Morning Marsha
Speaking of "seeing through", I can't see much through this fog we have here
today. Let's hope it's not indicative of a mental fog as well.
Here I could go on for a very long time. I am suggesting that humans
have really no access to the phenomenal external world. (Unless of
course you are a Buddha.) If you have a direct experience of an
external world, the moment you add a word or image to the experience, it
overlayed with pattern. And that would be conceptual pattern.
I agree that an experience gets conceptualized as soon as you attach a word to
it, but that does *not* mean we have no access to the phenomenal world!
What the Buddha, or anyone meditating, is doing is to try to access as much
dynamic intellectual experiences as possible. It may seem that if you access
dynamic *intellectual* patterns, it's easier to conceptualize them because they
are already concepts to begin with. But the fact is, as you conceptualize any
pattern, intellectual or other, the dynamic aspect is removed and that's the
important part. The dynamic aspect is what gives liveness, real-time and cutting
edge to the experience. All those things are gone after conceptualizing.
But what I'm trying to say is that if you acknowledge that the Buddha has access
to a phenomenal world, then you should also acknowledge that everyone else has
access to it. Perhaps it's not very common for people to have dynamic
intellectual experiences, eureka-moments or whatever you want to call them. But
we do have other types of inorganic, biological and social experiences every
single second of every single day.
When you say that all those experiences are conceptual, you're referring to our
internal, second hand, intellectual conceptualizations of those experiences. You
do not refer to the experiences themselves. A concept, being an intellectual
pattern, cannot *be* another type of pattern, it can only *represent* it via a
language.
The elephant in your mind is conceptual. Any speculation you do for
that elephant is conceptual. The minute you attach a word or image to
your experience of elephant it is conceptual. All your methods to
recognize an elephant is conceptual. All that you know about elephant
behavior is conceptual. Have you ever directly experienced an elephant
without your thoughts and images? Have you ever directly experienced
the moon without your thoughts and images?
Nothing wrong with concepts. But they are not direct experience of a
phenomenal world.
I think you're headed toward Descartes "I think, therefore I am", aren't you?
Since all you can really know is conceptual, everything else might just be your
imagination.
But I think the MoQ has something to say about that. Since concept are
intellectual patterns, and intellectual patterns are dependent on all lower
levels, it *proves* that the underlying patterns are just as real as the
intellectual concepts that we do know to be real.
No, conceptual experiences are real too, empirically real,
conventionally real. A real that is dependent on ever-changing,
collections of overlapping, interrelated, inorganic, biological,
social and intellectual, static patterns of value.
Be careful with that slogan. You know it doesn't mean anything if you
can't connect it to a coherent model of reality.
It might not be the conventional model of reality, but it's the model
I'm working with. How is it incoherent?
As I wrote 2 days ago:
Yes, I agree it's a better description, but I'm a bit burnt by how people
usually follow that description to its conclusion. The problem usually starts as
they start dissecting which different types of patterns there are, and if those
types are, as the thread name states, discrete and dependent. The end result is
often that the levels are neither discrete nor very dependent and on top of that
they are also degraded to a "convenient" division of reality but with no real
connection to it. At this point, the original statement about "interdependent
patterns" are long forgotten and no second thought is given to the fact that the
removal of discreteness, dependency and realness have perverted the original
sound statement into a very flat and incoherent slogan.
I think I need to declare a disclaimer. I'm just working with what I
have at the moment. I make very definitive statements, but for sure I'm
thinking, playing, testing & etc. I'm not a trained scientist, but
doing my best see if this hangs together, and where it might lead next.
That goes for me as well. I might have a slightly longer time horizon, but I'm
here to test my theories and see if anyone can refute them.
Magnus
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