Metaphysics - Idealism without woo-woo

[Soul_of_Shu]

I'm reminded here of my first visit to Venice as a backpacker in 1973, arriving on the morning of Good Friday and naively expecting to find a room still available, and being left to wander through its maze of mostly nameless meandering alleyways, while getting utterly lost in search of a place off the beaten tourist track to lay my weary body down, the guidebook having become pretty much a non factor. As it turns out, well into darkness, after what seemed a futile endlessness, I did stumble upon a 'room for rent' sign, offering what amounted to a walk-in closet with a cot in it. Oh how I loved that simple abode. Thus 'getting lost' became my preferred way to explore the journey ... go figure ... but I digress

[Lou Gold]

Of course there is. The direct experiential percept of "I'm not real" is it not being there. One learns what is not the same way one learns what is.

Lou, I think that it has been discussed here many times already and I don't think there are many people here who consider the incarnate self-image as the "ultimate reality".
The fact that you have transcended your incarnate self and experienced yourself from a higher standpoint, does not show that your ordinary self is an illusion, it only shows that it exists embedded within a higher perspective.

etc

OK. Here we go again. Your full statement was "There's no such direct experience that in itself says "by the way, I'm not real". We can come to such conclusions only consequently, through thinking." However, one chooses how to identify (attach) to the experience. The meditative practice of relaxing (detaching) the identification will release a previously obfuscated experience. Relax the 'I' identification and experience other than 'I'. As Rumi says,

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.

You can't think 'me' without thinking 'other' and this is why the Bhagavad Gita says, "The difficulty begins with the thought of 'I' and 'mine'. It is the identification tat is the illusion.

[Eugene I]

Meditation where will and thought are experienced clearly, lead to very different results compared to that of putting the will to sleep. I'm planning to write something about the nature of these results, some of the following days.

Cleric, thanks for your insightful post. I agree that Buddhists ignored the mystery of will and in that respect their views are limited. And I agree that our concept of "I" is a primitive conceptual abstraction grounded in the direct experience of will, just like the concept of "red" is grounded in the visual perception of color. But instead it would be equally appropriate to use a concept of "willing" that just reflects the fact of the ability of spiritual activity to exercise willful actions. And note that at this point such concept of "willing" remains neutral and does not become a noun/"entity". But that is not how most of us typically interpret this ability to will. We go much further and associate an "entity"-"I" that is the "doer" of the will, thereby making an assumption that the directly experienced spiritual activity can not perform any "willing" unless there is a "entity"/"subject"/"I" who is the "will-er". And this is a much more advanced abstraction step further from that primitive abstraction of "willing", and such abstraction is based on an implicit assumption of the existence of such "entity" that has no ground in the direct experience whatsoever because, as you said yourself, it is impossible to directly experience such "I"/"experiencer"/"doer".

One can argue that we all have this undeniable sense of "self" with which we associate the concepts of "doer", "experiencer" etc., and that sense is exactly the experience that serves as the ground of the abstraction of "self". However, such sense of self is not a direct perception like the visual perception of "red", but rather already a meaning of an unconsciously and implicitly fabricated thought of "being a self". In other words, here we confuse the experience of a meaning of a though with the experience of a perception. In reality this is simply a circular thinking: the though of "I" finds its ground in itself by taking the "sense of self" subconsciously implicit in such thought as its own experiential ground. In other word, the thought-form of "being a self" is like an iceberg with the "sense of self" being an "underwater" unconscious part of it and the concept of "I" being an above-the-water cognitive and conscious part of it, where the "above-the-water" part self-referentially grounds itself in the "underwater" part.

Regarding Buddhism, the reason of their denial of "self" has more to do with psychology rather than with philosophy, and their philosophical arguments are secondary to psychological. The psychological reason is that they envisioned the concept of "self" (as a belief in the existence of "self" as a separate ontic and eternally existing "entity", which Buddha called "eternalism") to be the psychological foundation of egotism and suffering. So, based on that understanding, their recipe for emancipation from suffering and egotism was to dismantle the foundation of it - the concept (or, as they say,t he "illusion") of "self" as an eternally and separately existing entity. And they became so biased in this agenda that they chose to even ignore the aspect of will.

IMO Buddhists went too far in their denial of "self", throwing out the baby with the water. Yet, I can still see some truth in their psychological insights and would agree that the belief in the existence of the "eternal entity of self" is indeed the foundation of human egotism and much of psychological suffering and confusion in our lives. That is why I'm very cautious to jump from the abstraction of "willing" as an undeniable aspect of the spiritual activity (which is totally justified and grounded in the direct experience) to the abstraction of "I"/"will-er"-entity (which IMO is not grounded in the direct experience other than the self-referential experience of the "sense of self").

[Cleric K]

One can argue that we all have this undeniable sense of "self" with which we associate the concepts of "doer", "experiencer" etc., and that sense is exactly the experience that is ground of the abstraction of "self". However, my argument is that such sense of self is not a direct perception like the visual perception of "red", but rather already a meaning of an unconsciously and implicitly fabricated thought of "being a self". In other words, here we confuse the experience of a meaning of a though with the experience of a perception. In reality this simply is a circular thinking: the though of "I" finds its ground in itself by taking the "sense of self" subconsciously implicit in such thought as its own experiential ground. In other word, the thought-form of "being a self" is like an iceberg with the "sense of self" being an "underwater" unconscious part of it and the concept of "I" being an above-the-water cognitive and conscious part of it, where the "above-the-water" part self-referentially grounds itself in the "underwater" part.

Thanks Eugene,
First, to clear out - I'm not arguing if a self exists as an entity, if it is eternal, if it has boundaries, etc. It's all about what we find in the given. The point was that the sense of self and the ability to say "I" for ourselves are found naturally within the given. You are perfectly correct that the "I" is not perceived as a 'thing' in the will but rather through this invisible sense, which makes us feel as a force that gives direction of the will. I'm glad that you mentioned about it.

Of course, here we can counter-argue that 'such sense of self is not a direct perception like the visual perception of "red", but rather already a meaning of an unconsciously and implicitly fabricated thought of "being a self"' is already pre-judgment. Our thinking has preconceived notions of which elements of experience can be considered trustworthy and which illusionary. That's also what materialism does. It cherry-picks the experiences of the senses and tries to explain everything else with them. So it is here. We have some deeper inclination to consider some elements of reality as more important than others. The materialist, as said, picks the senses. The religious man - his religious feelings. The idealist - his thoughts and ideas and so on.

The fact that everyone has his own inclinations and preferences for certain elements of reality over others is enough to make us think: "If this is so, how can this ever be resolved? If everyone pulls towards his own area we'll never arrive at a common view. If everyone is so convinced in their own view, isn't it naïve to believe that I'm some special exception and my own view is the true one?"

There's only one way for this to be resolved and it is to seek consciousness of the deeper strata. Your example of the iceberg is great - actually I've used the same analogy in the post I'm preparing. So we are either condemned to live in a world of opinions, where everyone can equally support his own and refute those of others (and so can everyone else regarding our view) or we can try to penetrate deeper below the surface and investigate how opinions and thinking itself are being born.

[AshvinP]

Of course there is. The direct experiential percept of "I'm not real" is it not being there. One learns what is not the same way one learns what is.

Have you ever seen someone, perhaps yourself, get so excited about something they perceive outside that they run smack into a glass screen door? That's a painfully learned case of confusing perceptions that are transparent to us with those which are "not real". To push Cleric's fireball example a little further, try putting additional "I think" in front of "I think the fireball". No matter how many "I think" we add to the front, the thought-experience does not change into a qualitatively different thought-experience. Because the "I" is transparent to us, yet it is still very real.

Location, location, location. When I perceive it 'not there' it means 'not where I'm placing my attention'. If the search is important to me, I then look somewhere else until I find (or not), the arbiter in process always being experience.

Exactly. There is always within us motive (attention) applied to the 'search'. That is not a property of the percept which we experience. So the 'disappearance' of the percept when we shift our attention reflects more information about our internal organization than on the reality or unreality of the percept.

[Eugene I]

There's only one way for this to be resolved and it is to seek consciousness of the deeper strata. Your example of the iceberg is great - actually I've used the same analogy in the post I'm preparing. So we are either condemned to live in a world of opinions, where everyone can equally support his own and refute those of others (and so can everyone else regarding our view) or we can try to penetrate deeper below the surface and investigate how opinions and thinking itself are being born.

It seems that we are converging to some common ground, Cleric, and here I agree with your above post. But the sobering reality is: at this point, as existing in human form, we seem to have no access to that depth below the surface. The origins of "thinking itself" seems to be beyond our realm of direct experience and awareness.

I've been through many religious, spiritual and meditation practices and traditions, which helped me a lot, including insights into the origins of formation of our concepts and interpretations of reality, but there is always some "bottom" that I hit and never able to penetrate further. The mystery of consciousness, it's ability to experience qualia, to will, to have thought-forms with meanings always evades my attempts to grasp and understand it. This is not to claim that it is impossible to achieve through some extraordinary spiritual experiences, scientific discoveries or philosophical insight, but it's just to state the fact that I personally have not been able to do that.

[AshvinP]

There's only one way for this to be resolved and it is to seek consciousness of the deeper strata. Your example of the iceberg is great - actually I've used the same analogy in the post I'm preparing. So we are either condemned to live in a world of opinions, where everyone can equally support his own and refute those of others (and so can everyone else regarding our view) or we can try to penetrate deeper below the surface and investigate how opinions and thinking itself are being born.

It seems that we are converging to some common ground, Cleric, and here I agree with your above post. But the sobering reality is: at this point, as existing in human form, we seem to have no access to that depth below the surface. The origins of "thinking itself" seems to be beyond our realm of direct experience and awareness.

I've been through many religious, spiritual and meditation practices and traditions, which helped me a lot, including insights into the origins of formation of our concepts and interpretations of reality, but there is always some "bottom" that I hit and never able to penetrate further. The mystery of consciousness, it's ability to experience qualia, to will, to have thought-forms with meanings always evades my attempts to grasp and understand it. This is not to claim that it is impossible to achieve through some extraordinary spiritual experiences, scientific discoveries or philosophical insight, but it's just to state the fact that I personally have not been able to do that.

Nice, now we're cooking with some heat

[Cleric K]

OK. Here we go again. Your full statement was "There's no such direct experience that in itself says "by the way, I'm not real". We can come to such conclusions only consequently, through thinking." However, one chooses how to identify (attach) to the experience. The meditative practice of relaxing (detaching) the identification will release a previously obfuscated experience. Relax the 'I' identification and experience other than 'I'. As Rumi says,

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.

You can't think 'me' without thinking 'other' and this is why the Bhagavad Gita says, "The difficulty begins with the thought of 'I' and 'mine'. It is the identification tat is the illusion.

Here we are finding intersection. I do agree that relaxation of identification is the way to self knowledge.
What I'll argue is that this de-identification stops short. What I mean is that when we fuse with the Universe, in the way it is commonly done, it is only another form of identification. Our ego expands and lovingly embraces the totality of experience. We don't feel separation anymore because we have identified with the the world content. We have left nothing outside of ourselves. Of course, this identification is rarely explicit as in "I'm now one with the Universe". This we don't do, because we avoid the I-word. But we are nevertheless there, spread over the world, lovingly allowing ourselves to be carried on the chords of creation. And canary in the coal mine that betrays this, is the simple fact that after we are in our normal state we can say in full honesty "I experienced oneness with the Universe, we were one". This in itself should make us aware that our "I" was there all along, experiencing, recording and then being able to recall the experience. Even if in the higher state there were no trace of our intellect, our desires, our flaws, etc., still, the same essential nature that animates both our lower and higher experience is present in both cases. That's why we can have awareness of transitioning between one state and the other. There's something common in both states, that is able to witness the transition. (again, not arguing about ontic "I". It's just difficult to escape the specifics of language, which is designed to express in this way)

So I fully agree that we need to de-identify but I should say that this process can go much deeper and in a direction that not many are willing to take. Precisely because one becomes aware of the iceberg. It is easy to push away the contents of the ego and spend some time spread out over the fabric of the Cosmos. It's a much more disturbing experience to witness what we are made of.

[Lou Gold]

There's only one way for this to be resolved and it is to seek consciousness of the deeper strata. Your example of the iceberg is great - actually I've used the same analogy in the post I'm preparing. So we are either condemned to live in a world of opinions, where everyone can equally support his own and refute those of others (and so can everyone else regarding our view) or we can try to penetrate deeper below the surface and investigate how opinions and thinking itself are being born.

It seems that we are converging to some common ground, Cleric, and here I agree with your above post. But the sobering reality is: at this point, as existing in human form, we seem to have no access to that depth below the surface. The origins of "thinking itself" seems to be beyond our realm of direct experience and awareness.

I've been through many religious, spiritual and meditation practices and traditions, which helped me a lot, including insights into the origins of formation of our concepts and interpretations of reality, but there is always some "bottom" that I hit and never able to penetrate further. The mystery of consciousness, it's ability to experience qualia, to will, to have thought-forms with meanings always evades my attempts to grasp and understand it. This is not to claim that it is impossible to achieve through some extraordinary spiritual experiences, scientific discoveries or philosophical insight, but it's just to state the fact that I personally have not been able to do that.

Eugene,

You say,

The mystery of consciousness, it's ability to experience qualia, to will, to have thought-forms with meanings always evades my attempts to grasp and understand it.

YES, because intellectual grasping (comprehending) and surrendering/standing under (understanding) are not the same. The former seeks to bring under control and the latter yields to 'Thy will be done'.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Oh the 'I'rony that the 'I' born of That which one is in essence can't grasp what That does ...