Hi Kasia,
what doesn't mean a first-hand experience? experience limited to senses? is it possible to experience the raw experience without being aware of it? No
First-hand experience is what you experience directly. And not what you think, or what you’ve learned from others.
Yes, whenever there is experience there is the awareness of it.
This is not what we are questioning here, but your assumption/believe that there is a doer that is making the hand move.
You believe that in order for the hand move, there has to be something deciding and then moving it. When you look, there is nothing there. But since you don’t question your base belief that there must be a doer, you are making a logical reasoning (by thinking) assigning doership to consciousness.
So instead of questioning your base belief, you are distorting what you see in direct experience by a speculative story. Can you see that?
V: How do you know that there is anything making decisions?
Is there a decider at all?
K: because I'm experiencing the results of a decision made
Here is the problem.
Stop right now, and lift one of your hands.
HOW do you decide which hand to raise?
Do you decide at all?
Is it your doing?
Or the hand just goes up to the air on its own, and you are just aware of it, without making any decision or doing anything?
V: What is it that is sending an impulse? And from where?
K: an energy impulse sent from the brain
This is the intellectual reasoning which is not your first-hand experience.
This is a learned knowledge. This is NOT what you experience.
You don’t experience a brain sending impulses, right?
Here you are just repeating something you’ve learned in school, don’t you?
What is missing here is the ability to distinguish between a thought content and reality. So let’s look at this.
Looking at your direct actual experience and seeing how your thoughts work are the 2 main key components of realizing that there is no self as you thought it to be.
This is important: A thought is DE (direct experience), it can be noticed right now, but its content isn't DE.
Think of yesterday’s dinner. There can be a picture brought up, smell and taste remembered, all content of a thought, but you won't be able to eat it right now.
And why? Since the dinner is not experienced, it’s not real.
Imagination is real, but not the dinner. Can you see this?
If you had pizza for dinner last night, it was real then.
Now, it is a thought.
The memory is a real mental construct, now.
A memory is nothing else but a thought occurring NOW.
It is real now as a thought only.
But the pizza is not real now.
It is just an imagined pizza, a visual thought OF a pizza, not a real, directly experiencable pizza in this moment.
It this utterly clear?
The problem comes when we misperceive the contents of thoughts and believe that they are at the same order of reality as what is actually taking place here-now.
And this happens over and over again, hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day.
The goal is to learn not to confuse a mental construct (thoughts) with reality.
A mental construct (thought content) is NOT a real experience.
A thought content is an IMAGINED experience, but not an actual, real one.
Is this totally clear?
Real is what can be experienced DIRECTLY, here-now.
Can you see this clearly?
There is nothing wrong with mentally evoking an image of another time and another place… the problem comes when we don’t see that ‘that other time and place’ is not real, it’s just a mental construct now.
Thinking about past or future, or another place is all right, as long as you realize that it is just a thought, and that thought is NOT a real experience here-now, since it has no independent reality.
So there can be a mental reference something that is not an immediate experience of here-now, but it is essential to see moment-by-moment that these mental references are NOT here and now, they are not real.
As soon as there are no thoughts about them, they cease to exist, because they are not real experiences, just mental fabrications.
Is this clear?
Reality is what is left when you stop thinking about it.
If nothing is left then it wasn’t a real experience, it was just a thought / imagination / fiction / mental abstraction.
Is this totally clear?
Let’s look at this in practice.
Think about sugar now.
When you think the thought 'sugar', do you experience the taste sweetness?
A thought never contains experience. If it did you could taste the word 'sweet', and feel the word 'hot'.
But, when the thought 'sugar' is there, you know that a thought is present, don't you?
So that knowing of the presence of a thought is the experience of it.
So there is an experience of a thought, but not the experience of 'sugar', or 'sweetness', or a taste, right? Just the experience of the occurrence of a plain thought?
Vivien
