“There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering that leads to more suffering and the suffering that leads to the end of suffering. If you are not willing to face the second kind of suffering, you will surely continue to experience the first.”
                                                                                                                                     --Ajahn Chah

On the Dangers of the Reification of the Process of Attention

A Simple Introduction

A wonderful lesson I took in my early years in college was from one of Ortega y Gasset's* works. It involved the following (crudely) paraphrased example. He asked what the color white was and to what we might apply it knowing full well that many whites existed and we apply the word white to all of them. So, which was the real white? He drew the distinction between the variety of whites we experience and the ideal or concept white we think. While, as far as I can recall, he never applied it to the concept of self; but his lesson in color also applies to the notion of self. We commonly use the words I, me, mine as if they applied in one or another sense to the same self. We also use names (nouns) as if they apply to a self-same person, place. or thing. These usages are fine as long as we have in mind the conventional nature of the application of the concept to the changing experience of what we conventionally call the thing. But, as we know, this is seldom if ever the case. We seldom, if ever, realize that the name is not adequate to the ever-changing experience we have of what we believe the name to refer to. Take the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus's well-known example (and warning), "It is impossible to step twice into the same river." Now, while I have stated this rather simplistically, it works to point to ever more complex issues that often cause us a great deal of confusion and even suffering.


On the Dangers of the Reification of the Process of Attention (unedited but headed in the right direction)

If we are hellbent on using the term “consciousness” for discussions regarding our experience as sentient beings let us be acutely aware of our tendency to regard this term as a thing, entity, or object rather than an activity that lives, that is intensely alive and superbly ephemeral; it is an ephemeron.

All five factors--objectivity, feeling, perception, narratives, and consciousness--of the assemblages are ephemerons, they are alive and as such not things, not cadavers, not objects in a frozen landscape called the world. Experience is living; it is coming and going simultaneously. Birth and death are the movements of time, of experience. Freedom may be viewed as the evanescent awareness of assemblages in their synchroneity and revelation.

Craving is the arising of narratives of the death-rendering battle against impermanence.








*Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1886-1955, the great Spanish philosopher that I strongly recommend your attention to at some point in your life.    

This post takes the place of the deleted "Desire and Fulfillment..." post

On the Movement of Experience as Time

We may analyze experience into five basic factors that integrate to form assemblages: (intentional) objects, feelings, perceptions, narratives, and awareness.

The collusion of any them--past, present or future; internal or external; explicit or implicit; common or sublime--is here termed an assemblage.

Assemblages may be seen as an organization of the factors, i.e., both the structure and content of all conventional experience.

These assemblages, for most of us, function as the targets of craving, invariably accompanied by a self-sense.

The factor that organizes the others is narrative. Narrative organizes perception, consciousness (or awareness), objectivity, and feelings (body). Again, the organizations are here called assemblages.

Narratives are, in the linear sense, historically constituted. Their intentional structure and content are formed by a process of deposition, as in geological deposition, wherein the past shapes a present inclusive of circumstantial conditions that also lend to its intentional, future-oriented composition.

All narratives are vectorial. It is helpful to consider the depositional character of narratives as frames that are inclusive of each moment of present circumstances as well as all prior deposits also shaping that present moment as well. (More should and will be said of narratives but we will have to wait for more appropriate time and place--assemblages.)

Assemblages are temporal in two senses: 1.) the sense that they derive from the past in the present toward an intended future, i.e., they are vectorial; 2.) in the sense that they are ephemeral.

Assemblages are evanescent and, in conventional experience, attended by a self-sense, also evanescent.

An assemblage, when with its attendant self-sense, is a necessary condition for attachment, aversion, or indifference to arise. An assemblage is also a necessary condition for the various modalities of self-senses to arise in the forms of I, me, and mine. Identification with, relationship to, and possession of
the assemblages are the general forms of self-sense composition and manifestation.

A self-sense may be said to be the bearer of the craving-assemblages. They are concomitant, in all but a few cases, with dissatisfaction ranging from cravings for continuing pleasure, to aversion, indifference, stress, to extreme suffering--despite the evanescent nature of the self-sense.

This apparent continuity of the self-sense is due to the similar intentional content of the evanescent narratives organizing the factors providing cohesion.by association. This processual movement of similar self-sense bearing narratives is time itself.

Experience is time.*







*As always, the foregoing is subject to modification.