Anton Rogachevski

Yep that I agree with, "Human" is surely not the center of it all. Paraphrase of a famous quote by Alan Watts

@UnbornTao As an unenlightened being my experience is pretty much the same as anybody elses, I still believe in the physical realm and think that we should leave ontology entirely to phisicists. I would say my main field of study is phenomenology and that is the study of experience from the inside. For me experience is pure sensual data, I actually don't know what it is, it's purely mysterious for me. I also highly doubt the field of non-dualism you can read my post in the blog about debunking enlightenment. I think that humans give their monkey brain too much credit, but actually it's a banana seeking device, and not an ontology deriving device Btw I have a compulsive editing tic - I have a million insights after posting the text and re-edit it so much I hope Leo's server doesn't crash So you may go back and see new stuff in my past comments. --- Some more thoughts about experience: Experience trying to understand itself is like water trying to wet itself, fire trying to burn itself or a knife trying to cut itself. You can't touch the point of your finger with the same finger.

My claim is that in order to reach the basic direct experience we must deconstruct every possible concept about it and relating to the supposed idea of "perception with the senses of objects". - this is an imaginary story and not direct experience. Go back and see what my original claim is. You ask what is experience and I said "Mu!" That's it, and it's dead serious. Anything else you say about it would automatically be false, cause its nature is that you can't capture it in any finite idea. If I was the Zen master and you the student and I asked you "What is Experience?" The moment you opened your mouth I would hit you with a stick. Because you can't say anything true about it. : )

Do "objects" exist? Where? Is there a duality between perception and the object of perception? Do you see what I'm getting at? Any statement has built in ontological claims. We should be careful with unexamined claims because we don't actually know for sure all of these. My premise is that there can't be objects in a the direct experience, but only sensory phenomen.

@Aaron p Yep, eventually we confuse our abstraction with reality itself.

What do you mean by that word? Who perceives? Perceives what? Aren't sounds and colors also sensations? Let's imagine no sounds, no colors, no sensations, no feelings, what is left? Can there be any experience without these foundational building blocks? I was saying from the start that experience was ineffable and indescribable. I feel we got lost in words here a little bit - It's best to define and differentiate all of these from each other to understand what is meant here.

@UnbornTao Colors, sounds, sensations and feelings?

@UnbornTao I jump between the conceptual and actual seamlessly because I figure we already established what is what. What do you mean by "mere encounter" and by "what's there"?

While the idea of "mere" experience seems simple experience itself is an infinitely complex and fascinating structure. There is always A LOT going on, but our brain is designed to focus and filter out all the other stimuli, like a search light. There's actually no such object as a "hand", and it's not "yours".

@UnbornTao It seems that you have a philosophical mind and that's very cool. You like ideas, differentiation and complexity and to some point you might expect this complexity so much that you feel unease with simplicity like Leo's famous "just look at your hand and shut up." And my simplistic collapsing of ideas into one notion. I think that those words are useful still and can describe different aspects as different procceses and that can help with linear thought explanations. So I'm still not throwing them all out. "What's the difference between awareness and experience?" seems like a very juicy question so lets keep contemplating. Cheers

Experience is usually from direct sensation, and Awareness may be of a more complex and abstarct aspects of experience, inculding thought.

Don't know what "Knowing" is other than direct experience knowing in the now. Any other form's probably a fancy sort of belief. We do have direct access to experience. What else do you want to access? Also a layered idea on top of experience. Entails a "perceiver" of an outside world. Memory is memory, it's a recording of pure senses, but a concept is words, a story, so In a sense a concept is also a type of memory of a noise playing in the Now. A memory is yet another part of experience, which is very rich as we can see - it's much more than dumb animal senses, but a great intelligence and a thing of true beauty. But it is re-experience, or else how would you talk about it? You have an experience of it right now. You can only imagine it's in the "past" if you have a conception of "time" present. You may ask yourself: "Aware of what?" anything you may be aware of would be an experience. I do respect the wish to keep this an open discussion and keep investigating together, this is great! Thank you for the great talk. My personal approach is to keep simplifying and to keep as less synonyms of definition as possible. You can see now how calling different aspects of the same unified phenomenon: Awareness has caused us to think that all the other aspects of it are separate from it, and are different in nature. We are pure Experience that is self examining right now, quite cool I would say.

A memory is occuring in direct experience right now, but you attach a story to it and say: "it happened in the past". Awareness is another word for experience for me, because if I try to think of an Awareness that has nothing to be aware of, it doesn't makes sense. This "awareness" will not be able to know that it's aware in this case. Therefore awareness and experience are one for me. Two sides of the same coin. I ask myself: "Where is awareness? Who is aware?" And I can see that these questions can't point anywhere actually. Experience is self aware from the purely solipsistic-phenomenological perspective (from the inside of the simulation) What isn't occurring Now? Can there be such a thing?

As the old Zen quote says: "You can't peg a nail into the sky." If you truly understand the nature of experience, at least conceptually, you can understand that this question doesn't make sense. There's an infinite field that's unified in it's nature, so there's no one to point and no thing to point to.

Thank you for the discussion dear sir! Yummy food for thought for sure! You can't call the basic first experience anything, it's prior to language. On the other hand all the labels we have ever had we stuck on this pure wonder, but it just doesn't do it justice. Like: "reality" "existence" "the universe" and so forth. Consciousness and experience are two sides of the same coin. Consciousness is the backdrop and Experience is the light, but they are the same stuff essentially. About the presumption of the impossibility of a direct access (access to what actually?) it goes both ways. You can either assume you can or that you can't : ) In this equation knowing = experiencing Experience is prior to "perception", since in order to conceive of this idea you have to already have some basic experience. The fact that we are discussing this seems to suggest that we can in fact investigate it from the inside whilst being a part of it. The power of conception and abstraction are forces to be reckoned with. When you try to talk about an "awareness" that's prior to experience you are back to duality and creating an imaginary thing that "perceives".