The essence of wonder resides especially in daily life. What can be more strange than white clouds flowing and fluxing across the sky? Unless it is awareness seeing the clouds, which is not really different, but the same. It is a matter of exceptional wonder that ordinary reality exists and functions. That being is, is a matter of deep mystery. That we are aware, is another wonder; that the material and natural world exists in its natural form, is extraordinary. It is also perfectly strange and marvelous that mathematics works as it does; simple arithmetic and geometry are astounding.
As it was: I am sitting at my workplace writing this. To my left a large screened window opens into space filled by a midsummer maple tree with green and yellow leaves, sunlit and shadowed. Crickets and Rosy Finches are singing in the afternoon. While writing this on a notepad my computer is getting some much deserved rest on a metal table, which it shares with a telephone, a cup of coffee, half a glass of carrot juice, an old dot matrix printer, stacks of books and a variety of papers.
This is an ordinary moment in an ordinary place; this is reality. We live most of our lives in such a reality. It would be most extraordinary if philosophy could explain ordinary reality. I cannot offer a complete explanation; the question is too deep, but I can offer some tools which give clearer insight into reality and may even help with the living of it.
Unusual events happen; extreme situations occur, but rarely; we had a sudden flood in this city of Fort Collins a month before writing this, five lives were lost and there was much material destruction to homes and to the University, especially to the library where reconstruction in progress, partly intended to protect from floods, had left a gaping hole in one wall through which waters flooded several hundred thousand volumes, some but not all of which were saved by freeze drying; a flood wherein a six inch deep creek became a hundred foot wide torrent in a matter of minutes, floating mobile homes like boats, wild boats without rudders crashing into each other, now just empty shells marked by the health department for deconstruction, water tearing out culverts and smashing great chunks of debris against bridges, setting off gas line explosions, a sudden disaster when many were heroically rescued and a tragic five were not, when the music center where my son took his guitar lessons had its collection of old instruments destroyed, when a young woman who worked at the next door camping supply store was torn from the grasp of her friend and lost in the dark current.
The flood was the extraordinary, changing reality, redirecting lives. Yet the city, the community, the people, except for the five we mourn, continue to live, the sun still shines every day, insects breed, corn grows and tomatoes ripen all at once. The extraordinary is a ripple on the deep waters of time, totally tidal for those in its direct path, sliding into green summer of insects humming for those a little out of the way. Even in this small and ravaged city most people still live in their homes, have their regular employment, watch and perhaps help with the reconstruction and even the recently homeless live without fear of their lives, some sort of regular living wherein they see the trees and sky, listen to the crickets chirping, hope for better circumstances, love their children, play, work and dream much as if ...
If we would live for the extreme or be concerned primarily for the extreme then most of our moments would be taken up with preparation, if not propitiation, and waiting, waiting. It is better to grasp the essential core of time, the regular currents of present motion and to use these currents to ride awake and calm across wide seas of being. The heroes of the flood were there in presence. Too often the bulging fullness of time is thoughtlessly dismissed as emptiness; it is wiser and more interesting to experience the gathering of the clouds, the storm itself, and the aftermath of the rain as full of content and experience.
Each of us experiences our personal life and being. Our experience begins at birth, if not before, and continues until death, or after. We may live primarily in the enduring present, although the content of now is deeply linked to what has been and is also colored by what is expected. Experience is described by many names: perception, thought, memory, knowledge, intuition, emotion, imagination, pleasure, pain, surprise, envoidment, prescience B and phrases: interior visualization or >the mind=s eye=, necessity and the convergence of logic, enlargement of action, entanglement with language, mathematical reasoning, awareness of being and consciousness of being notY
Experience can be described in general terms and by specific instances, as well as the connecting links between. Various natural statements apply. Experience is. Experience occurs. Experience is experienced by a subject. Knowledge, including knowledge of and about experience, is experienced. What is not experienced is thereby unknown. Our personal being is encompassed by our whole experience, so that what is not experienced is not part of our personal being. What is experienced, is. Experience is also whole. One can call the name experience without dividing it into categories.
We may, and should, also maintain the phrase >direct experience=, which denotes a focus of experience into that which we most intimately feel, sense and know. Direct experience is our most immediate, and in that sense deepest, guide to what is. When the cactus bites, the pain perceived is direct experience; where the light is seen, that is direct experience; when thought appears, that is direct experience; infinity is directly experienced by bright minds.
But this is now, for me, the most direct that I can say. Words describing experience, perceptions and memory, simple things and real. A stream flows on and all its ripples, waves, sunlit reflections, floods and ices appear and go away. At least, they appear if anyone is watching. And if you look again, sooner or later, they are gone. What remains? The stream bed, the channel, and in some sense, the water. Not the same matter of water as it might be caught in tubes and held apart from other water, but much the same general thing that is water. These things may last for longer than we are willing or able to watch.
I write we and you might think I; but what is common among us? At least there is that fact of the most separate and individual content of our experiences. I write in my now and you read or remember in your now. They are both the same, as both nows and the same words, and different, as doing and understanding, as in relation to our personal selves. Ah yes, we have also this in common, that we have personal selves, both similar and distinct. How is this?
When we look into what is happening here, we see a kaleidoscope of perception, a multitude of events, differing in form and appearance, but having something in common. What is common among our varieties of experience? It is that we undergo experience; we experience it; it happens to us, we who are, we who are alive, we who know, we who perceive, we who experience.
As with most words, experience has a spread of meaning, usually determined by the context in which the word appears. But we ought to be a little more specific here. By experience, I mean primarily two things. First, personal encounters with experience, such as perception, thought, emotion and memory. For example, 'We all experience sunshine.' Next, the generality of this sort of event, as in 'We all experience sunshine.'
Another use of the word experience is to denote the wisdom or understanding of situations, which an individual may grow in time, due to repeated exposure to the events of life, although this also may refer to a more distinct and limited type of encounter. We might say, 'The old wanderer is experienced.' Or 'Carver Joe is experienced in the feel, and especially in the response to the knife, of several native woods.' This type of usage for experience is mostly a background resonance for these texts.
Even with these limited uses, experience has a wide variety of forms. Is there something consistent among all of these encounters, something we can name, something of which we can say that when experience occurs, that something always, necessarily, partakes of the quality of experience?
There is such a name. As usual, in English, it can have more meanings than we wish to assign to it. Nevertheless, it is a good name, and its barrack crust of multiple definitions, the historic weight of its implications, can be stuffed aside for our discourse, not absolutely, but sufficient for our practice. That word, this name, is awareness.
Frederick Joseph Staley