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Sunday, 5 November 2017



Without thinking it through, but just going ahead in response to the question of how experience is possible, it might seem that somewhere lost in the jumble of phenomena, more or less operational or optative, there is a distinguished object, the analogue in mind of the partly seen and fully believed body in space, which is the experiencer, the 'I', or eye, located at the eye of the storm or at the origin of co-ordinates, and so just as you can look in the mirror and scratch your nose or wink at yourself, you ought to be able to form a pretty good impression of just what this 'thing' is, of this whole I-business. It turns out not to be so simple, if there's one mirror in there there's a whole house of mirrors, and you are hopelessly lost in it, never able to tell if you are going or coming. But more likely there's no mirror at all, just a series of fading traces that leads you to think that there ought to be a perfect mirror, but somehow never in the same here and now. So, forget the mirror and accept that there's a visible world and an invisible subject and that the two are somehow counterposed. Reality depends on the subject but is stabilised by the object. You are at sea, but in a well-furnished boat and you can grasp the handrail to stabilise yourself. If anything is, you tell yourself, the object is. What is almost too simple to grasp is that is-ness belongs completely to what you must take as the subject, to what can never be object, not at all to all those swarming intimations you take as yourself, but to the ultimate non-phenomenal experiencer, and this can have no counterpart. There simply isn't and never was anything to hold on to, it is, as Wei Wu Wei quips, 'all my eye'.   

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