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Saturday, 8 October 2016
As a protagonist, the hero of your own adventure, this all seems rather disappointing. One goes into the mind and takes a look around and it looks like the same barren place as it always has, after you've removed as much of the furniture as you could and quite a bit of the rest has worn away with the effects of time and negligence and your incessant tinkering and irregular scrutiny. But is the mind like a room, is that a useful metaphor, does it take you any further? Is it a place you want to stay in, is everything you need really here, like the room in Pascal's famous saying, it being a matter of learning to stay put? Or is the process of making it habitable only an intermediate step, and now you are to see where you can go to from here, so it is more like a base of exploration? The ambiguity is in whether the mind is the inhabitant or the dwelling, or if we admit that it is both, whether it can be both at the same time? The mind seeks to resolve its multitudes, its infinite adaptability into a single momentary figure of extreme particularity, to draw pure potentiality into the definiteness of experience. The potentiality cannot be directly experienced, it seems an abstraction but if it were not present and effective in some sense then the realisation of any experience, that it is only itself when it shines forth out of a background of all the other things the moment could have been but wasn't, would be meaningless, and so the distinctive modality of experience would be lost. We can call any such definite experience (erlebnis) a dwelling for the mind, but then also it is the experience which dwells momentarily in the mind, in its theatre, its space; the mind hosts the experience, the experience hosts the mind. Perhaps it is precisely because the mind first hosts itself, that its indefiniteness closes on its indefiniteness, that all of this is possible? In that case boredom would have its concealed treasure, would be no more than the belief in a centrifugal force.
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