If you search for the experiencer you will only finally reach the screen of perception itself. That’s a bit like saying I looked at the table as intensely as I could, and I saw my looking. I guess a way to put my point is that you (and most eastern ontologies) have restricted the search to one way of knowing (which is understandable because it is primary to us), and concluded that everything can be explained in terms of that. You don’t have details on how the vertical aspects of reality came to be (and no one really does), but assume that it can all be described in terms of that which is perceived at the root of conscious experience which the sages have transcended.Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed May 12, 2021 3:04 am This is much simpler, you don't need to feel any "nothingness" at all. And the awareness of being an "experiencer" is only an idea by the way, you cannot find any "experiencer" no matter how much you search. It's about conscious experiencing itself. The content of what is experienced always changes, but the experiencing itself never changes, "time" does not apply to it.
There is of course another tradition from the west. This has been mostly replaced by the eastern version with phenomenology etc, because the western tradition was fairly primitive in terms of the understanding of consciousness. It’s a bit like what many of the scholastics did when Aristotle was rediscovered, and they dropped Plato (although in reverse in some ways). However it has not taken over completely, and I would suggest that’s because there is good reason to believe that this will never be a description of the whole of reality. For example it could explain the intelligibility of the universe, but not the order that appeared fully formed from the start. It can explain how mental processes represent as matter, but not why it a conscious screen that seems to ‘act’ habitually and deterministically would choose all the perfect settings right at the start for life to eventually be possible. You can do what some cosmologists do and invent trillions of previous attempts, but that is truly wild speculation.
The Platonists and the Kabbalists had good reason to consider more structure to reality than the limits of our perception. There is no enlightened sage that can suddenly tell you the structure of atoms, or why light always travels at the same speed. Modern science has good reasons to believe that there are more dimensions than the four of space and time, but doesn’t have the first clue what they are. Interestingly the maths using our existing theories suggested 10 dimensions from five separate models originally, until they added an 11th that none of our maths pointed to, but which made the other five fit together like different paths up a mountain. So even though M Theory makes no sense because it’s more like a tin of paints than a painting, if we speculate that it at least tells us something about reality, we have three paints for space, then some more that in theory we have access to, and then something we have no access to at all.
I agree, but again your scope of reality assumes we are the same as god, with access to all of reality. This is a very common assumption, but a big assumption that contradicts other accounts.I don't claim that it is "fundamental", neither I claim that I have full awareness of all that is in consciousness. But experiencing is definitely a "prerequisite" for any conscious experience because without the experiencing (the ability to have conscious experience) no awareness of any forms would be possible.