Blog Archive

Saturday, 30 November 2024

The idea that experience serves he universe's or God's desire to know itself, as it were, to enter into the detail of itself, that that is the purpose of experiencing is another version of qualia theory, only now the elementary particles are not the measurable individual qualia, but something much more mysterious and interconnected, molecules of experience. Does this make any sense at all? Experience may be manifestly finite, but can it be delimited? Isn't it always open-ended, doesn't it dissolve completely on closer inspection?

Friday, 29 November 2024

There is an assumption as if experience is something you have, something that is given to you, that happens to you, but the truth is the reverse, you are something that happens to experience, or, so that there may be experience, such a way of enjoying or encountering being from the inside, you re given to it as its vehicle, as the individual that makes experiencing possible. So that the dream might occur the dream characters are brought on stage and when the dream is over the question of where they have gone simply does not arise.

Thursday, 28 November 2024

There is experiencing without reflection and then there is the experiencing that is reflection on experiencing, or the self-conscious awareness of experiencing. The latter is taken to immediately imply that there is an experiencing substance, that the 'I' is that substance, or is an instance of that substance. What a great number of tacitly assumed premises there are in that deduction - because the cogito can only be a deduction, and not an intuition or immediate perception. These premises all belong to the pragmatic heuristics of getting about in a world of already constituted objects ('where there's smoke there's fire' etc) Something is accomplished in that thought experiment, but it is not a piece of metaphysics, it is simply the sudden transition to self-consciousness, a self consciousness that remains to be understood on its own terms.

Wednesday, 27 November 2024

The unmediated respect for the other is not for the other's consciousness or sentience, their intelligence or other gifts, but for their being as vehicle of their consciousness and sentience (if these two are considered as distinct) etc. If the other is unconscious or diminished in mind for one reason or another, their being is still considered as the vehicle for an undiminished potential of mind in full, and so we can project its inevitable realisation into an indefinite future or into the outside of time.

Tuesday, 26 November 2024

The untethered individual is the basis and seeming principle of experience, the solitary subject for whom intersubjectivity or surrender are interests, are options, adventures. His experience goes from a void and into a void and while it can appear to be self-originating it cannot pretend to be self-fulfilling - its insistence would require an end yet its end is outside itself - this is the only outside it has to acknowledge.

Monday, 25 November 2024

The sensory world seems to peel off as a rind or an overflow from the purely intellective world much as Plotinus describes Nature's contemplation, like the half-completed sketches of a geometer solving a problem and so that it might be possible to gather that contemplation into a purity without any residue, any loss of adoration. The higher is impersonal, you need the physical particularity to rejoin the personal subject but whom itself and its desire to exist. to persist may be absorbed again in some yet higher and more embracing ideal.

Sunday, 24 November 2024

Terms like 'beingness' or 'meaningness' and why not even 'truthness' betray the thoughtless tendency to see all of experience as made up of qualia, the adjectivalisation of reality. If there is a dialectic, or battle of ideas, between the conceptual and the perceptual then it ought to be noted that while the former cannot be concocted out of the latter alone, the other way around is viable, is ... conceivable. The concept, or the element of understanding or of intelligence does not appear as such, is out of time and space, and in this respect is akin to the 'I', the true subject. It is neither adjective or noun, but closest to pure verb, to the act, the gesture.

Saturday, 23 November 2024

There are only a handful of Ideas that are filiations of the absolute in which they are perfectly at one and from which all other master ideals are derived. These could be intellect, soul and being (or freedom) from which beauty, truth, compassion and wisdom are derived. None of these can be private, ascension along any sch line dissolves separateness without doing any violence to things as they are.

Friday, 22 November 2024

Experience and its worlds are built out of distinctions from the most rapid and of highest energy to the slow and comparatively relaxed distinctions that colour ordinary life. Consciousness inhabits both sides of every distinction equally, so that at its heart no distinction exists at all, so that the basis or ground of fundamental distinction has no quality of distinction whatsoever.

Thursday, 21 November 2024

The tiny world of individual mind is like the world as seen through the wrong end of a telescope. In this case the individual mind is the telescope and if you turn it around and look through it the other way what you see, the stars and galaxies and cosmic radiance of deep time, also belongs to individual mind. Either wat that which is looking is nether seen nor is it reflected. That in and for which appearance appears does not appear. That this is either paradox or the most obvious axiom is the dual in logical space of the same phenomenon.

Wednesday, 20 November 2024

As a mind you are the merest scintilla, barely even that, in the ocean of all mind, all appearance, and at the same time as consciousness you are all that is and was and will be. It is impossible to encompass these two truths together.

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

The hegemony of matter, all the waste, absurdity and pointless suffering is the world's move in the game it plays against mind, to which the response is that the very perfection of this move, and its integration with entirety of the cosmos, shows that it could only have been made by a mind, or at least that it is just the move that a mind would make, the same mind playing against itself.

Monday, 18 November 2024

Every desire or passion, every strong emotion has an object which at the same time appears to be the cause of that desire, passion or emotion, but since the source of these must at the same time be the self, the experience is a scattering of the putative self out into the world of the not-self. This crossing of the inside and the outside gives to the life of passions the quality of an interminable quest, and the attempt to curb desire, itself a desire of the next degree, the quality of violence.

Sunday, 17 November 2024

Time as a immensely rapid series of moments chained together by conditioned dependence, is a conception of time which may well achieve an experiential verification, but this verification applies only to the concept, that is its viability as a foundational concept for a class of experiences, but not as an ultimate reality since such a concept is only possible as a response to the pre-given nature of time. Only the complete identification of the experiencer with temporalisation itself could point to that reality. Being-time can 'resolve' as a succession of infinitesimal moments or as a continuum, or as a pure illusion, and so in itself is al of these and none of these.

Saturday, 16 November 2024

Hegel's thesis and antithesis seems a plausible enough pair, in that everything in consciousness, in itself or in reality, proceeds by contradiction and strife, but synthesis is vague and inaccurate. No state ever 'transcends and includes' another state, at best only tells itself that it does so. Every past self that you think you've outgrown would astonish you if it were able to confront you. This is because the freedom at the root of every mode of experience and which is its very life has nothing to do with evolution, is unchanging and uninvolved in the picayune dramas of appearing being.

Friday, 15 November 2024

The parameters of experience coincide exactly with those of the experiencing self even though that self is what it is, draws all of its 'selfness' from not recognising this fact. On the other had this identity in duality is what makes possible its extraordinary moment to moment renewal, its ever arising anew, its charming or maddening naïveté. While this seems to point towards a kind of anatman realism, if pushed all the way it ends up in idealism of the non-dual variety.

Thursday, 14 November 2024

The ego self is a property of the body and hence of the world. It is something like a field which manifests according to various modes of vibration, of which many are possible depending on the driving forces. It has no identity of its own but acquires one by virtue of its association with the self, which seems to produce a system of its modes. When two such fields come into proximity they affect each other in such a way that the one which deviates least from its native modes becomes the subject and the other the object. Or the two might form a coupled system with modes of its own. Simple interactions of this kind emerge as complex interaction of the phenomenal selves.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

That the object of desire takes on a transcendental and existential status could be explained by evolutionary psychology, or by psychoanalysis or by the theology of a personal God. As components of, or deductions from, a theory of human nature these are mutually exclusive, but as pointers to a phenomenology they merely indicate different ways in which a space can be opened within the experience of desire and by which it can serve as a pointer away from experience and towards its matrix.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

The secular is founded upon the shifting mirage of a virtual transcendence whose purpose is to give objects of desire and the desire itself an absoluteness, an impossible promise and a life and death imperative - a phantom authenticity. This affects all forms of desire, but one that is least avowed, namely familial desire (storge, Gemeinschaftsgefühl), the divination of the hearth and of the group, re-emerges in political desire, often poorly directed and subject to unconscious manipulation.

Monday, 11 November 2024

Experience is the search for the beloved and is the search for self, for self as beloved ad beloved as self, not the overcoming of duality but its meaning and completion, the indistinction of what is most personal with what is most impersonal, the point of dynamic equilibrium.

Sunday, 10 November 2024

As the speed of experience decreases it takes on a different texture and you begin to realise that all past a d future experiences are somehow co-present, something which is entirely paradoxical from the point of view of, well, experience. Experience only develops and unfolds in time to the extent that the two are effectively the same and by this identity are not the same as consciousness. Consciousness conventionally defined as the property of being that it feels like to be is identified wit experience only within and from the point of view of experience. Consider, however, that experience may only be an aspect of consciousness as it creates time in order to explore one of the boundless possibilities of its knowingness.

Saturday, 9 November 2024

It is futile to want to do away with desire, this is just opposing a weak and inauthentic desire to strong and presumably authentic desires, insofar as they are known. This late culture has elevated desire as authenticity to an ideal, for want of any other believable ideal. The desire to uncover the true nature of Xis a weak but authentic desire inseparable from consciousness itself, one that is easily elbowed aside. It is, however, all you have to go on, even just to see the malleability and falseness of latent claims to authenticity that go by way of the social self, the very index of the inauthentic.

Friday, 8 November 2024

The doubt, the strangeness of mere existence, not your or someone's doubt, not the question of reality, or a response, a defense, some sort of reaction, not taken from anyone or anywhere, the original doubt of an infant, someone without a name, with no theory of mind or delight in exploration, but the unmotivated, unexpected pause, the suspension in the midst, the brief parting of the veil.
The ubiquity of the 80:20 rule in group endeavours suggests that what counts are neither individual or relationships, but relationships to relationships. This would mean that the effects scale with the cube of the number of actors, and applying this to the 80:20 yields close to a 50:50 split, that is, an equilibrium on the level of relation to relationships of the two groups in which the 80 relate mostly among themselves and the 20 to all. In other terms, the geometry of the triangle being predominant. The weight of oedipal or mimetic themes in fiction bear this out as well.

Thursday, 7 November 2024

Disputes about matters of fact are disputes about the conditions for truth, in this way every such matter affects every other. It is not certain that the conditions for truth can be recognised, they can only be enacted hypothetically to see if they fit, the recognition is deferred and anyway left to you. If there was a way of knowing one true thing then it could be used to slit open every semblance, but you cannot be certain that you yourself contain a condition for truth, much less the thing itself.