Sunday, 10 July 2016



The split of experience into the what, the who and the how, the experienced, the experiencer and the experiencing, is natural and intuitive, but only as forming a support for the grammar of experience, which itself is a part of the essential communicability of experience. We must communicate it to others, or to ourself split off as other, in order for an event to become an experience. Even if the details are not fixed, but relative to some larger context of meaning, it remains true that experience is an articulated process. It has parts which fit together and which form enabling invariants across different experiences, across a field of experiences. Experiences arise not only on a stage, but that stage itself is in a field. So, we must have a kind of monitoring consciousness parallel to the consciousness absorbed in experience which maintains, or witnesses the constancy of, these functional elements. Not all of these elements are like the modalities of the senses, attached to specific physical organs and correlated with their properties, but even the ones that are still pose a problem as to how they are connected to a consciousness which knows no innervations of nerve or neuron. What is strange is how difficult it is to make all of this strange so that we can catch a glimpse of mind in operation. It reduces to the question of how phenomena come about and the peculiarly tacit way in which they seem to require no understanding, in which they go on and on and seem to explain themselves, to be already explained.

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