Mar 14, 2022, 1:51PM
CLAUDIU: […] One point of interest to follow up on …
CLAUDIU: That is to say that my experience of something that was permanent, therefore being permanent it is “sukha” (as in together-with the Absolute, not apart from it), and that which is permanent and sukha is fit to be regarded as “This is mine, this I am, this is my self” […] I also only recently was able to fit a meditative experience I had, before going to actualism, into any kind of framework… I was sitting with my eyes open, and entered into a usual concentrative/trance state […] When it ended there was a shifting back/coming back upwards into my normal center, vision came back (eyes appeared to have been open the whole time), and I was left with the distinct impression that no matter what happens in my life, I can always return to that peace / it will always be there, I can always seek refuge in it… though I never was able to find my way back to it, as nothing in the maps I had really accounted for such a thing.
DANIEL: This epistemological thing of having a “permanent experience” that you can “return to even if it has ended many times before”… perhaps a better word would be “reproducible” or “re-findable” or “re-cultivatable"?
It’s obviously oxymoronic to call it a permanent experience seeing as it ended :D. Which I suppose is your point.
But I wouldn’t call it a permanent experience… I would put it as “an experience of something permanent”, i.e. something that is always there, but not always experienced, but that can be returned to. For example, right now I am in an office in Portugal, but my parent’s house in the United States is there and continues to exist even though I am not there, and I can return to it. (Of course the house itself is not permanent, which will be the difference of the house or anything else in the phenomenal world as opposed to those things in the metaphysical world/the Absolute as Richard describes it.) But the point is that while I haven’t been at the house, it has still been there, and I can return to it.
But the way you asked your question I think goes to the core that may inform the differences between Enlightenment as you experience it, Actual Freedom as experienced by Richard et al, and Enlightenment as Richard experienced it/as I got glimpses of.
I know you take a phenomenological approach, as also I remember being the prevailing approach on the DhO (not sure if it’s the case for pragmatic dharma in general). But if I’m not wrong, the axioms of this approach are, all that there is that can be known is phenomena, and nothing more can be said about the ‘nature’ behind them, except maybe something that can be seen to apply to all phenomena.
So one would not be able to say strictly speaking that the house in the US exists, when not experiencing it - or even while experiencing it, all one can say is “sight is experienced, color is experienced” etc. Thus no one can say anything about whether anything really ‘exists’.
If this is inaccurate or a misrepresentation let me know 
.
But if it is accurate it strikes me that it is sort of axiomatically true then, that there is nothing that is permanent, etc. I mean it isn’t a conclusion, it’s an axiom. In a sense it shares the same qualities of solipsism which is that it can’t be argued against or refuted. It’s a tautology, the premises pre-suppose the conclusion, and there’s no way to disprove it…
While with Enlightenment as Richard experienced it, the idea is there is this thing called the Absolute, it does “exist” albeit it is not of the phenomenal world (or as Richard put it it is “an acausal, atemporal, aspatial, aphenomenal alterity of an ‘utterly other’ nature”), one can experience it (in the arupa jhanas for example), and one can ‘be’ that.
And of course with a PCE , an intrinsic part of the PCE is an existential sense, that what you are experiencing actually exists. Words cannot really convey it, it’s an aspect of experience that usually simply doesn’t occur, and you don’t even know it’s missing until you have a PCE. It is literally part of the experience – that the things being experienced exist outside of just this body’s experience of it – and conversely if there is not this sense of things existing then it is likely not a PCE. I remember distinctly, the first PCE I had after exposure to actualism, I saw that I do actually exist (as this flesh and blood body) and that the actual world does actually exist – while outside of a PCE, ‘i’ feel myself to exist as a feeling-being, which ‘i’ is found not to actually exist in a PCE (i.e. this feeling of existing is illusory – while the experience of actual existence is not).
{[Addendum in a 2:00 PM e-mail:] Oh and of course that, while when Enlightened one is that immaterial Absolute — when actually free, one is that actually-existing universe, experiencing itself as a human being.
So it seems we have three clearly distinct things, to abuse the term ‘Absolute’ a bit:
- a phenomenological ‘Absolute’ – where when having attained to it (Enlightenment) one is the “field” experiencing itself as impermanent, center-less, self-less phenomena that are aware-of-themselves, but don’t inherently exist per se
- an ‘alterity’/non-phenomenological ‘Absolute’ – where when having attained to it (Enlightenment) one is this immaterial/aspatial/etc Absolute
- an actually-existing ‘Absolute’ – which is in and of itself the trees and the birds and the rivers etc existing in-and-of-themselves – where when having attained to it (actual freedom) one is this actually existing universe, actually experiencing itself as a flesh and blood human body.}
Fun stuff to talk about indeed
Cheers,
Claudiu