Time, Narratives, Control and Configuration

Narratives, although not necessarily conscious, are what configure experience. Experience is vectorial*, i.e., experience is selflessly directed movement from the past aimed toward a future in the present. 

All three times are alive and conscious, configured by the past and intentional, i.e., structurally directed toward a possible future. In other words, experience--even what we may believe "happens to us"--is structured by fundamental beliefs about what is (the past) and what we will do (the future) with what is. In this sense, experience, as such, is a vectorial configuration constituted by past acts that anticipate or intend a possible future. This aim toward a possible or imagined future is as central to the configuration of experience as the past. In the oft repeated words of the Buddha, "Karma/kamma (action) is intention (cetana)". Thus, both past and future configure present experience in view of present conditions.

Present conditions are configured by the sensorium, covert cognitive and proprioceptive** processes that are, more often than not, covert or latent. Conscious thought plays somewhat of a superficial narrative role as our "consciousness of" an objective reality--the only kind we can be conscious of. However, that objective reality has become what it is via those covert processes of cognition, sensorial activity, and proprioception. These processes not only result in thought processes but also provide three general types of "feeling" (Pali: vedana), pleasurable, undesirable, or indifferent. Remarkably, there is no independently existing objective realm which is "worked on" by the three inner organs mentioned above, i.e., the sensorium, covert cognition, and proprioceptive--and our positing these is merely a tentative gesture at best.***  The only objectivity that is perceived to be independent is through the consciousness of and this is the result of a set of unspoken and unjustified assumptions. Reality, as the great Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset has stated, is "...what we do with what there is." In our sense of the term reality is experience. Since experience is fundamentally ephemeral it does it an injustice to attempt to freeze it and reduce it to the image of thought, something that began for Western Civilization, to impose a convenient start to it, with the great Parmenides who told us that "thought is the way to Being." So, reality for him, must be like thought and thought freezes and reduces movement to frames, pictures, and unicorns. To paraphrase Ortega, "Whoever guaranteed that "thought reflects reality?" Pragmatic results do not justify the hidden and mostly unquestioned materialist metaphysics. To be continued... 









*For a definition of "vectorial" see:  https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vectorial

** For "proprioceptive" see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception

***You might even say, with some hesitation, that the positing is a conciliatory gesture to our brothers and sisters steeped in physicalism.