NoumenArt: Art & Consciousness Project

MindSpace III, originally uploaded by XhyraGraf.

Morning the first day of her 31st year-Kenmore, Scotland:

As she quietly contemplated the water in the loch, something familiar caught her eye.

“Well here it is,” she thought. “Right here in this moment.”

Extending herself into the stillness caused her yet unmoved gaze upon this thing … this infinitely present thing … to also widen across the waters

“Here is all the proof you need for the existence of God.”

With new resolve, she allowed the moment to pass and moved away from the reflection of her being.

Tags: SEER Model

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JamVari.html

Lectures XVI and XVII MYSTICISM 

One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand. But though forced to look upon the subject so externally, I will be as objective and receptive as I can; and I think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in question, and of the paramount importance of their function.

A more pronounced step forward on the mystical ladder is found in an extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimes sweeps over us, of having “been here before,” as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we were already saying just these things.

 Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition: “By God Almighty! there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clearness of mind.” Memoirs of Alfred Tennyson, ii. 473.

(more…)

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/#1:

1.1 The Wide Sense of Mystical Experience

In the wide sense, let us say that a mystical experience is:

A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual experience granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection.

1.2 The Narrow Sense of Mystical Experience

In the narrow sense, more common among philosophers, mystical experience refers to a sub-class of mystical experience in the wide sense. Specifically it refers to:

A (purportedly) super sense-perceptual or sub sense-perceptual unitive experience granting acquaintance of realities or states of affairs that are of a kind not accessible by way of sense-perception, somatosensory modalities, or standard introspection. (more…)

The experience and perception of time

Also reread paper on tensed beliefs

But what sense or senses do we use when perceiving time?

The very expression ‘the perception of time’ invites objection. Insofar as time is something different from events, we do not perceive time as such, but changes or events in time. But, arguably, we do not perceive events only, but also their temporal relations.

When we perceive B as coming after A, we have, surely, ceased to perceive A. In which case, A is merely an item in our memory. Now if we wanted to construe ‘perceive’ narrowly, excluding any element of memory, then we would have to say that we do not, after all, perceive B as following A. But in this article, we shall construe ‘perceive’ more broadly, to include a wide range of experiences of time that essentially involve the senses. In this wide sense, we perceive a variety of temporal aspects of the world. We shall begin by enumerating these, and then consider accounts of how such perception is possible.

There are a number of what Ernst Pöppel (1978) calls ‘elementary time experiences’, or fundamental aspects of our experience of time. Among these we may list the experience of (i) duration; (ii) non-simultaneity; (iii) order; (iv) past and present; (v) change, including the passage of time.

but it is a contentious question whether the experience of tense—that is, experiencing an event as past or present—is more fundamental than the experience of order, or vice versa, or whether indeed there is such a thing as the experience of tense at all.

One of the earliest, and most famous, discussions of the nature and experience of time occurs in the autobiographical Confessions of St Augustine.

While not following Augustine all the way to his theory of the subjectivity of time, we can concede that the perception of temporal duration is crucially bound up with memory. It is some feature of our memory of the event (and perhaps specifically our memory of the beginning and end of the event) that allows us to form a belief about its duration. This process need not be described, as Augustine describes it, as a matter of measuring something wholly in the mind. Arguably, at least, we are measuring the event or interval itself, a mind-independent item, but doing so by means of some psychological process.

The term ‘specious present’ was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Clay, but the best known characterisation of it was due to William James, widely regarded as one of the founders of modern psychology. He lived from 1842 to 1910, and was professor of philosophy at Harvard. His definition of the specious present goes as follows: ‘the prototype of all conceived times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible’ (James (1890)). How long is this specious present? Elsewhere in the same work, James asserts ‘We are constantly aware of a certain duration—the specious present—varying from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute, and this duration (with its content perceived as having one part earlier and another part later) is the original intuition of time.’

A quite different definition is this: the interval of time such that events occurring within that interval are experienced as present. This is how the specious present tends to be treated in recent discussions, though it is inconsistent with James’ remark that we can discern earlier and later parts in the specious present. As we remarked at the beginning of this article, if two events are experienced as present, they are surely experienced as simultaneous. [I have sone disagreement with this statement - I think most peopl can say that they experience two items as present but may not concede that they occured simultaneously and actually vice versa.  It has to do with the very idea they introduced in the beginning that 'perceive' can be contrued both narrowly and broadly. This again is part and parcel of the qualia problem.  Even if we are somehow able to prove to someone that the events were or were not simultaneous and even replay them in the same way-their subjective experience of 'the perceiving' may not match up to 'reality' - as in the next quote...]

Taking the specious present as defined by this third characterisation, the doctrine of the specious present holds that the group of events we experience at any one time as present contains successive events spanning an interval. The experienced present is ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present, it is an interval and not a durationless instant. The ‘real’ present, as we might call it, must be durationless for, as Augustine argued, in an interval of any duration, there are earlier and later parts. So if any part of that interval is present, there will be another part that is past or future. This definition needs to be tightened up a little, to distinguish the tendency of

Some pictures can be found on Ana Galano’s Blog [eventually I'll get my act together and all my artwork, etc. will be consolidated and uploaded to this site]. Here is a bad shot of it at my aunt’s house before installation:

My aunt said it looks like a StarGate, and I celebrated. Woohoo!

A little note:  The interesting thing about the artwork is that it [or display/explanation of it] always manages to place me smack dab in the middle of an important life lesson.  It had become somewhat of a challenge and an integral part of this work [like Bricolage] to work only with what I had collected or could find around me*.  I was successful up until installation day; as I found myself driving to Home Depot to buy sand, I grew angry [and yes, I cried].  I had lost touch with my work and it was completely my fault. 

         There was something comforting about watching my mother sift the sand that my sister had infused with her energy and it mirrored the patience it took for me to clean up the grungy metal, figure out how to construct the pieces, collage the digital images and paint layer after layer after layer of the painting.  But here I was going against the whole process of patient reconstruction and meditative repetition; I still had not learned that one could only be accomodating up to a point and now I was compromising the integrity of the process – and, of course this means the integrity of my vision. Therefore, as usual, my desire to make everyone comfortable only ended up with the stifled portion of my psyche rearing it’s head and causing an uncomfortable situation anyway.**  I had to come back the next day when no one was there to complete the installation.  Again and as usual, Ana came to my rescue to supply the stabilizing energy needed…I don’t know what I would do without her. 

Following is the ‘artist statement’ for the work. (more…)

Tags: Creative Process

Chapter VIII
The Development of Wisdom

At the cognitive level, which is its most basic sphere of operation, ignorance infiltrates our perceptions, thoughts, and views, so that we come to misconstrue our experience, overlaying it with multiple strata of delusions. The most important of these delusions are three: the delusions of seeing permanence in the impermanent, of seing satisfaction in the unsatisfactory, and of seeing a self in the selfless.[66] Thus we take ourselves and our world to be solid, stable, enduring entities, despite the ubiquitous reminders that everything is subject to change and destruction. We assume we have an innate right to pleasure, and direct our efforts to increasing and intensifying our enjoyment with an anticipatory fervor undaunted by repeated encounters with pain, disappointment, and frustration. And we perceive ourselves as self-contained egos, clinging to the various ideas and images we form of ourselves as the irrefragable truth of our identity.

Whereas ignorance obscures the true nature of things, wisdom removes the veils of distortion, enabling us to see phenomena in their fundamental mode of being with the vivacity of direct perception. The training in wisdom centers on the development of insight (vipassana-bhavana), a deep and comprehensive seeing into the nature of existence which fathoms the truth of our being in the only sphere where it is directly accessible to us, namely, in our own experience. Normally we are immersed in our experience, identified with it so completely that we do not comprehend it. We live it but fail to understand its nature. Due to this blindness experience comes to be misconstrued, worked upon by the delusions of permanence, pleasure, and self. Of these cognitive distortions, the most deeply grounded and resistant is the delusion of self, the idea that at the core of our being there exists a truly established “I” with which we are essentially identified. This notion of self, the Buddha teaches, is an error, a mere presupposition lacking a real referent. Yet, though a mere presupposition, the idea of self is not inconsequential. To the contrary, it entails consequences that can be calamitous. Because we make the view of self the lookout point from which we survey the world, our minds divide everything up into the dualities of “I” and “not I,” what is “mine” and what is “not mine.” Then, trapped in these dichotomies, we fall victim to the defilements they breed, the urges to grasp and destroy, and finally to the suffering that inevitably follows.

Tags: Buddhism