Experience and Desire: some thoughts

Experience may be viewed as a sentient, breath-driven, felt, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of historically (karmically) conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses. This movement is synchronously paired with correlative responses that manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances perceived as either fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses or desires. Therefore, intentions and their reciprocally generated circumstances form an experiential union wherein the drama of human life is played out as living. In this sense of the word reality, it may be used to denote experience as the evanescent movement of a karmic vector seeking the fulfillment of intentions. When these intentions meet with obstruction difficulty arises as suffering and new intentions arise seeking to remedy the suffering.


Often, the intentions, desires, are seen to be fulfilling and a kinesthetic movement of pleasure arises, more often not, sedimenting the drive to continue the feeling despite the evanescent or impermanent nature of all experience. This movement gives rise to further pleasure-seeking and difficulty-evading in a self-reinforcing and futile attempt to achieve a homeostasis of pleasure synonymous with the absence of difficulty—in a word, utopia. No such time nor place exists. Experience, in this sense of the term, admits to no such possibility.


This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest too quickly too be grasped by the reflective activity of the consciousness of and thus is all-too-often mistaken for an independent and objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills “my” intention eliciting pleasure or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven thereby reifying conceptual constitutions into worlds seemingly independent and constituted from their own side. The sedimentation process or embodied memory process aids in this movement contextualizing all actions within the frameworks of pleasure-seeking and avoidance. And so it goes, on and on and on and...until.*

If one takes language as in thought, speech, or text--or more accurately languaging—i.e., narratives, stories of, by, or about self if taken as fundamentally referential, one is bound to suffer. This is simply the way things are. Not a great realization, but a significant one.

Self-natured, self-laden, or self-ish narratives, of whatever sort, also are carriers of feelings. These feelings arise from a very subtle level below, a topic too early in our examination to unpack, into full bloom in the esophagus, throat, and head. Narratives dictate the precise configurations of these feelings and, if narratives become habitualized, as they are inclined to do (another important topic to be addressed in due time) their associated feelings also become habitualized and form an isomorphic relationship with the narratives that produced them.

Now, it is very important to note that the beginning of this process has far too many causes and conditions to be analyzed in great detail. In fact, there is no perceivable beginning of this process of habitualized self, narrative, feeling (SNF) as it reaches far back into history where it has caused great suffering--of course, as well as great accomplishments. However, we are concerned, not with accomplishments driven by SNF but with the alleviation of the suffering the movement of SNF often brings in its wake.

The SNF proliferation process, driven by beginningless intentions, i.e., desires, seeking satisfaction, and inevitably encountering obstacles to fulfillment in many instances will give rise to suffering unless--and wait for this--one surrenders to the indicative, the "what is." This surrender we will term acceptance-attention (AA). Acceptance-attention will be discussed at a later date.


*The "until" is discussed in the Dharma-Megha blogpost.

The Wisdom of Anxiety

Have you ever experienced anxiety? I have. It is a dreadful condition. Uneasiness does not even come close to describing it. It is terror itself. Is this dreadful feeling understood? Somewhat. Here is my take on it. It’s a kind of rambling reflection on self and contingency. See if it is of any help both if you get anxiety or know someone who has it and think this take on it may be of some help. (I have also included, in an endnote, a “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” reference on social anxiety that you may also find helpful. )

I’m going to say something that I have yet to hear regarding anxiety. The self is anxiety. From my observation, there is not one hair’s breadth of difference to be found between self and anxiety. Where else and when else is anxiety felt? Looking directly at anxiety, when it is occurring, you may notice this actual identity between self and the feeling. The self feels anxious, yes, but the self is not separate from the feeling. Okay, let’s take a closer look at these seemingly outlandish remarks.

Upon very close observation, you will note that anxiety arises. This is no small matter. Anything that arises in our awareness is contingent. What is meant by contingent? That which is contingent is that which is dependent. Anxiety is dependent on causes and conditions. Let us say that a series of thoughts carrying the notion self in situations arise saying something like “This is not going to work out well,” or “I will look foolish,” or “I am feeling uneasy,” or any other series of thought or mind-narration that places the self in some sort of insecure situation, frightening uneasiness, and the narratives seem to come so fast that the self that appears to be the victim of these feelings aroused by the narratives is anxious. See what was just said, the victim, the self, is anxious. That is, the victim, the self is itself the anxiety. Why? What gave rise to this self that is anxiety? Contingency! When contingency is recognized, i.e., when dependency on causes and conditions is seen so clearly that nothing is certain, anxiety may result. Naturally, this is a self in insecurity, anxious, even fearful of what may happen without knowing what it is that may or can happen. There are simply far too many causes and conditions to settle upon. Contingency is like a raging sea with waves so high and rough that no solidity is possible. We feel so uneasy that we may even die or worse. Anxiety is seeing what is. It is actually a clear insight into what is, the insecurity of a matrix of causes and conditions that is far to complex to count on, to rely upon, to settle the feeling. Anxiety is an awakened mind, a mind that sees clearly what is always the case. The movement of life is far too complex for narrative thinking to comprehend, despite the culture of reason that we have been conditioned to believe that we can and should be able to figure it all out. Actually, more of us should become aware of contingency for the notion that we have life “under control,” we “have it all together,” or even “I’m sure about what will happen,” are narratives in denial of contingency. Each moment of life is contingent but we here, especially in Western culture , have been conditioned to believe that we are the agents of our actions, the self is the supreme doer of all actions, and the self “should” be secure in a reasoned approach to living. This is nonsense. Actions are not done by a self, despite what we have been led to believe. Through anxiety one may find that freedom lies in a sort of abandonment of self, of self-aseity, so that the notion that we should “have it all together,” and be “self-assured” in our feelings and doings is not a governing narrative freeing us to rely more on the contingency, the matrix of living itself, rather than on a fiction. We can and need to let go and realize that we are not ever in control. There is no one to be in control because the very self that we are at any given moment is impermanent and contingent and not solid and real.

Look at all of the problems that have arisen in the last few centuries as a result of peoples’ feelings and acting on this notion that they know what’s best, they are intelligent, they know how we should be, and how things should be for the better. This is the hubris of the self. The self is a foundation of enmity, pride, boastfulness, arrogance, violence, antagonisms, and so many more human problems. Wars begin with self and end with death.

These are simply some reflections on anxiety that may prove somewhat helpful to begin your own research and practice to deal with the nature of anxiety. More of us should realize the wisdom of anxiety. 

We do not suffer from "clinging" but...

Keep in mind, these are notes. 

We do not suffer as a result of clinging in the sense that there is a self that clings to intentions, i.e., desire. Those habits of clinging, or better, the habits that are clinging generate and configure conventional experience carrying the narratives and accompanying feelings that are the self-sense. Do we really believe that we wish to cling to feelings of frustration when circumstances either obstruct our intentional path or cling to the pleasure that arises when there is an apparent fulfillment of desires so that in future the frustration noted here is also fostered? Do you really believe that we consciously enter into such a bargain with experience? 

At any given moment the self--as the movement of a circumstantially and meaningfully situated self-sense inclusive of narrative and feeling-motion (kinestheses)--fosters other narratives that again say an ephemeral sense of a self into existence along with its correlative ephemeral circumstance. This motion may carry on for some time instituting itself as a habit doomed to eventual difficulty. This is a feedback loop that moves along with such ephemeral rapidity that it mostly goes unattended. Once open and simple attention is pointed in its direction the process may collapse and a pregnant pause may ensue that may open a door to actually witness this elusive and often tragic program. We humans are mere programming. We do, however, have one ace in the hole, awareness. Awareness, whether we conceptualize it as consciousness or some other sort of reality, is of no consequence. It is simply a living and breathing movement of witnessing what is going on. It has little to say about itself, in fact, it says nothing about itself. It is what it is whatever that is. 


There are habits of clinging, or shall we say, habits the ephemeral movement of which are themselves the carriers of who, what, when, where, why, how, and so on and on and on.

Who is the Other?

One of the most important aspects of interpersonal relations that goes unsaid and unexamined, except in fields like academic philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, and several more is the field of "intersubjectivity." We will, in the very near future, explore this topic from our vantage point and see the role an effective understanding of intersubjectivity may play in our effort to reduce or even eliminate some of life's difficulties.

What I hope to accomplish here is to create an exercise that opens us up to an envisioning of the other, sentient or not, that becomes grounded in the knowledge that it is our karma and consciousness that generate all experience. The following paragraph is a preliminary statement of what may become revealed through the performance of the exercise.

It is on the basis of our own sentience that otherness is constituted. In union with sentience, accumulated prior actions (karma) give rise to all the structures, contents, and meanings that constitute experience. The stream of sentience that flows from past to future in the evanescent present animates the bodies and worlds in which living feels, moves, and breathes. Like form and color, sentience and karma must be known as both unified and distinct. The mind that realizes this conscious momentum as living may be one wherein suffering can be attenuated. 

"What is going on here?" This is a question...update and edit

What is Going On?

       “What, me worry?”

                       --Alfred E. Newman

There are times when we do not recognize that we are worrying. You might even say that we are the worrying when we don't take note of it. We even say "I am worried" in a fully incarnate identification with worry. We simply do not notice that worrying is the case. In a manner of speaking, worrying is what is going on, i.e., worrying is the experience or that which is the case. But noticing that worrying is or more accurately was going on could become the experience thus displacing the former occupant, the worrying. Noticing that worrying is the case is not worrying. It is seeing that worrying was the case. A space between the thoughts that were the worrying and noticing that worrying was occurring is also a temporal distance from the worrying, making the worrying an object, the past, and not the subject, the present. The worrier is now objectified and hence rendered, hopefully for more than a brief moment, a corpse.  A new subject or self is born that is--even if it is just for a split-second--an observant self that sees the former worrying. The worrying is now an object. The noticing always takes place in the present rendering the former moment spatially and temporally distant--a thing of the past. This, in Yogic and Buddhist circles, is what is termed "recollection" or "remembering," more often termed "mindfulness." (The Sanskrit word is smrti the Pali word is sati.) More to come…

"Faith is taking the step, even when you don't see the whole staircase."

On Faith

The above quotation, by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., happens to be an extremely effective perspective through which we may learn to relax and perhaps enjoy, at times, the movement of experience. All action, or karma, may be seen to imply faith. What Dr. King said is deeply profound and yet simple--once a basic understanding of the way in which experience moves and the manner in which experience is generated.

Action as karma, according to the Buddha is intentional. Karma, action in the Buddha's and now our sense of the term, aims toward the future in the present. Action is always about something--as the phenomenologists say--i.e., it is intentional. Often, this future is unspoken and even unconscious--like walking down a flight of stairs. No matter whether the act is one of body, speech, or mind action is not possible without faith. The question now becomes, "What is faith?" Or, as Wittgenstein advised, let's determine how we are using the word faith. A discussion of faith is one of our exercises that aims toward the alleviation of suffering. Let's give this some thought to bring faith to life in our everyday, i.e., profound, experience. Let's look directly at experience and determine if making our reliance on faith a truism is helpful in our quest to minimize our suffering.

I just stated that faith is something to be relied on. Yes, indeed it is. At first glance, this sounds quite absurd. Isn’t faith the act of reliance itself? Recall that we rely on the staircase being there for the fulfillment of our intention to ascend or descend a staircase. More often than not, we simply act in the faith of the stairs’ presence, as we say, “unconsciously.” In short order, we may find that our definition of what is conscious and what is not calls for some revision. (Remember, from some of our prior blog entries, it’s all about the narratives.) Is our reliance, our faith, on or in the presence of the remaining stairs conscious or unconscious? What do you think? Often, as when we know that a staircase is in need of repair, we may be quite conscious of the stairs above or below us; it may imply danger to ascend or descend. But what about in more normal conditions? The remaining stairs in our movement forward--and this applies across the board to mostly all actions--are not necessarily brought to consciousness, or thematically known, as they may simply be there for us in a modality of faith-full knowledge or a consciousness that is faith itself. The wonderful Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset said that this type of consciousness might be called “the consciousness I (we) count on." We simply count on the stairs being there for our next step. But is consciousness or awareness present? It would seem that I am pressed to say “Yes, definitely." If we somehow lost consciousness regarding the remaining stairs we would cease to move forward. Yet, we do not normally apply the word consciousness to this kind of knowing. We do not often use the word in the sense of it operating at a more or less subliminal level. However, I think we would not want to admit that we lack consciousness of the remaining stairs but we must expand our usage of the word. I doubt that we would wish to say that our ascent or descent does not involve consciousness. So, let us use consciousness in a more inclusive sense to help us to realize that consciousness is not exclusive to thinking, or if you like, conscious thought, thematic thinking, or even so-called representational thinking. Now, having said that, we must move to this expanded use of the word consciousness.

Experience, History, and Embodiment: Meaning and Impermanence

Experience, i.e., reality, may be viewed as an evanescent, sentient, breath-driven, felt, incarnate, vectorial, and recursive impulse of historically (karmically) conditioned intentions accompanied by a multiplicity of self-senses. This vectorial or intentional movement is synchronously paired with correlative responses that manifest as their ephemeral and complementary meaning-laden circumstances perceived as either fulfilling or obstructing those intentional impulses or desires. Therefore, intentions and their reciprocally generated ephemeral circumstances form an experiential union wherein the drama of human life is played out in and as the process of living. In this sense of the word reality, it may be used to denote experience as the evanescent movement of a karmic (i.e. an historically sedimented) or intentionally constituted vector seeking the fulfillment of those intentions. When these intentions meet with obstruction, difficulty often arises as suffering and new intentions arise seeking to remedy the suffering--—and this is what we may refer to as conventional experience.

Often, the intentions are erroneously perceived as fulfilled and a movement of pleasurable feeling arises, more often not, sedimenting the drive to continue the feeling despite the evanescent or impermanent nature of these very feelings. This movement gives rise to further pleasure-seeking and difficulty-evading in a self-reinforcing and futile attempt to achieve a homeostasis of pleasure synonymous with the absence of difficulty—in a word, utopia. No such time nor place exists. Experience admits to no such possibility.

This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest far too quickly to be grasped by the reflective activity of a consciousness of, i.e., thought, and thus is all-too-often mistaken for an independently existing objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills my intention eliciting pleasure-feeling or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven. It is in the nature of intentions to be reductive meaning they cannot possibly anticipate all of the prevailing causes and conditions that will be brought to bear in the eliciting of circumstances that arise with respect to their execution. Unforeseen conditions, e.g., weather, traffic, resistance from other sentient beings, etc., may arise that obstruct fulfillment and if they don't obstruct those unforeseen conditions are largely left unmanifest.


This evanescent union of intention and circumstance becomes manifest too quickly too be grasped by the reflective activity of a consciousness of and thus the intention-generated and reciprocally elicited situation s are all-too-often mistaken for an independently objective reality that either stands with me and yields to and fulfills “my” intention eliciting pleasure or thwarts my intention arousing various levels of difficulty or suffering. Intentions are, in the main, pleasure- or avoidance-driven thereby reifying conceptual constitutions into worlds seemingly independent and constituted from their own side. The sedimentation process or memory aids in this movement contextualizing all actions within the frameworks of pleasure-seeking and avoidance. And so it goes, on and on and on and...until.

If one takes language as in thought, speech, text, or bodily acts or more accurately languaging—i.e., narratives, stories of, by, or about self if taken as fundamentally referential, one is bound to suffer. This is simply the way things are. Not a great realization, but a significant one.

Self-natured, self-laden, or self-ish narratives, of whatever sort, also are carriers of feelings. These feelings arise from a very subtle level below, a topic too early in our examination to unpack, into full bloom in the esophagus, throat, and head. Narratives dictate the precise configurations of these feelings and, if narratives become habitualized, as they are inclined to do (another important topic to be addressed in due time) their associated feelings also become habitualized and form an isomorphic relationship with the narratives that produced them.

Now, it is very important to note that the beginning of this process has far too many causes and conditions to be analyzed in great detail. In fact, there is no perceivable beginning of this process of habitualized self, narrative, feeling (SNF) as it reaches far back into history where it has caused great suffering as well as great accomplishments. However, we are concerned, not with accomplishments driven by SNF, but with the alleviation of the suffering the movement of SNF often brings in its wake.

The SNF proliferation process, driven by beginningless intentions, i.e., desires, seeking satisfaction, and inevitably encountering obstacles to fulfillment in many instances will give rise to suffering unless--and wait for this--one surrenders to the indicative, the "what is." This surrender we will term acceptance-attention (AA). More to come...