Use of the Words 𝙇𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜 and 𝘿𝙚𝙨𝙞𝙧𝙚

Experience may be viewed as a sentient, breath-driven, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses and responses that simultaneously manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses.
We may legitimately speak of this momentum as living and those intentional impulses as desires. This may be interpreted as the intentional desire-driven momentum of past acts incarnating as a vector: Experience, in use here, is the pregnant present expecting the perfect child of fulfillment in the ardently anticipated future—the only future that may be said to incarnate sentience. This present is not graspable, attainable, nor fulfilling. It is soaked with disappointment, patent or latent, from its roots, arousing vectorial maturity, i.e., anticipation, aiming toward inevitable failure. It is marked by difficulty, a lack of inherent essence of all its phenomena, and ephemerality. Phenomena arise and simultaneously dissolve according to the intentional drives marred by the lack of fulfillment of their expectations.
--Gene Kelly, 12/2018
“...desire is the primal seed of experience,….”
--Rg Veda 10.129.4

Our time is up. Let's be serious about our lives for others. What others are to you is what you are to them. Please be kind. Compassion is the wisdom-filled wish for the well being of all others. 

In constituting ourselves we constitute others; in the constitution others, we constitute ourselves. Be kind and practice it to the end. Our salvation consists in the realization that all otherness--despite the inculcation, sanctification, legitimization, and legislation of the belief in an independently existing reality--is, in fact, granted its very being and sentience through our life as lived. 

Some thoughts--So what is Consciousness and Its Friends?

First and foremost, consciousness is an illusion. Talk of sentience, consciousness, awareness, and phenomena are all words of utility. Words are utilities. These words--and, by the way, there are no words either--are used, as tools in our toolbox. They are the means by which we, in our naivete or expertise, attempt to point back to some fictitious purified form of experience in which we are said to find freedom or some liberation from suffering or difficulty. So, let us set our record straight and declare that all of the entries that appear on this (my) blog are, in this sense, a practice of convenience with little to no pretense of reflecting something we may call, much to our detriment, reality. 

In anticipation of some objections, I will attempt to clarify what I likely did not say. Our saying is just that, saying. Whenever thought is used indexically, i.e., to point to, it necessarily lies. It cannot tell what has already taken place or what truly is a case in the completeness of experience, another vaunted word that allegedly points to the living that supposedly grounds our use of indexicals. We might say that our knowledge--after biting that famous fruit of the tree--banished us from Eden.

Now, with utmost urgency and certainty, we must declare that the possibility of a reduction or minimization of our difficulties is available to us when we come to a recognition that experience is a structured and meaningful movement. Throughout this blog, we have been attempting to index this movement as time.    


As always, much more needs to be said...eventually...

A Dangerous Narrative: "I am looking for happiness."

One of our, call it "epistemic," mistakes is to attribute sentience to our sense of self. To ascribe sentience, as such, to any phenomenon is an error that continues to support the erroneous notions of free will, substantial self-nature, and a denial of the conditioned nature of all phenomena. Sentience--or awareness, or whatever the most apt metaphor one uses at the time--is a distinct non-phenomenon that is a necessary aspect of all experience. One would not be wrong in saying that sentience is pure subjectivity. 

Allow me to add, that this "understanding" demonstrates the simple, yet often difficult to realize, fact that no one gets free nor does anyone get enlightened. It is simply, but not obviously, a matter of a sort of recognition that awareness has never been, nor will it ever be identified with appearances (phenomena). As such, awareness is and what remains the actual freedom that we paradoxically search or yearn for. One might even say that freedom is what is already the case for awareness, or pure subjectivity, and is not and cannot be an attribute of a person. The search for personal happiness is grounded in a misunderstanding of Buddhist or, dare I say, "authentic" spiritual teachings/teachers. Personhood, or selfhood, is a phenomenal and as such an ephemeral appearance only. Like sound or a candle flame, the so-called self or person is merely an apparition. This ephemerality of self-appearance is, in its appearing disappearing. If one cultivates a watchfulness regarding this phenomenon, one may detect the distinct nature of consciousness and realize that "it" has always abided in freedom. The biographical narratives, so prevalent in our cultural-historical reservoir (alaya-vijnana), have a tendency to "hook" consciousness making it appear that sentience belongs to the narratives. So, if the narratives declare that one is unhappy, miserable, suffering illnesses, etc. then the process of identification with phenomena leads to "personal" suffering instead of distinguishing the sky-like nature of awareness from the narratives and, surprisingly, the pain we suffer. (Of course this latter usually requires great skill and yogic practices that most of us have not cultivated. However, there are some few gifted who realize this constitutionally.) The "take-away" for us average folks is "Beware of Biography."