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Saturday, 18 April 2020


There is cogency to putting the ultimate experiencer in question when it is a matter of sensory experiences. Where is it that you actually see or hear, or taste or feel or smell? Always somewhere further behind where you can hold them in reflection or just consider them. This is because the knowing that you are perceiving is already a knowing and so is keyed into the entire conceptual apparatus. Or to say it in a more positive way, there is always room for getting closer and closer to 'pure' sensory experience, to the point of 'becoming' the experience, and even beyond - it is asymptotic. The problem is that no such intrinsic separation is there with respect to conceptual activity, which means with respect to the entire interconnected complex of knowing and knowing like engagement. Since the agent of any such distancing is a phenomenon or epiphenomenon of this knowing there is simply no effective fulcrum in which to plant a wedge. This is why a lot of what passes for meditation is the systematic attempt to reframe the conceptual or noetic dimension as a subtle kind of perception - of qualia, or arisings or dharmas or whatever terminology is used. Perhaps what is missing is a different way to enter the penetralia of the noetic without recourse to the metaphor of distancing.

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