an object, but to tend its boundary, and the aperture through which things pass, with care — maintaining the ability to connect without dissolving, and to stand firm without closing off.