Chapter 15 is very clear, even if it takes close reading, so I don’t think I need to see much about the contents. Instead, I want to highlight a point about our method in this program (and in TSK in general) The questions in this chapter are theoretical, but the point is not to present some interesting no theory, or to challenge existing theories and leave it at that. The point is to offer a way of tuning in to your own experience.
First you have to take the questions that are being raised seriously. (For instance, what it means to talk about a first moment of experience. This applies not only to the first moment of time–the origin of the universe–but the first moment of a new thought or experience, for instance if you have been walking down the street and you start to think of you mother. So you start by identifying this kind of moment. Then you let go of the conceptual question, in the sense that you don’t try to come up with an answer. Instead, you continue to be aware of your experience, and that awareness is shaped in part by your appreciation for the question that has been raised.
A good example is the first paragraph on p. 125. Can we do this inquiry? The text says the questions raised are not accessible to “direct investigation.” Then how can we investigate them? By letting them blend into our inquiry, our openness to what we are experiencing. Then new experiences will come. By the way, compare the last full sentence on p. 125 to the questions I was raising about Ex. 14 last week.
Now, we are not very good at this integration of analytic questions with experience, because we have been trained to think of analytic arguments as something cut off from experience. That is precisely one of the difficulties people have with TSK. So here is a good chance to overcome that difficulty, instead of perpetuating it. It’s really a sad part of our educational system, because it leaves us with head-people who don’t know how to connect to their experience and experience-hounds who feel anxious when they are told they have to think things through. Ah well.
If you want a refresher on “descriptive knowledge” see pp. 104-105.
As for exercises, I want to suggest a change. It seems to me that to make the transition from LOK Ex. 14 to LOK Ex. 23, we have to do LOK Ex. 22, as the book suggests. So stay with LOK Ex. 14 for this week, and integrate into it LOK Ex. 22.
Jack