UnbornTao

What, in our encounter with something, isn't a conceptual or mental activity of ours? For example, when you speak of 'experience', we can distinguish between activities like interpretation, sense-making, and perhaps others. These wouldn't qualify as "direct experience." Say you dislike seafood--so whenever you think about or encounter any kind of seafood, your dislike, your emotional disposition, tends to arise as a single, vague experience, that is, we fail to make a distinction between our relationship with it and our activities and what could be said to be there for itself. What's actually there/here? And these distinctions have to be made experientially, not just intellectually, which makes it all the more challenging.

We really are starting to contemplate everything. Let's keep the focus on experience.

This is a story. The question is: What is experience? For example, in your experience right now, can you see that you encounter things? You see an object. And within this experience, you can, as if, subtract its name, value, use, which are activities done by you, and so might be called conceptual and are different in nature from a direct experience of the object itself.

I didn't include someone who perceives, by the way, but the act of perceiving. That relates to self which is not the topic at hand. "Perceives what?" Good question. In our experience we perceive things, so that's hard to deny. Whatever the senses provide is perceived -- what that is, I don't know. Seem to be more primal or primary than sensation. For example, sensing your body might be slightly different than perceiving it. That's the dilemma. We're asking what experience is, and from that, whether it precedes perception. We could question what the experience of Helen Keller would be like, who lost her sight and her hearing. That might point us in the right direction regarding experience. Perhaps that's the case, and we can have insight into its nature. Besides that, this is a tricky subject -- experience, perception, concept. Again, the point with this thread is mostly to promote contemplation. We could start by refining "perception", which is a mere sensory encounter through the senses. We need to work out this distinction in our experience. By taking a simple object and setting aside all our knowledge about it, we might have a more present and unvarnished encounter with it -- that might be called "perceiving the object."

Can you make a dent in the idea that something external - like achieving a significant goal, having circumstances go your way, or getting what you want - must happen in order to cause or justify happiness?

Manipulation deserves its own thread.

Nice, congratulations 👏

That's fine too, but I'd say eliminating everything we have about it builds a more real and present relationship to the matter.

I suggest you really pay attention to what you do with your mind--not in a mechanical, self-conscious or intellectual way, but in a present, aware, and sensitive manner. This is more of a general point.

As with enlightenment.

Jesus Christ, we sure hold a lot of BS about enlightenment.

That sounds like perception. Not sure whether to include that in the category of perception. It depends on what we're talking about and what kind of sensations we are referring to. Hey, another thing to investigate in a new thread. Feeling is more about the conceptually-produced activities we engage in, so we wouldn't find feeling within perception itself -- maybe not even in the "perception" of a feeling. So, we see we don't really know what experience is, experientially. Progress! To be clear, I'm not presuming that through this discussion we'll necessarily reach, at some point, 'the answer,' or a satisfying conclusion that will do the job for us. It's more like an invitation to open up and see where that leads us, hopefully to an insight.

Those are the questions to contemplate. What is there when our various mental activities (interpretation, association, memory, knowledge, and so on) are set aside? That might point at experiencing something for itself.

You point at interpretation, so setting that activity aside for the moment, we may be getting closer at a "mere" encounter of what's there, or perceived to be there.

@Anton Rogachevski When looking at your hand, extraneous activities to the mere encounter might start to become apparent, so we can see that within an apparently obvious experience, there's more going on with it than we initially thought.

What is experience? Not experience as skill or knowledge but the fact of experiencing. Not sure what you mean by your last sentence.

? So easy.

@BlessedLion The Gospel of Peter.

Hmmm, we might need to get back to the drawing board. Let's leave awareness for another time.

If we're considering experience in the usual fashion, then that is indirect -- a sensory encounter, or the process of making sense of that. You encounter something -- What is it that you're calling direct? We can know about something, identify it, like "that is a nice yellow shirt." We can know how it relates to us and what charge it has for us, yet I wouldn't call this direct but perhaps personal experience. Do we? Direct access as in direct consciousness. But I think we are starting to speculate too much. Let's keep it real. Seems to be more objective than a mere idea, I don't see why it has to entail a perceiver. It could be like the body functioning -- a function of biological life that occurs rather naturally on its own. A perceiving is pure and impersonal, as Wei Wu Wei said. Not at all. In my experience (), memory is incredibly biased and subjective. It is safe to say that it often is a complete misrepresentation of "what happened." The recording that you talk about sounds like a pipe dream -- we likely didn't even payed much attention to what actually happened. Concept is a much broader notion than a mere idea. It is not. A memory of playing football is not the experience of playing, since we've established that the experience it is referring to isn't happening now. It is a thought. Not aware of something but the fact of awareness itself. Regarding your second sentence, yes, it seems to be that way. It is tricky. It doesn't mean they're the same, though. Cheers!

We can understand the explanation in retrospect but imagine you are Newton prior to the discovery of that. --- "Principle", by GPT: 1. Beginning or starting point of something. Example: The beginning of the movie was very striking. 2. Fundamental basis or foundation of a system, theory, or process. Example: The principles of Euclidean geometry. 3. Moral rule or standard that guides behavior. Example: He acted according to his principles. 4. Cause or origin of something. Example: The principle of motion. --- From Latin principium, meaning “beginning, origin, foundation.” Derived from princeps (“first, foremost”), which is composed of: primus = first capere = to take or seize So principium literally means “that which is taken first,” pointing to what comes first in order, logic, or importance.

Not a bad definition, but it sounds like: balance is balance. Sounds good. This might be pointing at the "relationship" aspect. Clearly it doesn't happen in isolation but in how various elements interact with each other. You've been reading the Lankavatara Sutra?

@Anton Rogachevski You could be open to the possibility of direct access or knowledge. How do you see knowledge and experience? Why do you see them as the same? Would you say there are other kinds of knowing? What about perception and its relationship to experience? The memory itself is the story of something that happened. What's happening now is the activity called memory, which is conceptual. What the memory refers to, even though it may be thought of as a past experience, isn't an experience now. Notice the crucial point: we tend to live as if a memory is the same as the experience it is referring to! It is held as a re-experiencing, but it isn't. Well, different words are used for a reason. "I'm aware" is not exactly the same as "I experience." The wonder and inherent openness is the point of such questions. What is awareness may be a topic for another time.

Extraneous explanations may be valid but they aren't really necessary in this context. Principles constitute the "rules" of existence, so to speak. In this case, it simply means that objects fall downward in a fairly consistent way wherever the principle applies. This is your experience. To the extent that the principle is operative, "reality"--or some aspect of it--will function according to its demands. That was just an example of relative truth. Why would you care? Find out what's true for yourself, first of all. That alone is already difficult. It's not about fantasy--it's about what is, here and now. I'd add that seeking utility and seeking truth are entirely different pursuits, each with its own goals. Perhaps understanding principles would be more fruitful for the advancement of humanity. And consider this: the truth is unknown--and may even be useless. What if our search for utility blinds us to what's true?

A memory, say, may be experienced but it isn't an experience. Because, among other things, what it is referring to is not happening now, it is about a past event. In that sense, it could be called a concept, a story. Now, we may have found one component of experience: it is always occurring now. What about awareness?