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Monday, 26 June 2017



The jiva or individual soul is like a media device through which experience is played. This analogy works to the extent that there is a demarcation between the experience and the experiencer. Perhaps this seems all the sharper today when experiences are so commodified and promoted and expected. People strive to acquire a catalog of experiences, special experiences, Erlebnisse, which count and can be counted. Experiences escape - you try but fail to define yourself through experience; the experience ends and you are back to being yourself. This is a feature as it leaves you thirsty for the next experience. Where the experience failed to touch you you retain the account of it, its place in your course of life, your curriculum vitae. Insert an experience in the player, as it plays a certain organised stream of contents arises in appearance (there is no good word for this sense of manifestation, for appearing on the transcendental screen) and then it is over. You eject the file and replace it with another, or not. You can leave the soul empty for a while, with only quiet static indicating that there is a screen somewhere in front of you. Experiences natually break up into chapters, into episodes - punctuated by night (or day) and sleep, for example. They start and end and when they end there is a moment of retrospection in which the experience comes to exist as an event, something you've gone through, erfährt, and that can be named. Self-reflection, like Minerva's owl, spreads its wings at dusk, or equivalently in Autumn, in the Autumnal perspective integral to each lived moment. Only here does the phenomenal self begin to emerge as distinct and not entirely absorbed in the experience.

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