Thoughts, in more-or-less compressed linguistic form, have this character too.  Most thoughts arise, and if pressed, we would claim agency: I thought that.  But thoughts can also be found to arise without agency.  Indeed, the first lesson learned in basic mindfulness training or in contemplative meditation is that thoughts arise and  flow in a stream without prompting, as if welling from a spring.  Did you ever have a thought that was incongruous?  One that expressed an opinion you are sure you do not hold?  One that voices an offensive or indefensible view?  The difference between the notionally bidden and the insistent unbidden thought lies not in their source, but in the attribution of agency: the sense of being the author or source of the thought. Once a thought is examined and subject to scrutiny, it becomes an object, as distinct as a cup.

Look now at the cup at your right hand (replace with any other familiar object in your immediate surround, if you don’t have a cup).  Prior to making the cup the immediate object of your attention, it was part of your environment.  We even say it was within your visual field, as if it were lurking with intent to strike your retina.  Before your attention, the cup is part of your world, and provides part of the background against which any attended object is perceived.  The cup, then, shares something with the melody and the thought: it can be the central focus of attention, in which case it pops out of the background field of the experienced world (or the world of experience) and is clearly an object.  But when it is not the focus of attention, it is part of the ground of the subject.  You can cast your attention all around and you will never find any such ground, for what you are doing is akin to looking for the darkness using a flashlight.

The buddhists regard thought as a sixth sense.  This is an eminently sensible point of view, and one that Western psychological science (hah!) would do well to attend to.  As attention roams over the field of the present, turning from cup to tune to thought, the world arises.  The persistent and perverse insistence that perception is the business of uncovering (within) a world (without) prevents us from taking this basic character of experience seriously.  The phenomenological tradition in continental philosophy should have helped here, but it has proved to be a linguistic swamp, one proponent more unintelligible than the last, as if experience required a new language.  Part of this stems from mistakenly clinging to the notion of the subject as an invariant persistent unity for whom experience arises.  William James (and many others) have more accurately pointed to the unity of subject and object in direct experience, and have managed to conduct the subsequent discussion in plain English.  Perhaps progress can be made, first by taking seriously the notion of thought as another “perceptual” modality, and secondly by attending to the fluctuating field of self and other that is the play of attention, in which elements of experience vacillate between self and other.

This seems to me to be a prerequisite to a phenomenologically informed psychiatry too.

By the same token, we repeatedly run into the identification of Samsara and Nirvana in Buddhism.  Nirvana here is not some hippy-like state of bliss, but a transcendent reality underlying the phenomenal appearance of the world, while samsara is that phenomenal appearance.  Unifying the two does violence to the modern sensibility, but it again emphasizes that that world arising in experience is not independent of the experiencer.  There is no external world presented to an internal cognizer.

One might fruitfully consider how these oppositions line up against Kant’s phenomena and noumena.

Finally (for now) we might note the observation of William James (1904):

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call
the `pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially
either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is
plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.
(James 1904, p. 23)

I am ignorant, and I will displease every reader who comes with some specialized knowledge of this or that subfield.  So be it.  The philosophy (if such it be) to be articulated here will begin with broad strokes.  The sources will be eclectic, and, given the territory, not all will appear authoritative.  But that is a positive.  If we speak with the backing of authority at all times, how can we meaningfully question the status quo and advance our understanding?  The themes to be developed here are given a rather more conventional treatment in my scientific work, and in less pious manner, in my hobby, masquerading as a church. This third avenue will not recapitulate those arguments, though I may lean upon them. Abbreviations after each source will be used as a shorthand way of referencing in subsequent posts.

Some of the sources I bounce off most frequently, and who will inform much of what I say are:

• Wei Wu Wei: Terrence Gray, aristocrat and scholar.  Perhaps a mystic.  His suite of 8 little books draws upon a coherent set of arguments from Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism (Especially Mahayana, Ch’an and Zen) and especially Taoism, bringing forth a common insight and articulating it in a modern idiom.  He lends himself to fatuous quotation, unfortunately, but his argumentation is rigorous and keenly analytical. (Abbr.: WWW)
• Indich, William M. (1980) Consciousness in Advaita Vedanta.  Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, Delhi.  Advaita Vedanta is a strongly analytical strand in Hindu thought that grapples with the articulation of a non-dualist cosmology.  Non-dualism will be a central theme to all that appears here, although what is meant by dualism (they are infinite!) is not perfectly clear at the outset. (Abbr: AV)
• The collected writings of William James.  James, the pragmatic philosopher and seminal psychologist, provides a hugely important reference point in the articulation of the enterprise of psychology.  The subject matter of psychology is, to this day, not clear.  James, in his philosophy of radical empiricism, insisted that psychology should start with, and never leave sight of, the domain of present experience – the lived world that later so infatuated the phenomenologists.  Unlike that sorry bunch, James could write well, and did not shy away from articulating deep thoughts in accessible language. (Abbr: WJ)
• Jinpa, Thupten (2002). Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy. RoutledgeCurzon, Oxon, UK. Jinpa, for many years the principal English translator to H.H. The Dalai Lama, shows how the 14th century scholar Tsongkhapa walked a fine line in interpreting Ngarjuna’s doctrine of the void, showing how Nagarjuna’s insights should not be misinterpreted to lead to nihilism, and how insight into the conditioned nature of the phenomenal should not usurp common-sense in dealing with the everyday world.  An early pragmatist, perhaps? (TJ)

Behavioral goals demand an observer to specify them. Sometimes we call this observer “context”.

We speak of this when we bristle:

What you looking at?

Nothing

Wu Wei is the absence of this need.

The lecture is here. Be entertained. Be very entertained.

Computers are introduced into the wild (a rather romantic notion). Slum kids (who?) in India are exposed to computers without the benefit of any further guidance. No adults. No instructions. In an experiment repeated several times now, they go through several predictable stages. Listen to the story for the details. Its a great project, and one I’d heard of long ago. Now, software is pure affordance. In software, whatever the hell we are can express itself most clearly. Honed by a thousand individual P/A systems, we can chart ourselves in the software. We learn that we need bookmarks. Marshall McLuhan would have loved this shit.

But the story that unfolds is telling. The ghastly society of the future that is depicted in several ways, is clearly seen to run on economics, and the people are seen to be complete dupes, believing the explanations of clever men and scientists, no matter where it leads them. The few dissenters, to our eyes, are marginalized cranks. The present upheavals have engendered a lot of well-placed distrust in very many people about the official corridors of power, about the basis for our economy, and many of us are asking ourselves what the entailments of our particular economic model really are. Faced with the problem of redesigning a financial system, or an economy, from scratch, we have to ask ourselves, what is our “slavery”? Where have we gone wrong. If we defined things differently, how would money flow? Mankind is resettling. The present elephant in the living room seems to be poverty, and economic imbalance. When things get this upset and unstable, fundamental questions are asked. Our response now must be to admit the injustice of the former system. and improve upon it in a globally inclusive manner. A project worthy of the PMF indeed…