This is a probably better exposition of what is written in
https://riswey.blogspot.com/2025/02/resolution-to-issue-regarding-existence.html
Another way to see this is via the Transcendental Unity of Apperception as Kant called it, or the Cartesian Theatre.
Where am I?
If we look at all the phenomena the old adage of philosophy is true "all knowledge begins with experience"
Anything we have experienced has been either seen, smelled, tasted, felt, heard or thought. There is an inner world of voices, imagination, memory, dreams, emotions and feelings that seem to not quite fit into these categories. If I sit and day dream about a holiday we are no longer seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling or hearing anything in the world, we are recalling these things. I will just call all this thought in that we are thinking about the Past, recalling memories and using imagination to make them vivid.
The point is that there is a definable realm of sense from which all experience comes.
Be clear there is nothing else, and if there is add it to this realm of sense.
Now I can experience all of this! This means I am not "in" any of these. If I was in the sight then how could I also hear?
But if I am not in any of the senses how can I know about myself? We said that all knowledge began with sense. But I cannot sense myself.
This is what Buddha means by Anatta which is that "all things are non-self."
And it is obvious. There is no self to be seen or heard or felt or thought.
Okay that might take a lot of meditation to be clear on. We look in the mirror and go well there I am.
But this is sight. And we are not "in" the sight. We are experiencing the sight, but we are not what is seen!
When our leg is removed in an operation we think we have lost a part of our self. Well obviously our body has had a limb removed, just as a car can have a wheel removed. But what makes us say that "I" have had a leg removed. How do we know this? We felt and saw and thought that our leg is removed, but we are not "in" any of these senses. Even if we were conscious during the operation and are actually watching the surgeons at work, they are removing a leg from a body. Presumably with anaesthetic we are not feeling anything, but what we are seeing cannot be "me" because I am not in any sense. But we have been told we are having our leg removed so think certainly I am losing a leg. But we cannot "think" our self anymore than we can "see" our self. Just as someone needs to be experiencing sight, so someone needs to be someone experiencing thoughts! We are not "in" our thoughts.
Thoughts are a bit harder than sight. We can close our eyes and see black. We can shield our self from vision to some extend which proves we are not our sight. But our thoughts are not so easy to stop. Some people drink or take drugs to try and stop their thoughts is they do not like them. What is the equivalent of closing our eyes regarding thought? The thing to observe is we can only think one think at a time. The reason closing our eyes works is that everything becomes black. We are still seeing, it is just black instead of other things. If we focus our mind on one thing, we will find everything else goes away. This is meditation and it is the way we bring the thinking mind under control. When we are able to see thoughts as a sense like sight then we get to see that we are not our thoughts and we are instead the person experiencing thoughts.
So we get to Descartes. "I think therefore I am."
And we can see the slight mistake he makes. He attributes "thoughts" to himself. He starts with doubt. And starts to doubt whether anything is real. Eventually he gets to doubting doubt itself. But he realises that if doubt is not real then he is not really doubting which defeats the whole project and he is released. But if he is doubting then doubt is real and he has a real thing which defeats the doubt also and he is released. But then he attributes this doubting to himself and proves his existence. If there was no self he argues then how was there even a project in the first place. He expands from doubt to thought and just says if there is thinking then there is "me." He ends up expanding it all the way: if there is anything then there is me.
And this is actually the point here. The presence of the world, the reality, the fact that whatever we are experiencing is never-the-less a real experience that is actually happening: this is the self.
The mistake is to think that the self somehow lives in one of the senses. To think we can see a bit or it, or we can think a bit of it. The moment we notice a thought: this is the self manifesting. It manifests as the experience itself. But Descartes thought that he was thinking, rather than present in the experience of thought. This is quite a difference.
This is all incredibly simple, but we like to get things complicated so we will burrow straight back into experience and try to experience our self not as the experience but as something being experienced.
The most tricky way we do this is the Cartesian Theatre. We imagine and think that we are somehow a person inside our self looking at our experience.
We are right that at least we are not trying to experience our self. we have gone beyond holding our hand up and saying this is me. But we have sneaked a "thought" of our self into our thinking. Instead of "me" being the experience of thoughts and thinking, I have now become a thought of a mini-person inside my body or mind who is having these experiences. This is a very sneaky way of getting a solid self back into the picture.
We are only ever the actual presence of the experience, we are never the object of what is sensed or thought.
This makes us seem like the ultimate voyeur. Only ever looking in on the world as a person through a glass screen.
But this is the same mistake as the Cartesian Theatre. For there to be a glass screen there must be somebody on one side and the world of experience on the other. Again in our sense of thought we have sneaked our self in as a chess piece on the board. We are just the manifestation of the game as it is, we are not "in" the game, or on the board at all.
Now there is just one last stage to go to Enlightenment. I am no where near this. In the above there is still a sneaky way that experience is singular. There is just one field of experience here. There is one watcher who can switch between sight and sound and feelings and thoughts. When we say "I am feeling happy" we are saying that there is the experience of happiness right now. Which is correct, but sneaked into this is the sense that this is just one experience of happiness. This quickly becomes a single "me."
The problem with this is it starts down the track of objective reality, where once again I get wrapped up in sensed things and start to enter a sense somewhere to be observed rather be the observer. An apple after all is just one of many apples. But "I" am not like an apple so there cannot be many of me, or even one of me.
This I suspect is why deep practitioners who can see more clearly begin to say that the "I" is not just one, somehow belonging to a singular me, but becomes a general "I" that is beyond the things of the sense world which come as ones and twos and manys.
Another problem I can see talking about the "sense" world is the sneaky belief that there are other world like the material world. The usual thought is that what we sense as a phenomena is a representation of a "noumenal" reality that underlies the senses. This is how 2 people can each see a single apple. There is only one apple, but two experiences of that apple.
But actually this is happening in the sense world of thought. No two people can ever see the same apple. We stand in different places to start with. So the experiences are not of the same thing. Phenomena are always different. The idea they belong to a central thing is just a thought we manufacture from what we see.
How crazy we think. Surely there is an apple actually there.
And which of these slices is "The Apple"?
Before it was cut all these slices were together. If two people were looking at the apple they would have seen different sides of the apple and so different slices. In terms of set theory if the apple is the collection of slices A
A = {s1,s2,...,sn}
Then person 1 may have seen a phenomenon P1 made form slices:
P1 = {s1,s2,s3,s4}
And likewise person 2 may have seen phenomena P2 made from slices :
P2 = {s2,s3,s4,s5}
And they are both saying that these phenomena are created by the noumenon A.
This is not true. Their phenomena are different because they experienced a different subset of the world. And in no ones experience was there an apple A. In fact even in the nounmenal world there is no physical apple A because really there is just a collection of slices {s1,s2,...,sn}.
And we can slice this apple any way we like. Those slices are actually made of slices. And even atoms or sub atomic particles.
There is such thing as a single atomic "thing" with a name that we can see in its entirely. We only ever see parts and our phenomena are of these parts. So much so that they are the same. Why separate phenomena into noumena and phenomena. What is gained?
There is just one world.
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