It's important to remember that just because we hear the instruments playing doesn't mean we HEAR music. That just because we can pronounce sentences that we ARE speaking. That just because we see the trees that we ARE perceiving it. Or just because we can touch the cat that we CAN feel it. All these apprehensions involve the mind as much as the body--an ongoing mental translation of the raw sensations of our bodies even as they are happening to us. An electrical dialect we learned long ago. We are conscious down to our very nerve endings. Our minds are embodying even our bodies are mentating.
There is no life in itself nor death in itself. No inviolable demarcation between the two. There is only whatever is enlivening us and whatever is killing us. The incipient opportunity and the fading passion. We are all Schrodinger's cats.
Feelings and moods are complicated and slippery and hard to name, being the mutant hybrid spawn of thought and emotions. Here's my go at some common ones.
We must learn to distinguish having the words and phrases readily available to say something from really having something to say. We must keep in mind that if there's only one way to say something, with its own popular cllches and jargon and rhetorical flourishes, then we probably aren't really saying much at all.
Everything that attracts you, distracts you, intrigues you, and disturbs you is a fresh way of becoming self-aware. Not as a self, not as some well known person with such and such a name and biography and way of life. But as a knowingness and a presencing opening up to exponentially growing potentiality. Your phenomenal subjectness and the objective world around you just two opposite perspectives on the same happening, infinitesimal center and infinite circumference, which is the grand mystery at the heart of everything---the instantiating/expressive unfolding of Time itself.
On the concurrent instantiation of stance and distance. Of the absolute relativity of centering and the relative absolutizing of circumferencing. Inverted yet symmetrical mirrorings of each other. How the privately perspectival and the publically visible arise out the one activity of cognitive seeing. The possibility of the openness of the cosmic within the enclosing of the situational. We conceive and perceive at the same time. The mitosis of the inside and the outside from the timeless and/or of the "transcient". Metaphors of awakeness within metaphors of beingness all the way down, dialectically performing yet expressing the ongoing subjectification and objectification of spacetime.
Phenomenally-manifesting qualia of being a non-physical being:
On the epistemic emergence--the experiencablity---of "nextness" and adjacency. Both physically and conceptually. As the indistinguishability between phenomenal presence and phenomenal nascence. The saming yet differencing between beingness and moreness. It's how the actual overlaps with and mingles with the possible. How nowness connects to newness. How we both consciously long for and yet are lured beyond consciousness in the same moment.
With all seeing one always needs to see "what" even as one is seeing thru. The instantanious happening of the presenced thru what is presencing. With the physical phenomenon of light we have that going on. Light generates both the seeable colors and the seen thru transparence out of its own timeless agency. It illuminates as apparent even as it discloses thru transparence. Can the same happen with speaking? With writing? With thinking itself? Is not ongoing consciousness the conceptual internalization of physical light?
New word---a fusion of "science" or "knowing" with "transience" or passage. Transcience! The intuitive how of knowing manifested out of the experience of the transforming. The pretification of "has beingness" thru its present/presencing metamorphisis into "can beingness". We are knowable as both what knows and what it is knowing.
The seed of Space latently lurks inside of temporalization even as the seed of Time implicately lurks inside of spatialization. Generating both out of each other, statically objectified as physical absence AND eventive non-mediacy, they explicate the underlying co-immanence of thenness/thereness and nowness/hereness in one enactment of the metaphysical Subject. We thus appear to exist IN space and IN time at the same location and moment.
"When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality. So poetry becomes a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life." ~ Andrei Tarkovsky
Please stand by. Do not attempt to adjust your TV set. We are experiencing our own personal rennaisance at the moment.
Light and darkness is the field-like objectification of sight just as information/ignorance is the field-like objectification of cognition. Static though etheric reifications of two activities/expressions of the Subjective. This is how they can metaphorically and symbolically stand in for each other.
Enlightenment. Showing. Illumination. Clarity. Obscurity. Concealment. Exposure. The luminous scintilla seeded inside the darkness of matter as a future spontaneous and salvific gnosis.
Conscious subjectivity not an absolute emptiness or receptacle in which objects can assume examinability and analysis thru. Rather more of a seething incandescent crucible exuberant with alchemical and transubstantial miracle working. Water turning into wine. Flesh resurrecting into spirit. Matter transmuting into the philosopher's stone. The self-knowing phenomenality of all experience reified as the cosmic Big Bang.
I half agree with Levinas when he stated "The Real is what resists symbolization absolutely." But this very observation, that it is even conceivable or possible in itself, unveils and "truths" itself thru the conscious experience of that which is Real absolutely resisting symbolization. Kant's amazing axiom, that the conditions for the possibility of experience are also the conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience, applies to truths as well. The absolute truth of this stated observation residing inside the very thinking thru of it from inside all our experiencing. In the end it is only a warning not to allow the Real to become reified or objectified as what only symbolizes or represents it.
The concept of objective physical beings void of all subjectivity is simply an extrapolation of the past and totally completed event. Of an event hypothetically occurring no more to anyone and only existing in the past immortally as a frozen non-present moment. Thus it is we find ourselves embedded in a conceptual scheme containing static things even as reality itself is always only happening as incomplete and contingent and unfinalized. All analysis and observation of these frozen events as a sort of projection of remembering past events as though objective and independent in themselves from being remembered or having ever having happened at all.
Why we never wear sunglasses in our dreams.
There's no need to. Everything in the dream even our own bodies is noctiluscent and glowing. A different kind of matter than the physical world. No sun ever appears in our dreams because light and being illumined never happens as if from the outside on things that are completely dark on the inside. Everything there is made of dream stuff, which is pure phenomenally-manifesting consciousness itself. The dream is made of us as self-presencing consciousness, what happens in the dream expresses this ever-morphing alive substrate, and we are such stuff as dreams are made of. Observe what happens when you begin to fall asleep:
"There’s a strange little window between being awake and falling asleep when images can appear without invitation. A face flashes into view, a place forms for a second, or a thought turns into something almost visual before disappearing. It’s as though imagination has started moving on its own before you’ve fully left the waking world behind."
Many avenues for becoming more self-aware. Not just as some objective thing--a supposed self inside our bodies or a person basically historically and socially constructed or even as some unconscious psyche of collective archetypes and mythologems. Rather as self-knowing presenting itself.
Hence the abundant opportunities to optimize this. Being our body. Having a career. Having a family. Introspection. Creative expression thru art and writing or music. Thru dreaming and fantasies. Thru therapy. Thru some sort of spiritual belief system. Thru politics and social causes. Thru being in love. Thru accumulating material possessions. Thru stoic and ethical actions. All of these pursuits converging on the same ontic state of ongoing reflecting of being an awake and feeling subject back to ourselves. Becoming objective, as a static and identifiable thing with such and such properties, only provisional and meaningful as a means of becoming an immediate self-showing and self-expressing way of happening.
The two-fold meaning of our lives as the nascent transmutation of ontological beingness and epistemic knowingness. Somewhat like the explosive nuclear fusion process within matter itself that powers starlight. We need to smash together what we can know and what we can be. We need to tap into and participate in that primal synthesis itself, on the ontological level, melding together the two as the concurrent actualizing and potentializing at the core of Time itself
The Subject's many modes of agency
Science trying to understand the universe is like trying to understand a movie lasting 13.5 billion years by examining only one frame of film when we walked in right in the middle of it.
Every piece of the puzzle you fit in makes it easier to solve the puzzle. The more you work at it the more effortless it becomes. Till the very end, when it becomes pretty much self-evident. I think life is like this.