Sunday, 11 June 2017
The organ of experience is your entire life. This means more than the irony that experience is never complete until the one who experiences it is gone, rather it refers to the way that the ultimate referent or experiencer is a submerged core of being which, although contingent and particular, hardly changes, if at all, in the course of a life. It is a sort of fundamental pattern which is only ever expressed in part in the course of any particular experience, so that to gain a sense of the entire pattern you might seek to add together all the experiences of a lifetime, but that there is nothing which guarantees that your lifetime will necessarily cover it all. This is a rough way of saying it; naturally early life experiences are far more determinative than later ones, so that inner significance can be gauged by the degree to which it wakes up childhood experiences, poorly understood at the time and only now starting to reveal some of what was hidden. Every experience delivers something to you, but most of the message is unreadable in the moment, it can only be revealed later, in an other time which may never come in the ordinary unfolding of your life. Another way to say it is that experience woos being, but rarely succeeds in moving it. It desperately wants to because it knows that being is all that matters, and so it tries desperately to force the issue, resorts to chemical or moral toxins, or else it resigns itself to a cultivated and discreet shallowness. The barrier between experience and being is impermeable from the side of experience; you can do so much, get off your face so many times but nothing changes. And if experience has such a hard time of it then the predicament of thought with its phamacopoeia of ideas is even worse. In your waking life you can think yourself into anything but it will all be unravelled the next time you fall sleep. Being has not responded, has not opened its cyclopean eye and taken you in; until that response is just as clear to you in dreams and deep sleep as it is in waking life nothing has really happened.
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