Experience Knows Me

5 Responses to Experience Knows Me

1. Hayward says:

   December 6, 2008 at 8:17 am

   Bruce
   Thank you for the time and clarity you share.
   You ask how it is for me.
   It is becoming increasingly clear that experience is an expression of position or view point. On a useful but ordinary level it is clear that our mood, beliefs and assumptions constitute a lens that organize and conducts experience. It is therefore very useful to study exactly how the ordinary experience forms and come to recognize is merely a way of knowing and can be opened. For nothing can be supported or sustained except by knowing.

   However, I find it a leap of faith to posit an expressive ground that is inherently free manifesting in and as all appearance.

   Thanks for the time
   Hayward

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2. Louise says:

   December 5, 2008 at 9:01 am

   Space knows experience.
   Experience knows space.
   Therefore, clearly space & experience know each other.
   However, for me to know space & experience, will dropping the “experiencer” unlock perception for all that arises in the nameless formless intimacy that untimelessly awaits………..?

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3. Bruce says:

   December 5, 2008 at 8:38 am

   Hi, Hayward, yes, I hear you. I agree those are somewhat formulaic responses.

   The way I relate to this, is that I see TSK as a kind of poetry of experience, not a scientific body of propositional statements or empirically demonstrable “facts.” I see it asking us to expose the narratives of conventional experience and then experiment with others, seeing what shifts (experientially) for us in doing so. This “works” if we can discover the “givens” of conventional experience — notions like the self, the observer, substance, not to mention time, space, knowledge — to be more like stories than absolutely founded features of “reality in itself,” because then we are free to find other (possibly more fruitful or satisfying) ways to approach, relate to, and “organize” our world.

   How do you see this? I think we DO run into trouble if we take TSK to be similar to a scientific enterprise dealing in, and delivering, hard empirical facts. I think it operates on a different level. But at the same time, it isn’t compelling if it can’t in some way undermine the absoluteness of a naturalist account, for instance, even while also leaving its general features intact — which is something I believe TSK does attempt to do.

   Best wishes,

   Bruce

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4. Hayward says:

   December 4, 2008 at 8:33 pm

   Hello Bruce, Thanks for your comments. I am familiar with these arguments, however, I am finding them formulaic and the alternatives they point to unfounded. Just because I can not identify an observer, does not mean one does not exist. The alternative explanations you offer above can not be observed any more easily than the “experiencer”. Where is the evidence of a transpersonal witness or a luminous space capable of communicating. It seems we maybe challenging a conventional view of “mind” and “self” (that can not be observed) by postulating Space Time and Knowlege (which likewise can not be observed). We are arguing that TSK appears as all ordinary appearances, that the Body of Knowlge is apparent as all appearances. This is so only because we say it is so. It is no more founded than us saying objects are perceived by the five senses and organized by an interpretive mind. We may be offering varying stories of how it is that self and world appear. But neither our conventional explanation, nor the alternatives can be found anywhere except in our saying.
   Hayward

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5. Bruce says:

   December 4, 2008 at 12:34 pm

   Hi, Hayward, what do you find when you look? Is there an ‘experiencer’ apart from experience? When I look, everything I find is more experience… Does this imply a transcendental witness, the eye that cannot see itself? That’s one approach. Or, with the unfindability of an experiencer apart from the field of experience, maybe one can simply say, “the observer is the observed” or “space is self-luminous.”

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