I wanted to write a brief note about our practice during the phone call today.\u00c2\u00a0 I found it difficult to ‘identify’ any moment that I could describe as an example of ‘polar knowledge,’ and wondered if the notion is more of a theoretical one than a phenomenological one.\u00c2\u00a0 Looking around the room, I could disengage labeling, but the room still remained a recognizable, ordered space of objects — similar to what Hayward, I believe, described.\u00c2\u00a0 I could see that, while I wasn’t actively labeling (I could distinguish when labeling came in, and when it wasn’t active), there was still already a ‘structuring’ of experience, which I reasoned would connect, perhaps at an unconscious level, to previous ‘patternings’ and ‘learnings’ or ‘conditionings’ that are more complex than the ‘polar structure’ we were investigating.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, noticing this, I tried an experiment — I closed my eyes and just attended to sounds for a moment, disengaging my connection to the vision, and then tried suddenly opening my eyes, to maybe ‘catch’ a moment before the room had been ordered into a recognizable (conditioned) shape.\u00c2\u00a0 A ‘raw sense’ moment.\u00c2\u00a0 But I don’t think I really touched such a moment, not in a way that I could recognize.\u00c2\u00a0 I realized that even ‘recognizing’ a moment of so-called ‘polar knowledge’ would actually already be descriptive knowledge in action.<\/p>\n
A real koan, this one.<\/p>\n
Bruce<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I wanted to write a brief note about our practice during the phone call today.\u00c2\u00a0 I found it difficult to ‘identify’ any moment that I could describe as an example of ‘polar knowledge,’ and wondered if the notion is more … Continue reading