Thank you, Cleric! In short, this has clarified my doubts, I think I've now reached a sufficient understanding of the given.
Cleric K wrote: ↑Mon Feb 13, 2023 1:11 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Mon Feb 13, 2023 7:48 am
I’m saying, we want to address the
immediate given of experience - what a naive observer can notice, not knowing anything about philosophical arguments and forums, only equipped with sound and calm observation intent - yet a
category is introduced, that moreover is made of functionally (hence temporally) uneven elements. This is not at all an issue in the thousand ways this category can be helpfully used, but here we are addressing the pure given of experience!
Federica, I believe that you're taking a somewhat restricted view on what the given is. We should remember that we're dealing with living phenomenology. Thus the experiences of our spiritual activity should also be included into our investigations.
Here's a simple example. Take a small object and place it in front of you. Place your hand as if you are about to grab it. Then begin to
imagine how you take the object. As always, the more slowly and smoothly we do this imagining, the better. Repeat this imagining over and over again. At some point decide to actually take the object. Try to feel the difference. Naturally, the difference is very elusive. We can't point our finger at it. But yet undoubtedly we feel that we
do something differently.
One thing I should have kept, but I ended up editing out: I had an underlying question mark about how to speak of living thinking to others - how to point to the “immediate given of experience”. I didn’t want to sound pretentious so I cut it, but actually people start to wonder what this “philosophy” I’m doing is all about, so I’m trying to figure out how to talk about it. so I can answer questions.
This being said, I never said I would exclude the experiences of spiritual activity from the given. Quite the opposite:
Federica wrote:We first observe that our given experience consists of sense perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, as conscious phenomena (in more reasoned-out terms, it consists of thought-pictures of sense perceptions, thought-pictures of feelings, and other thought-pictures)
Now, I admit I hadn’t grasped the missing piece you describe, that makes the bodily will phenomenologically given. Thank you, I understand that. Very useful, because until now I was placing under the word Will a larger meaning of intention, freedom, free will, that can apply to the body, but also to willed thinking and willed feeling. For this reason, in my proposed description of the available sorts of conscious phenomena,
I replaced Will with sense perceptions. That was the ‘innovation’ I wanted to suggest, in order to better stick to the immediate given, but I wasn't clear what exactly is intended with Will. Now I am.
So I had
two misconceptions about Will: first, I was missing that phenomenological “something else” that you describe; second, I was thinking of Will as intention plus its execution in time. Therefore I thought that Will was the "odd one out" in the triad, and that it was confusing when the goal is to do a slow, careful, phenomenology. With these clarifications of what the Will is, my points are clarified! In some more detail, in case anyone is interested:
Cleric wrote:Yes it is true that these ideal soul spaces that we flow through are not at all obvious but I think you overlook the fact that all our conscious willing passes through thinking as well.
I didn’t overlook it:
Federica wrote:Experiential inquiry only allows us to take stock of thought-pictures, and they are of three types: sensory, that includes one's own physical body, feeling, and other thought-pictures.
Again, my misunderstanding comes from misreading the exact meaning of will:
Federica wrote:We can observe a force originating from the 'I', that we call intention, or Will - the direct contribution of the self to the shape of the observable becoming.
So I used the will as the originator of the rules of transformation. But I was not imagining such rules guided by abstract models. On the contrary, I spoke of an inner model that is not external or theoretical.
***
Cleric wrote:The reason you see the rules of craftsmanship as more immediate than that of thinking...
I didn't see them so at all!
Instead, I gave some examples about the DoF not being as obvious as it seems, then I said that the more immediate steering seems to go
across not
along the WFT categories. I am well aware of the heavy constraints limiting bodily imagination, not only the physical ones but also the karmic ones, as Ashvin mentioned, and those in between: more overarching than the range of our joints, but less than our karma, like our physical habits.
***
Cleric wrote:Actually in the course of spiritual development we have to become more and more conscious even of our most ordinary movements. We need to clearly live in that bodily imagination and clearly feel how our imaginative intents flow even in the mundane activities. One such important aspect is learning to eat consciously, to feel how that food has absorbed the life of the Sun, how it was grown, how it reached our table and how we now take that transformed Sun-life into ourselves.
I have some sense of this development, thanks for this insight! I try to do what you describe with food, but for now I forget about it more often than I remember….
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Cleric wrote:
Federica wrote: ↑Sun Feb 12, 2023 3:41 pm
So, when we say that we feel more creatively responsible for some kind of phenomena and less of some others, it seems to me that we have left the given, and have started extracting rules. We are creating not an abstract theory, but an inner model that we can use to either predict the degree of freedom of a future conscious phenomenon based on its type, or to draw further conclusions out of that categorization.
In the above you seem to place a strict split between the given as something that we find through the interaction with the bodily spectrum and our thinking process.
No, the above was not referred to Will but to the whole WFT spectrum. In simple words, what I was trying to express with “we have left the given” is this: “The essay says that W is less consciously steered, T is fully consciously steered, and F is in between. But this is not always confirmed in our experience, as per the mentioned examples of how it’s much less obvious than so. Therefore, when we say that T is the most conscious, we are extracting it as an inner model, a rule that we have experienced to be true when we have consciously willed out thinking activity, but that’s not as confirmed in reality (we might be easily tossed around by our thoughts for example). So we have created an inner model, a concept of T as necessarily high in conscious steering, that we use to sets an expectation, or a prediction, that our next T activity should be steered fully consciously, though maybe the given will be different, maybe we will be tossed around by repetitive thoughts without even realize it. So when we say T is fully under our responsibility, we have left the given, we are relying on an inner model. It can be so - say in a concentration exercise - but it can also not be so, if we fall back into compulsive thinking.”
Such was the difference I was making between given and not given. Although it's true that the soul spaces are not obvious, I understand now this is not the point. Of course, we need to develop our activity and improve our conscious steering but it's not the point of the phenomenology, and with the right meaning and phenomenology of Will, I understand now how the "given" extends to the full spectrum of activity.