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Preston's account of Gendlin's implicit as a realm of awareness that is more than thoughts and feelings and that precedes Cartesian dualities defines his philosophy as quintessentially nondual and places his philosophy within the spectrum of the nondual and meditative contemplative traditions. Gendlin's investigation of the relationship between the implicit and the process by which it is symbolized in words is reframed as an inquiry into the relationship between lived nonduality and its paradoxical expression in the dualities of language In its clinical application, Preston's use of Gendlin's focusing-oriented psychotherapy constitutes part of a meditative nondual practice pointing to the cultivation of a nondual state of consciousness within the relational field. It is this expanded nondual awareness with its attendant features of letting go and unconditional acceptance that gives the power to and underwrites derwrites the various strategies employed by Preston in articulating the implicit realm.
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about [Franz Kafka, cited in Pawel, 1985, p. 96].
Disintegration anxiety is the deepest anxiety man can experience… the attempt to describe [it] is the attempt to describe the indescribable… it is not an exact verbal definition that is called for, but rather an attempt to evoke a taste of the experience in question [Kohut, 1984, p. 16].
There is something in me that is more than a feeling or a thought, I come to a stop at a wall. There is something beyond that wall; I have no capacity as to how I would get past it. It feels incredibly old and important. But it's not that I will never be able to understand it—but the understanding will be quite visceral [Client in psychotherapy].