Thanks for the comments, everyone!
Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Jan 20, 2021 12:53 am
There definitely is: it is the ever-present awareness of any perceptions, feelings, will, thoughts, concepts, ideas. The perceptions, feelings, will, thoughts, concepts, ideas are always changing and fleeting, the awareness of them never changes, it does not move and does not shift, it is ever-stable and all other experiences are anchored to it and inseparable from it.
Let's first try to equalize our understanding of what, for example, awareness means.
Clearly, awareness it not a
simple perception that we can attach a concept to, in the manner we can attach a concept to the experience of red, of warm, of pain, etc. There isn't something that we can point to and say "That's awareness".
Let's try to build up our understanding gradually. I'm not claiming this is some "official" definition, but it's something that we can reach in a rigorous way. I must warn that we need some extra concentration here. Casual newspaper-like skimming through, may not be sufficient.
We'll start again form a state with minimal prior knowledge of anything. In that state we are able to identify and attach concepts to elementary perceptions but we don't encounter "awareness" as such an elementary perception. The concept/idea of awareness is not something that immediately presents itself to us within the given. Yet we can work our way towards it.
Let's start from the most obvious things. We may have a visual perception of a table. Together with the visual content we experience the meaning, the concept of "table". We not only have an experience of a colorful blob but we recognize some meaning together with it. This is already an act of elementary thinking. Usually we don't consider thinking in this way - we'd rather picture it as a train of logical thoughts - but in our discussion we can assume a broader perspective and consider as thinking any act of connecting concept/idea to perception. Clearly, at some prior time, the colorful blob was just that (probably in early childhood) but we gradually learned to recognize something characteristic in that blob or any other similar blob, that resonates with the concept of "table". This may sound unnecessarily detailed but let's just be on the safe side and make sure everything is perfectly clear.
The next step could be to widen our visual field and encompass the whole room. Here again we experience the corresponding concept of "room". Then we widen further and arrive at the idea of visual perception as such - we now recognize that the visual perceptions of table and room are only instances within a more general visual field. Let's add now also auditory perceptions. We encompass our visual and auditory fields and experience the idea of "audio-visual perceptions". In this manner we add everything else that we can - all other senses, feelings, will, thoughts, imagination, memories.
Finally, we can even perceive the very act of what we have been doing so far. The actual experience of "experiencing ideas in relation to perceptions" can itself be recognized as such. Thus we have widened the scope of our perceptions as far as we can and now we also experience some meaning, some idea in relation to the thus widened experience.
At first, this idea is something concrete - it reflects the concrete sum-total of perceptions that we have encompassed. If we repeat the above steps in a different context we'll arrive at other unique sum-total idea. But we can also recognize that there's something common in the ideal contents in all instances. In a similar way we can experience many color blobs and finally extract the common ideal element within them as the concept of "table". In our case we can extract the general idea of "totality of experience" - words don't matter. Anyone can use another if so inclined. So every time we repeat the exercise we arrive at a unique totality of perceptions and their corresponding sum-total idea but we can also experience the generalized idea of "totality of experience". This idea has been
abstracted out of the concrete experiences.
When we gave a name for that idea, we have in reality projected or condensed the idea into a symbol, a verbal thought. This symbol acts as a handle for the general idea. Now we can use it in language and anytime we think that symbol/verbal thought, the idea of "totality of experience" is evoked. What we must be perfectly clear about, though, is that we now experience this idea
without the actual sum-total of perceptions. The perception to which the idea is attached is the thought-perception of the symbol - that's where they come together. But other that that, we can now throw around the concept as any other X, Y, Z.
This is something of
extreme importance. We need to develop our ability to be perfectly clear whether we are experiencing concepts and ideas in relation to actual perceptions (like in our exercise) or in relation to a condensed thought-perception that acts as a symbolic grounding point for the generalized idea.
We need to really take our time and
feel the difference. At every step of the exercise we are firmly grounded in the
given. There are no "floating" concepts and ideas. Every meaning that we experience is in relation to
concrete perceptions - no matter if individual or sum-total. Contrast this with the experience when we summon the
though-symbol as a grounding point for the idea. Unless we can make clear distinction between the two, confusion is inevitable.
Please note that nowhere in our discussion have we mentioned anything about a self. We are perfectly in line with Eugene. Let's consider a state of experience without self and self-driven thinking . There's no problem whatsoever to conceive of this state as perceptions together with corresponding ideas/meaning but without experience of a process that links them together. The link is ready-made, we don't feel responsible for it. There's also no problem to experience thoughts that we don't feel responsible for. In fact, this happens anytime we listen to someone speaking to us. This may sound striking for some, but it is indeed true, if we are able to observe correctly. When we listen to spoken words we allow the speaker to think for us. The auditory words directly evoke their corresponding concepts without feeling ourselves active in that process. It is different if we listen to a language that we barely understand. Then we perceive sounds but we have to think about them and translate them, thus we create the meaning of the speech ourselves. Another, slightly more pathological case could be if we are "hearing voices". Here again we experience perceptions and meaning without any activity on our side.
Yet we have to recognize that at any point of experiencing these no-self/no-thought states, active thinking can take over and connect own thoughts to the perceptions or project the meaning of the state into words (or any other form of thought).
So at this stage, if we really want to speak only of certainties, we can only say: as long as we experience active thinking, there's also a sense of us being responsible for the thoughts. If we passively absorb the perceptions and their automatically attached meanings, there's no apparent sense of self but at any point, the contents of experience can become the object of active thought and the sense of self emerges again. These are the facts of experience. Note that we are not saying "self exists" but that "sense of self exists". To claim that the self
as such exists, we would have to point to a concrete perception. But we certainly do not find such a perception in the given. On the other hand, we most surely can have the sense of being the cause of the thinking process.
If we are to assert this sense to be an illusion we should really be able to extract that idea from the given. This is a typical example of the paradoxical situations we reach when we build upon abstract ideas. As long as we are dealing with abstract logic, for every statement we can form its inverse. For example, one statement could be "the self is an illusion because the fundamental no-self-awareness only imagines the self into existence". But we can just as easily build it's complementary: "the state of no-self is an illusion because it results only when the fundamental self-awareness imagines its own sense of self to be nonexistent" These things can never be dealt with through abstract reasoning. We are on firm soil only as long as we recognize what we find in the given. The facts of experience is that both self and no-self states are possible. The idea that one of them renders the other illusionary is added by us only quite artificially, it is not something that is contained within the given.
We have established that awareness is something that we can form a
concrete idea about - we have the steps to experience it directly from the given. But if we construct a thought like "awareness dreams existence", we need to very vigilant. Quite impalpably, the concept of "awareness" becomes something different. It is one thing to say that the contents of experience have similarities with dream life and quite another that awareness dreams life. While the first establishes facts of experience, the seconds lays a much stronger claim, which to be sure, is not readily supported within the given. We are not claiming that it's impossible to have correct ideas even before having the corresponding perceptions. But we have to very careful with the implications of such ideas. "Awareness dreams existence" is not simply a beautiful expression but it has quite dramatic repercussions on what we'll consider possible and impossible, what can be considered knowledge and what chasing shadows. If we take that idea at heart, the totality of our experience immediately assumes the character of a thin film supported solely by the mysterious dreaming activity of awareness. Any further pursuit into the structure of the thin dream image becomes laughable. We either sit back and enjoy the dream or make the effort to wake up, as this is the only thing that makes sense if we are interested into unveiling the mystery of the dream. That's why we have to be so careful when we overlay our own ideas over the given. We all know how one such innocent idea, of subjective and unknowable by definition, objective world, has been overlaid on the given and is still causing generations of philosophers to break their heads against the implications. There's nothing wrong, it's even necessary, to explore such ideas but we really need to always look for ways to support the ideas within the given. If the ideas can live their existence only in the abstract we need to be extra cautious.
There're more things to be discovered if we investigate even more closely the thinking process but I'll stop here. So far the goal was to elucidate the intimate thinking process and to show that we are in position at any point to determine if our thinking deals with concepts and ideas that have been found within the given or we are juggling abstractly with thoughts that we have ourselves constructed and are now being overlaid over the given.
