Jim Cross wrote: ↑Tue Dec 14, 2021 9:59 pm I like the funnel model. It's Bergsonian, isn't it? Although Huxley also picks it up in The Doors of Perception when he describes consciousness as a filter.
Makes sense to me. Matches well with neuroscience too.
I'm surprised you didn't bring Bergson or Huxley into the picture. It would have clarified things somewhat.
BTW, all of your descriptions about "thinking" or "Thinking" don't really work for me. Sorry I'm just not sitting around (meditating or not) and doing thinking gestures as a funnel. If it works for you or others, that's fine. It just doesn't work for me.
It's like you stroke out everything I've written above and instead read "yes, the funnel is an intellectual model trying to explain consciousness".
I didn't bring Bergson or anyone else because what is spoken of requires nothing but unprejudiced thinking and the good will to observe it.
The exercises don't work for you because you don't want to experience them. You want to imagine them from the outside. It's similar to gymnastic exercises. There's great difference if we hear a description of certain movements and then perform them with our will, or we simply vaguely think about them and say "Yeah, I understand that, what's the big deal?"
The exercises don't tell anyone to fantasize a funnel. It's all about to observe our own thinking. Think of whatever you want but try to feel what exactly you're innery doing in order to produce the thoughts. Pay attention to the sources of distraction. Pay attention to the feeling which makes you not want to do that exercise. It tells you something "yeah, I understand that exercise. Seeing one's thoughts - big deal. I don't have time to sit and do that." Well, that's the prejudice. In the same way we miss something if we only abstractly imagine a gymnastic exercise instead of setting our body in motion, so there's something we don't really know about ourselves unless we try to investigate it. And this is actually one of the main hindrances for exercises like these. Even thought people have their excuses (I have better things to do) it's really that they feel uneasy about learning something about themselves.
I've given this example before. Most of us know the strange feeling when we first heard our voice on recording. It's usually quite surprising. We usually ask our friends "Do I really sound like that?" to which they say "Of course, what did you think you sound like?". It's very similar when we begin to penetrate the thinking process. We begin to feel uneasy because parts of ourselves begin to be exposed which were previously entirely in the blind spot. And this can never be achieved by just thinking about the exercise and saying "Yeah, I get it, it's no big deal" instead of actually coming to know our thinking voice up close.