What is experience?

[UnbornTao]

@Aaron p Can't see your pictures.

[Anton Rogachevski]

@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.

Edited May 17 by Anton Rogachevski

[Sucuk Ekmek]

12 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

This is a story. The question is: What is experience? For example, in your experience right now, can you see that you encounter things? You see an object. And within this experience, you can, as if, subtract its name, value, use, which are activities done by you, and so might be called conceptual and are different in nature from a direct experience of the object itself.

 

I’m not sure whether I encounter things or things encounter me—maybe both. I see objects only in terms of my survival needs, but I would like to know the object itself. Maybe I do know, but perhaps I can’t remember when things encounter me.

It’s hard to define the experience happening right now. It’s 5:30 a.m., and there’s a crow cawing outside. But if we look at the object itself, it’s just a meteor that has encountered our world, and now the crow is cawing like there’s no tomorrow. I hope this isn’t another story.

[UnbornTao]

@Sucuk Ekmek @Anton RogachevskiLet's keep going in that direction--toward deeper presence--as it seems appropriate. Insight is the goal.

Edited 23 hours ago by UnbornTao

[Sucuk Ekmek]

On 16.05.2025 at 5:42 PM, Anton Rogachevski said:

@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.

Interesting points. I don't believe in the physical realm, atleast not in the sense of man is the measure of everything . For me our realm just looks very instantaneous but I do think that we should leave ontology to phisicists.

 

I like your analogies — it's like water constantly going through solid and gas phases, then finding itself in a phase it has already been in, which should be impossible. Big or small, nothing in the physical realm would ever align in the same position twice; it would be like stepping into the same river twice, as Heraclitus says.

Edited Sunday at 01:13 PM by Sucuk Ekmek

[Anton Rogachevski]

23 hours ago, Sucuk Ekmek said:

Interesting points. I don't believe in the physical realm, atleast not in the sense of man is the measure of everything . For me our realm just looks very instantaneous but I do think that we should leave ontology to phisicists.

 

I like your analogies — it's like water constantly going through solid and gas phases, then finding itself in a phase it has already been in, which should be impossible. Big or small, nothing in the physical realm would ever align in the same position twice; it would be like stepping into the same river twice, as Heraclitus says.

Yep that I agree with, "Human" is surely not the center of it all.

Paraphrase of a famous quote by Alan Watts

[UnbornTao]

@Aaron p So what did you write? 

[Natasha Tori Maru]

I keep coming back to this question when I daydream!

What if we try to understand experience outside of time - this is my attempt to force a new perspective on myself.

It is my belief all experiences in all configurations must be manifest in Gods creation of 'reality'.

What if time is just our experience of one single frame of energy, ie one frozen moment with these colours, these feelings, these tastes etc, but happening so quickly with so many frame changes, it is as a movie unfolding. Like framerates on a TV, or a projector running over multiple images millions of times a second. So fast we cannot register this at all, due the lower vibration/energy state of solid 'matter'. 

So experience would be our consciousness accessing one frame - in one possible universe - and then another, and another.

Experience would be one slice of consciousness consuming sensation in an eternal moment. 

This is a half baked stream of consciousness thought though

 

[Reciprocality]

Intensive and extensive magnitudes that due to their invariant diminution manifests as the linearity and continuity of time, both physically and perceptively.

Edited yesterday at 12:55 AM by Reciprocality

[UnbornTao]

10 hours ago, Reciprocality said:

Intensive and extensive magnitudes that due to their invariant diminution manifests as the linearity and continuity of time, both physically and perceptively.

That sounds incredibly abstract. How do you see experience?

[Reciprocality]

1 hour ago, UnbornTao said:

That sounds incredibly abstract. How do you see experience?

@UnbornTao My answer sounds abstract because the question elicits concepts without any particular qualifications, we were to describe experience in general, right? Describing unique experiences does not have much bearing on experiences as such, which everyone who even takes the posts question seriously therewith agrees to.

Up to a certain threshold where inherent limits are met, however bright two color-phenomena are they diminish at the same rate when you close your eyes, thus do not diminish in proportion to their intensity, but what would happen if they did?

The various intensive magnitudes of sensory phenomena, which we can rightfully consider to be the matter or substance of our minds from where everything else derives and pertains, if they did diminish in proportion to their intensity, would accumulate and be present in "times" much later than they arose, and from such a lifelong experience we would be fated to derive a different concept of time, a concept which would pertain as much to that reality as the linear one do to ours, although such a reality would involve paradoxical timeloops where the principle of identity naturally no longer applies.

If in our own experience, in which the only known substance exists, (and substance are rightly defined to be the that of which everything else is a predicate or derivative) we derive the concept of linearity of time from the precise parameters of that substance and have no second substance to apply of the concept of linearity to and we can articulate the precise invariant condition that in our experience and thus in relation to that substance known for it to yield linearity then why should anything else be a sufficient condition for linearity than those parameters, the invariant diminution?

If no a. structure, concept, duality, medium or universal idea exist except in so far as the b. substance underlying them exists, and we can achieve a demonstration of the precise origin of the former in the latter, and no question involving the concept of "experience in general" avoids answers of the form denoted by "a", then anyone trying to answer those questions are justified in embarking on a journey in those structures. 

Edited 20 hours ago by Reciprocality

[UnbornTao]

12 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

I keep coming back to this question when I daydream!

What if we try to understand experience outside of time - this is my attempt to force a new perspective on myself.

It is my belief all experiences in all configurations must be manifest in Gods creation of 'reality'.

What if time is just our experience of one single frame of energy, ie one frozen moment with these colours, these feelings, these tastes etc, but happening so quickly with so many frame changes, it is as a movie unfolding. Like framerates on a TV, or a projector running over multiple images millions of times a second. So fast we cannot register this at all, due the lower vibration/energy state of solid 'matter'. 

So experience would be our consciousness accessing one frame - in one possible universe - and then another, and another.

Experience would be one slice of consciousness consuming sensation in an eternal moment. 

This is a half baked stream of consciousness thought though

Hey, leave God alone!  

It seems to me that experience always happens now, so this relates to what you said regarding experience being outside of time. What now is may not be a point in time. So, we could say that experience already is outside of time. What is it?

[UnbornTao]

@Reciprocality Not describe it but inquire into it--you are being too intellectual. Experience, experience, experience. Your experience happening now. Try to clarify what that is for you, first. Then ask what so-called experience is, and try to see different mind activities such as interpretation, meaning-making, association, memory, versus what is actually happening regardless of its relationship to you. I think this can point us in a good direction.

Edited 19 hours ago by UnbornTao

[Reciprocality]

1 hour ago, UnbornTao said:

@Reciprocality Not describe it but inquire into it--you are being too intellectual. Experience, experience, experience. Your experience happening now. Try to clarify what that is for you, first. Then ask what so-called experience is, and try to see different mind activities such as interpretation, meaning-making, association, memory, versus what is actually happening regardless of its relationship to you. I think this can point us in a good direction.

@UnbornTao  It certainly does point us in directions, that is what gesturing does. And I did precisely what you are asking of me in the first comment, but instead of taking responsibility of understanding what it means and asking questions that pertains directly to it you just posit that it is very abstract, yet I do my best with what I got and extrapolate on it only to receive the exact same response. 

Direct and substance are bijective, you use another term to refer to the same universal pattern that could only be denoted due to the repetitive nature of that pattern and have thusly already committed to my framing of it.

[UnbornTao]

@Reciprocality @Reciprocality @Reciprocality Experience, experience, experience. What is it?

[Reciprocality]

1 hour ago, UnbornTao said:

@Reciprocality @Reciprocality @Reciprocality Experience, experience, experience. What is it?

@UnbornTao Beyond my comprehension, absurd.

It is all purposive, but I don't connect with the ultimate end, I can only predict so much.

I am the whole thing, but not for reasons I am aware of. 

The "what" of this experience is prior to the distinctions of it and my thinking of it, all my thinking does is reorganise it into structures that gives me a sense of harmony and ease because if I weren't a system which sought harmony I would not be alive. Experience is will, primal instincts at every second, a semi coherent narrative and myopia. All the words that tries to answer your question of what experience is are reshuffled from another set of experiences and now used to describe a moment that is not really new at all. The reshuffling of the words are insufficient because all they represent are analogies between now and then, all I can do is ask why is it here at all and my answer is that I am inventing the possibility of the alternative.

[UnbornTao]

@Reciprocality Stop trying to show off and contemplate the matter already. You're stuck in stories.

The point isn't to conjure up an answer but to open up in order to have an insight--or just to recognize that we really don't know what experience is.

[Reciprocality]

3 hours ago, UnbornTao said:

@Reciprocality Stop trying to show off and contemplate the matter already. You're stuck in stories.

The point isn't to conjure up an answer but to open up in order to have an insight--or just to recognize that we really don't know what experience is.

@UnbornTao How silly of me, i forgot to add in the words "contemplation" and "insight" so that my contemplations and insights did not appear like showing off in your projections on them.

Edited 7 hours ago by Reciprocality

[Natasha Tori Maru]

3 minutes ago, Reciprocality said:

@UnbornTao How silly of me, i forgot to add in the words "contemplation" and "insight" so that my contemplations and insights did not appear like showing off in your projections on them.

Just an observation.

I find your manner of expression to be recursively self-referential and the word choice not succinct.

I cannot understand what you are trying to say, because too much mental energy is wasted in deciphering the point. I think the constant digression and parenthesis detract from the points you are making. While these tools are definitely assets in expressing oneself, there is a whiplash effect with the frequency of speech pattern.

Additionally, I can see you are typing from a stream of consciousness thought profile. While I love doing this myself, it takes a lot of skill to do so, as one needs to go back and re-edit for grammar again and again. There are many grammatical errors in your writing. Lots of paragraphs that require full stops and commas. This slows down the pace to further enhance understanding from the reader.

For example, when I present a complex subject, I focus heavily on pace. Start with short sharp sentences. Make them longer and longer. Until you finish on a long elaborate point, in one grand crescendo of realization! This introduces flow and can draw the reader in, so they absorb the complex topics you are attempting to enunciate.

I mean this as constructive criticism. No judgement