a meditation on basic experience
What’s given is just experience. All further mental elaborations and divisions are the phenomena of the systematic development of basic experience.
Self-and-World, self-and-other, subject and object; they’re all the activity of awareness arising from basic experience, which itself has no discernible base. Nothing apparent can be that base since everything apparent has already been arranged according to the activity of consciousness.
This is just as true for what is termed the internal aspect of consciousness. The world is not a product of subjective consciousness! Neither is subjective consciousness a product of the objective world.
Viewing the relationship between mind and material world as dialectical is helpful in that it is practical. But even here, in viewing things dialectically there is an elaboration from basic experience according to the activity of developing consciousness.
In basic experience there is neither an ‘I’ nor a ‘you’, nor a ‘world’. There is neither inner nor outer. The consciousness of basic experience is not even the consciousness of psychology, nor is it therefore the unconscious- this latter being a subsequent division within the elaboration.
The consciousness of basic experience takes facts just as they are. In itself, it must be formless like space.
If we want a lumpy analogy for basic experience and the developing consciousness, we might think of how things appear to us in our ordinary understanding of the physical world. For there to be an encounter between ourselves and an object, there must first be a place where that encounter takes place. Things appear and are encountered in space. Basic experience is like space where objects appear. If we think of space as having something like an active force which allows objects to manifest within it, we can think of consciousness as the active force of basic experience, developing and presenting objects of consciousness or better, just facts. The original content is of facts internal to oneself before any distinction is made between internal and external.
Before a self arises in connection to the body, that is, before body and mind are split in the act of self-reflection, there is the place of basic experience and it’s activity of developing consciousness. In human consciousness, the basic experience develops as consciousness according to the particular structures of the human form, including the sense organs and the brain. It’s like this with all sentient beings.
This following is about as near to describing the true aspect of things as words, -and certainly my words- are ever likely going to get (or to put it in waffly terms - the systematic character of basic experience as a point where reality becomes self-aware)-
The objective field- presents a world where things transform from and as causes and conditions for other things in a great flux of activity and changing phenomena.
The subjective field- is an experience wherein presence emerges from absence.
Reality includes everything, so even our abstract human speculations are an ‘emergent’ feature of reality. But to get to the radical root, or to pierce as close as possible to the active pivot of reality we must pare the elaborations of consciousness back to the basic experience which is there as our foundation. Here reality is active and appears as a formless place from which forms arise, or to put it in a more earthy material format (using David Hinton’s translation of Chan/Zen and Daoist terminology) reality is a sort of ontological tissue or generative membrane prior to the separation of our selves and the world. A singular active, living fabric – all potent – a mysterious abyss which transforms into forms and back into it’s formlessness.
Look at your own consciousness- at your creative ability, at imagination, at dreams- and see how such a miraculous process where things appear out of nothing and disappear again is not at all an impossible process. It is in fact a basic characteristic of reality-process as an entirety. It is the character of the basic experience of reality.