Did you ever...

When thoughtfully, i.e., no thought, observing the nature of an accidental spill or dropping something, did you ever focus on it from the point of view of surprise? We are generally surprised by accidents. Why? A simple answer would be, "We are surprised by accidents because we do not commit them. They are quite selfless; they lack agency. So, when an accident occurs, we feel a shock, a pause, a fear, and a range of other feelings that may occur. These feelings are, not to be silly, felt. We feel surprised. It feels somewhat uncomfortable, in less intense accidents, and often horrified by the more intense. These feelings are, for the most part, uncomfortable or worse. Our bodily feelings of surprise are a crack or fissure in what might be called the continuity of agency. We feel and often think that we are simply sailing along, performing actions as the doer until something, often the surprise of accidents, interrupts that continuity. The shock occurs as an interruption or fissure in a seeming continuity. What happens? Well, what happens is the fissure awakens us to the fact that we are not the agents of our acts. We ride the current of the continuity of agency to the breaking point, the occurrence of an accident. Accidents interrupt life as we anticipate it. They may be seen as an opportunity to watch what happens as it happens. This may be termed the thoughtless observation "in" living.

On Thinking

There is no thinker of thoughts;

the thoughts think the thinker. 

More precisely,

there are no such things as thoughts.
Thoughts exist in theory only;
just like everything else. 
Narratives rule all
but the wise.

Freedom, Determinism, Free Will, and the Causa Sui: Karma

Introduction:


The doctrine of free will may, and very often does, exclude compassion through one of its common manifestations, blame. Some may protest, without free will how can we be said to make choices? We don't! It is prior acts (karma) that determine what arises in experience and it is karma that will change what arises in experience. We may call that the cultivation of merit (punya) or demerit (apunya). With the exclusion of free will, we can blame only the causes and conditions that constitute our histories, including our present circumstances, and therefore we place the blame where it belongs--in our ideas and beliefs, i.e., the fundamental presuppositions that constitute the latent powers of manifestation of experience. In a word, it is incarnate history that determines the nature of all experience, barring what some may call the experience of nirvana or the "freedom from experience."*

If we truly had a radical form of free will, that will would not be determined. It would be unconditioned by history or anything else. To be "free" means, in this sense of the word, to be free from all determinations. In this instance, a will can be free only if it is not conditioned at all. To be undetermined would, therefore, include being without any causal influence whatsoever. If there was such a thing as free will, it would be without any determinations. A will that is partially free would not be free. So, this kind of will would not be influenced by prior acts, nor would it be caused to exist. It would have to be uncaused and totally undetermined. If this will was "real," upon what would its decisions be based? If unconditioned, there would not be any conditioned views to draw upon because then the will would be conditioned by those views and hence conditioned itself. As Nietzsche pointed out, the notion of free will implies what is called a causa sui or "cause of itself."

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic, but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately,..., the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself....**

(This aseity is what was ascribed to the God of the Catholics. God is the cause of himself. Or, God contains, in some fashion, the cause of himself. He is the first cause of all else but He must be the cause of himself. This is Aristotle's "prime mover, or theos. This godlike Being is the thought that thinks itself. Well, we may take that a bit differently, as we shall see below. The subject is the thought that thinks itself. The I is in the thought. The thoughts think the thinker.)

We are now left with the problem of accounting for what is euphemistically called "choice." The notion of choice has been a plagued narrative element since its inception. There is no doubt that we experience making decisions. I don't think most of us would argue that. However, most of us do not often focus on the process of decision making. We simply take it for granted, i.e., we rarely observe the process closely. Let's begin with thinking in general. When carefully observed, thought arises without effort--often to our detriment. The manifestation of thought occurs without someone, a thinker, there to generate the thoughts. If there were a thinker of thoughts, it would involve us in a logical and, I hasten to add, an experiential impossibility. If there was a thinker of thoughts, that thinker would have to be separate from the thoughts that arise. That would, of necessity, imply that a choice of the thought to be thought is being made. The thinker would choose what thought to think. This involves us in what is called an infinite regress. If a thinker chooses what thought to think, the thinker must--of necessity--have already thought it. Now, if the thinker has already thought it, what need would there be to think it again? And, if the thinker has already thought it, there must be a thinker "behind" that thinker choosing the initial thought the first thinker thought, and so on. This leads to an infinite regress of thinkers, choices, and thoughts. I trust you see the problem.
If there is no thinker of thoughts, then what leads to the distinct impression that we think our thoughts. My answer is feelings! We feel the thinking process thus granting a sense that I, in this instance my body, is doing the thinking. My feelings, being distinct from thoughts and being identified as "me," provide a felt basis for the impression that I (as my body-feelings) am doing the thinking. In this manner, we are identified with both feelings and the cognitive content of the perception or cognition. This is usually apparent only in a condition of quiet watchfulness; it is a serene form of consciousness.

Now, you may be asking yourself what chooses the particular responses to various circumstances, or what "decides" on what thoughts or feelings to manifest. Well, the easy answer is association. In meeting our "almost" novel circumstances in each moment, we only know what there is and what to do because of the presence of the past. Our prior knowledge, our karmic history, is on reserve. The familiar is only so in relation to the past. This past is further elaborated in the movement of thought toward action infused with knowledge. The present acts move based on an incarnate history toward an as of yet incarnate future. The future is always an "as of yet." That is the nature of our living future. The future in this sense is not a future fantasized. This future is a living future toward which we live in immediacy. The present in this sense incarnates the three moments of time, the past, present, and future. They arise interdependently. One does not exist without the others. The important point here is that these three moments, being interdependent, are infused with meaning: objectivity or form, feeling, perception, vectorial formations, and consciousness. (What the Buddha called the skandhas/khandhas, "heap," "muckle") This is one form of analysis that brings some completion to our reflective understanding of experience. Subjectivity is configured by the co-occurrence of these constituents of all experience. Subjectivity is always a meaningful subjectivity. Of course, some may say, there is the possibility of a minimal subjectivity without attendant meaning (Zahavi). We must hasten to add that this minimal subjectivity is infused with its correlative notion of being as in "I am." There is no sense of self that is naked. There is, however, the minimal subjectivity of the I am--still laden with the notion of meaningful being.
Now, if subjectivity is always a meaningful subjectivity, then it is not a pure subjectivity but an intersubjectivity. We share a common language, common meanings, common perceptions and so on. If subjectivity is a historical and social construct, we are of "one mind." There is, in this sense, a universal mind or "collective mind." If subjectivity is drawn from a historical repository, as "I" must be to function in the "world," the familiar, i.e., in experience, (For the lived world is always and only experience.) subjectivity must be intersubjectivity. We are, in this sense, inherently communal. Experience is drawn and projected from a communal well of past acts of body, speech, and mind--our karma. No human is an island. Our living is simultaneously a sharing.

Desperately needs some editing, but I hope it leads you in the right direction. I will entertain questions in the meantime.





*This is something of a difficult statement that I hope to explain in greater detail. I'm sorry for the momentary inconvenience.
**Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good And Evil: Part I - Aphorism # 21 (Philosophy Quote)". 2017. A Contemporary Nietzsche Reader. Accessed August 3, 2017. http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/beyond-good-and-evil/aphorism-21-quote_55f5c2e62.html.

Staring...

Washing dishes, 

with no one to talk to,

my Buddha dog looks on.

Q & A

An appropriate answer to the question, "Are you happy?" is "When?" 

A Few Words on Intersubjectivity

Intersubjectivity is, in many areas of philosophy, cognitive science, the social sciences, and perhaps most prominently in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind a very important topic  So, let's add our contribution.

What is intersubjectivity? The answer is not a simple one. My immediate response is, "It all depends on how we are using the word." So, in our desire to be considerate to the readership, we'll attempt a working definition. Of course, all definitions are laden with the history of prior usages of the term and the agendas that infuse the term with meaning. We must attempt to be careful when defining any important term, and all terms may be considered important given our intentions. It is the plurality of usages and intentions (agendas) that provide terms with meanings. In our desire to open a clear path for our readers, we offer this usage: Intersubjectivity is the realization of both the implicit and explicit movement of otherness within our experience. The rest of this brief essay will attempt to unpack that definition.

More on the way...

Usefulness of "Consciousness"

Let us employ the language of consciousness* (awareness) in an attempt to surpass the limits of its ordinary or more common usages and provide the term with some helpful additional roles.

We begin with a claim: Consciousness is not exhausted or limited by thought.

This may sound odd to many who are used to employing consciousness in the rather limited sense of being aware of something. Again, our aim is to enrich the term with another possible usage that may prove valuable for generating an opening to a more full or complete path to experience. So, one might say that this may provide some valuable aids to one's understanding facilitating a more complete realization of the breadth of human experience. Now, let's begin our exercise.

What we are about to say has been said before. In fact, it is one of the major themes in many religious and philosophical traditions. However, the route we shall be taking is a bit different. Our use of the term is meant to open us to a different way of looking, a looking with insight. When one exercises the proper focus, what is revealed may help lead us to a life with less suffering and correlatively a more inclusive openness to experience. That is the intention of this exercise.

We begin with an exercise in perception. I'm sitting at a table with my wife having coffee. It is morning and the birds are chirping. Suddenly, I hear a most unusual bird song while my wife is speaking to me. For a moment, the bird song steals my attention from what my wife is saying. She appears to be very intent on explaining something to me while the bird is singing. Then, she finishes what she has to say and I ask: "Did you hear that unusual bird song?" She pauses and then says yes. I ask: "Were you conscious of it while you were speaking to me?" She says "no, but I did hear it." "How, I ask." She says: "I don't know." I respond: " So, you were not conscious of it, but you somehow heard it." She responds, "yes." Our question is, how is that possible?

Well, this is where it becomes interesting. We often reduce our experience to what we become conscious of. However, what we become conscious of--as in our brief example--is not all there is to experience. An ambient consciousness is at work here. This is a consciousness so subtle, at least for most of us, that we miss paying attention to it. Our habits of perception obscure it. Our culture has been hell bent on claiming that all there is to consciousness is consciousness of something, i.e., intentional consciousness. However, what we may surmise from our example is that another more expansive consciousness is at work. This consciousness is not only a cognitive experience but additionally, it is a felt consciousness. If we have read some of my prior posts in this blog, you may have come across what I am about to say now. All experience, by definition, must take place in the body, i.e., in felt experience. The source of all experience, perceptual and cognitive, takes place in feelings, the body. By feelings, I do not mean emotions. It is in the ambient consciousness, a fully embodied consciousness, that the bird song took place. One may characterize this view as one of corporeal panpsychism. It did not take place consciously, as we are prone to say, but it did take place in what some cognitive scientists refer to as a cognitive unconscious. However, in our exposition, we must add, with haste, that the experience is not limited to an unconscious cognition; it is a felt awareness. This is a most subtle form of knowing that permeates all experience. This permutation prods some writers to add an additional metaphysical element to their exposition. You see, some of us are still echoing the voices of a naive realism, one that states the "world" is independently objective, i.e., independent of our consciousness of it. The things of this world attract our attention and we simply become conscious of them. However, and this deserves repetition, this is not all there is. So, in this sense, they posit consciousness as the ultimate reality, a substrate reality, or a universal consciousness--one that pervades all things. In our experience based view, consciousness is a term that we may find useful in exploring and augmenting our experience with an intimate and often blissful, felt dimension.

Through the cultivation of a skillful attentiveness to the ambient consciousness, it may begin to yield a fuller and more subtle dimension of feelings. We may refer to this as the process of surrendering to what is occurring in our experience without judgment or, most importantly, without any self-natured investment expressed as craving. This craving short changes our experience to the point wherein experience is poverty stricken. There is, ultimately, no satisfaction to be gained by this type of exclusivity of consciousness. The reduction of experience to the consciousness of does not exhaust experience. Experience is far too rich for that. But, the exclusionary form of consciousness of conceals experience; it is laden with non-virtuous cognitive activity, i.e., stories that are suffering itself. Actually, when this exclusionary consciousness is seen from the perspective of the ambient, embodied consciousness, instead of stories we have fables. Usually, these fables carry a strong notion of I-am-ness. There is nothing inherently wrong with the thinking and feelings of selfhood. However, when saturated with cravings, these processes are also laden with suffering. The fables with strong feelings of self of the non-virtuous type are themselves suffering and their correlate is ill feelings.

Please allow a cautionary note here. The use of the word "consciousness" here is not to be understood as an element that constitutes experience. I prefer to speak of awareness so as not to hint that a metaphysical reality may be made of "consciousness." No one experiences consciousness! I know that may sound odd or downright ridiculous. However, when burning your hand on the stove is felt, where the heck is consciousness? Think about it and watch your experience. You may find our view to be helpful in your future observations. Your keen observations may even lead to a reduction of the suffering we all share as human beings. That is my hope.




We plan on carrying this theme throughout our subsequent blog entries. If you find anything here at all relevant or interesting, please add your comments or questions to the blog. You may contact me at epkelly@gmail.com.





*Probably a loan-translation of Greek syneidesis, literally "with-knowledge."

"Online Etymology Dictionary". 2017. Etymonline.Com. Accessed July 5, 2017. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=conscience&allowed_in_frame=0.