OK, good, we are finally getting to the bottom of itCleric K wrote: ↑Wed Apr 28, 2021 2:52 pm OK. So we need to synchronize the terminology I guess. How would you name the following. I see red surface. Then I turn my gaze away or I close my eyes and recall the experience of the color. It's not necessary to have vivid colorful experience, neither to have a clear intellectual concept/word for it. Just the fact that I'm addressing the same inner experience that I had when looking at the surface, although now the actual perception is not present. In certain sense now I only have half of the experience - the meaning/idea/awareness of redness, without the perception. When I have both the perception and this meaning they are fused together but when I recall the experience I can experience (unless I have super vivid imagination) primarily the ideal content - that which is otherwise fused with the perception now I experience independently. This is how I would call it - meaning/idea. What word would you use?
My terminology:
1. When a new-born child experiences a perception of redness, there is just a presence of the quale of redness as a visual perception in his direct conscious experience. The child does not interpret or understand it, but the quale of red perception is still present.
2. When an adult experiences the same perception, and then afterward he recalls it and reproduces it in a memory, he experiences a different phenomenon, we can call it "an imaginative-reflective thought" of the original perceptual experience. It's a reflective copy of the original one. But this is still a conscious phenomenon, a quale, but of a different category - of a category of a reflective thought. The ideal content of such thought is still a quale of conscious experience.
3. When an adult experience the same perception, and at the same time has an interpretative thought "red color" - it is a combination of a quale of a visual perception of redness and a quale of a meaning/idea of that thought.
What is important to notice here is that we still equally experience all of the above as qualia, but qualia with different types of contents - the content of a visual perception of color, or the content of a meaning/idea, or a combination of both. And another thing to notice that all of these qualia are equally present and experienced in our direct experience (which are the permanent aspects of these qualia). Obviously (duhh..) we can never experience a quale that would not be present and would not be experienced.
And finally, this is the most mysterious part of it: we do not experience each quale as a separate experience, but we experience the whole content of all qualia together at each moment (of now) as an indivisible wholeness. It's just "THIS". It is only when we analyze them (with thinking) we conditionally in our imagination and interpretation break them into pieces and categorize as different qualia and phenomena. Such categorization is practically needed for us to function efficiently in our lives, so there is nothing wrong with it. But what is essential to notice is that such breaking-into-pieces and categorization is all the result of interpretation. As a fact of actual direct experience, the reality of our experience is always unbreakable oneness. Experiencing and seeing this direct and factual oneness which is not disturbed by the breaking-into-pieces mental interpretative work of the intellect is what is called "non-dual" perception. Such perception does not negate or suppress the breaking-into-pieces mental interpretation, but sort of "transcends" it and sees that no mental interpretation can in fact ever break this actual experiential unity, it can only do such break-up in its imagination. The psycho-spiritual importance of such realization is that it dispels our habitual dualistic perception of reality and stops us to believe that the world is actually divided into pieces, it stops us to interpret ourselves and other conscious beings as separate parts of reality. It restores the fundamental unity of consciousness without disregarding the amazing variety of the qualitative content of conscious experience. We do not need to become thoughtless vegetable-lunatics to experience the unity of consciousness. The unity of consciousness is always unbreakable as a fact regardless of the content and of the presence of perceptions and thoughts. We just need to notice and experientially see this unity of our conscious experience just as it is right here and now.