Saturday, November 26, 2011

All The Big Questions

The present appearance is of a version of the "I AM" experience called [your name] experiencing the words apparently written here and forming the individual ideas to which those words point into a larger idea.  Whew!  That is to say, "complex idea in a complex sentence."  Let's try to look that closely at "your" experience

Ask, "In this moment, what can be known to be undeniably true, eternal, indisputable?"  This "self" that "you" attach "your" name to?  Is it there when "you" sleep?  Doesn't seem to be, does it?  It seems to reassemble itself when "you" wake up in the morning.  What does that say about the reality of this "self"?  What if it's just a bunch of ideas clustered around this Bare Attention, this Naked Experience, this I AM?  Where are those ideas of self without the experiencing I AM?  Where is anything without THAT?

I AM, therefore, must be primary (philosophers call this "a priori").  Can it be separated from what it experiences?  Oops!  Any idea of I AM cannot be I AM, can it?  An idea cannot be the thing itself, any more than road signs can be the roads they point to.  You can't eat the idea of an apple.  So are ideas something or nothing?

What if all that exists is I AM?  Think of the implications!  If things and ideas have no intrinsic reality, then if we discount all objects of experience, the how is "your" experience of I AM different from "mine"?