The Real Fundamentalism

Let's try to fundamentally describe what's really going on and what's really real: AKA reality2. I realize we've been down this hole recently, but it's a new day and therefore a new new.

I woke up this morning thinking about experience, which is at once so fundamental as to defy definition, but so central as to be the rabbit hole of rabbit holes. For it is literally the cosmic hole without which there are no holes. Am I wrong?! 

No, just a hole

Excuse me while I check out Big Oxford for an exact definition. But whatever it turns out to be, I’m sure it will be out of its element and unable to keep itself from assuming what it needs to explain. In other words, tautological. 

At any rate, this shouldn’t take long. There’s a lot here, but here's one: the sum total of the conscious events that make up an individual life.

Okay, now define conscious, event, individual, and life, which are almost equally fundamental. You need to be alive to have experiences, but what is life but experiences?

This one is still problematic but a bit more elemental and closer to what we’re looking for: something personally encountered, undergone, or lived through. There’s also a list of helpful synonyms such as undergo, sustain, and suffer, each of which, come to think of it, is first hand and first person. Remind me to come back to this, because it's important.

This also reminds me of the “passion” of Christ, which doesn't imply passion in the usual sense, but rather, something passively endured or submitted to -- being acted upon rather than acting. 

That’s enough of that. My point is that bestwecando with regard to getting at the essence of experience is to say that it is at once an “opening” and an “openness.” And like any opening, it has two sides, in this case, an exterior and an interior. 

Now, to say interiority is very nearly to say experience, or at least it’s impossible to conceive of one without the other. For to have an experience is to have it on the inside, in this world of subjectivity. 

Which is another word that is very difficult-if-not-impossible to dig beneath. It is at once a hole -- or the hole -- but also a kind of wall, in that we can never get at it without assuming it. It’s just there (or here, rather), a given. 

But check out all the stuff in here! I mean, literally everything and more. For it is a spring that never runs dry, or a burning bush that is never consumed, or a light that is shines in the darkness and is never turned off. Except at death, but what can death be in the deeper context of what even a single experience of I AM is?  

As it so happens, my son is taking a class on Western Civilization, or even, one might say, EXTREME CIVILIZATION, which naturally leads to questions of what it even is. 

Today they’re going on about the centrality of BEAUTY, and here we go again with the so-fundamental-as-to-defy-definition. 

Nevertheless, Thomas took a stab at it, characterizing it as our perception -- or better, apprehension, since any animal can perceive but not see it -- of wholeness (i.e., unity and oneness), harmony (proportion or part-whole relations), and radiance (i.e, the extra-perceptual perception of some x-factor that jumps out of the object, up to and including the blinding glory or divine light discussed at the end of yesterday's post).

So clearly, beauty is something experienced, undergone, and personally encountered. And if no one is there to experience it, then it goes ungnosissed.

Not so fast! Because a big part of beauty -- the experience of beauty -- involves bearing witness to all of the natural beauty that was here for billions of years before we ever got here. Which, the moment you try to think about it, is exceedingly and surpassingly strange, because someone has pretty damn good taste in throw rugs.

For it is strange enough that an inexplicable hole should appear in the center of creation, stranger still that into it should flow all this beauty, from stars above to forests, oceans, storms, animals, and whatnot. What’s going on here? 

There is no principle down here that can account for the elemental mysteries discussed above, so stop looking here. Okay. Where else to look?

Insufficient time to do justice to the subject, but this principle of “passive witness to all the glorious beauty” must be situated above: there is an “eternal outpouring,” so to speak, and an "eternal reception,” but that’s only half the story. Or two thirds, rather.