SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 7:51 pm
Just listened to Corbin saying that there's no knowledge, only knowing.
OK. Agree. No knowledge
But let's go even further. Let's unlearn as much as possible. Let's unlearn so far that we are like naked beings into existence. No prior knowledge of anything. Well, let's keep at least language and our ability to discern and describe the contents of experience, otherwise we can't go on with this discussion.
We now find ourselves in a pristine existence or rather - experience is being experienced (we don't know we are "we" yet). How can the totality of this experience be described? Certainly not by saying that we are having a subjective experience of an objective world. We have unlearned ideas like outer world, inner world, self, God, consciousness, awareness, void, etc.
If we are to describe the contents of experience, two things are needed: one - the ability to recognize the "parts" of the experience. Let's call these parts in the most general sense -
perceptions. Two - meaning/concepts/ideas that go together with the perceptions. Let's consider the perception of yellow. The color sensation itself can be experienced together with a
thought that attached the concept of yellow to the perception. The perception can come and go, there can be many yellow perceptions at once but in all cases it is possible to experience
the same concept of yellow in relation to them. At this stage we don't know what this yellow perception represents - could be optical, could be imagined, could be hallucinated. There's nothing in the perception itself to immediately reveal anything about its origins. We encounter is as pure experiences of color. The idea of a hidden world behind the perception can only come later when additional concepts and ideas are connected to it through
thinking.
The goal of this exercise is exactly to distinguish what is truly given as a hard fact of experience and what is only later added through thinking about the given.
So within the totality of experience we find perceptions, feelings, will, thoughts, concepts, ideas. All this is given as an amalgamation of experience. Everything moves and shifts. How do we make sense of all this? Where do we start? Is there anything stable within the given that we can anchor the experience to?
SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Tue Jan 19, 2021 7:51 pm
This is how The Given, the Source, The Creative Nothing becomes and flows, in its nominal fake-belief substance of as-if-existence.
This sounds beautiful but do we really find it in the given? Is it really something we find confronting us as a fact or is it something that we attain to only later? What is the Source? What is the Creative Nothing? Is it a perception, feeling, thought, idea that we find within the
given? If it's not part of the initial given, can we describe a path that leads us from the given to the reality of these ideas?