SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 12:47 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jul 22, 2021 11:33 pm
So I think the simplest approach to this issue is the one Cleric already tried, but I don't think you responded. When you went on the moon trip and felt your "I" dissolve, your "I" was still existing and experiencing but "helplessly spread out". Otherwise, how could you remember and communicate that this experience actually happened to you? That seems to be the central thing a lot of mystical types ignore - that Self-"I" (sometimes called "Ego" too,
not to be confused with limited personal ego in normal cognition, as many of those same mystical types do for no good reason) who makes the continuity and recognition of any mystical experiences possible. I am not sure there is much point going further into any other argument until this point is seriously contended with.
The situation is comparable to metacognitive remembering of a dream, except for the "I", if a dream was experienced in first person. Experience of asubjective awareness can similarly become "owned" as "my experience" in metacognitive afterthought. And I'm not saying that is wrong, how else to talk about experiences, from pragmatism of general linguistics where 1st person is simply a marker for
who is speaking. Internal dialogue is clearly also a form speaking, most of it 1st person navel gazing blather.
In the Deepak-guided meditation I linked, the awareness/whole (or if you prefer "higher-self) felt this local and partial bodily awareness from "outside", like whole feels a part inside it.
To call awareness/inclusive whole "Ego" and "I", from my ego-perspective, as felt and observed as partial internal mechanism, I see no other reason for that but projection. The awareness/whole was not babbling, just feeling/listening, so in the concrete sense that aspect of self is not 1st person.
The above is just waving the white flag and surrendering to modern age of materialist form-obsession and spiritualist escapism, two sides of the same nihilist coin. Your explanation for the first-person Self experiencing and remembering is no different than a physicalist would use to dismiss the
transpersonal reality of a dream, a mystical experience, NDE, OOBE, etc. The physicalist simply denies the first-person experience any transpersonal reality by chalking it up too "metacognitive afterthought" of the individual. They say, "
yes you must talk about these things in spiritual symbols, but that does not mean there is actually a spiritual reality outside of your personal fantasy (navel gazing blather)". If we tell them the Ego-Self we are speaking of is
not identical to merely personal ego-perspective, they
ignore that distinction because they cannot imagine a higher all-encompassing Self-perspective. For some reason you are unable to see the relation between your view and that of the modern age physicalist, but it still exists.
Yours is a non-explanation which seeks to deny all reality of interiority and substitute in its place an abstract "pragamtism of general linguistics" where the profound experience of that interiority is "simply a marker", a dreamed up illusion of the unsubstantial ego which is simply useful for its survival. And because it is so fundamentally incorrect, it is also extremely dangerous. For one thing, it does nothing to actually explain how the duration of experience was sensed - how Hedge90 came back to normal cognition and actually felt that time had passed. That cannot be chalked up to "metacognitive afterthought". It also manages to demote and relegate dreaming consciousness to unsubstantial fantasy at the same time, which is exactly the opposite direction we should hope for society's understanding to head in. All these years after Jung systematically explored the shared symbols of the "collective unconscious", and most still pretend its a metaphor at best.