Tuesday, 26 November 2019


If you were to describe your experience in conventional terms it is not clear that you would be describing anything at all of what it is actually like. Such descriptions do not even correspond to a mind's internal self-mapping, since there is not even a unique and well-defined crystallisation; everything is hugely underdetermined and this is obvious as soon as you look. You might, for example, say that there are contents, or arisings, in the light of an awareness, but that turns out to be no more than an unwarranted extension of the metaphor of the seeing eye; awareness is not like light and its correlates are not like pictures. Furthermore the whole family of metaphors based on the idea of a self as source point of experiencing collapses under the lightest examination. Even if you admit something like an 'I', it is only an ideal centre for certain kind of thoughts, an inference and not a spontaneous showing. Whatever the event is which comes to be thought of as this experiencing, there is no reason to infer its limitation to the set of thoughts that revolve around this one apparent centre; the 'same' event could be producing other such centres, incommensurate with this one without being split in any way. It is more like the way that the same electromagnetic field can be carrying a myriad of different, independent and interpenetrating signals, than say like a theatre with a single stage and witnessing audience. As you approach it according to any aspect it melts away before you.

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