The older I get, the more I seem to be drawn to the aesthetics of natural phenomena, especially of wild places. I like using scenery and location as metaphor. Of course, one can really only claim to be using metaphor if one knows what one is using it to describe in the first place. And I can’t. I’m not enlightened. This following is just a creative meditation, an exercise (an indulgence?). It’s not even very, if at all, original. I just encountered the term (and some lovely images of) ‘vernal pool’ when following an interest in an ecological matter online. It’s such an evocative term, I really wanted to use it (and the images it evokes).
And so, the meditation;
‘An ‘abstract’ is not necessarily a ‘pure’ speculation or entity produced through imaginative fabrication in the mind. Discernment/discrimination/identification of a particular thing is also abstract; I look, and from the total background appearing through the senses, pick out this coffee cup. I cognitively abstract, identify, reify, and act upon this generated information (as in say, pour some coffee) . That cognitive activity is of a level of abstraction. Schopenhauer, perhaps influenced by Buddhism’s analysis of the human experience into 5 aspects (skandhas) distinguished perception from the pre-cognitive sensing of bare sense-data. In this he departed from Kant, for whom perception of phenomenal objects was direct for presentation to the understanding. For Schopenhauer, ‘perception’ already involved a cognitive act.
“I see this coffee cup” is already an abstract. Before laminating the basic experience with an “I” that sees and an abstracted particular- “this coffee cup” -that is seen, there is the activity of sensing, which furnishes sense-data- basic appearance- in the form of a subject-object paradigm to awareness. Before even this basic bifurcation, there is that which is active at the ground of awareness and which therefore is neither objective nor subjective, nor apart from the entire situation1. It could be called unconscious activity, but by doing so, it is itself objectified, abstracted, discriminated and named.
Like a vernal pool which appears when the conditions are right, only to vanish when they are not is this self that objectifies perceives, discriminates, abstracts, identifies and clings to the apparition of a substantial ego. That which is always present is neither the changing conditions, nor the ephemeral pool, nor is it apart from them. That is the paradox of constancy and perpetual change’
As Nishida Kitaro puts it “subjective consciousness and the objective world are the same thing, viewed from different angles so that there is only one fact….. the self and the universe share the same foundation; or rather they are the same thing..