On the Absolute Primacy of Experiencing

Whatever our claims about such concepts as reality, self, consciousness, G0d, etc., these claims themselves only ever appear within experiencing. We do not encounter these concepts (or anything) outside of experiencing.

Experiencing is always already happening; we don’t go anywhere to find it, and we don’t “construct” it from some private interior space. Experience is a continuous stream of appearing that is not subject to our will. Unlike imagination, experiencing is not something whose terms we can construct/change at will, and it is not something we can “begin” and “stop”. Rather, imagination happens within our experience (which is always already underway). We find ourselves already experiencing. Experiencing is passive; we don’t do experience; we simply experience—and anything we do (anything active) is always within the experiencing that is we are undergoing, so to speak, passively. We are always already given over to a world that shows up as there, as ‘outside’; we are already exposed to ‘reality’ or ‘a world’, and the lived encounter with this world precedes any theoretical stance on it—including what stands behind/beneath it.

What appears is always already meaningful; it already appears as something that makes some kind of basic “sense”. Experience never arrives as neutral data that we then interpret. Experience already shows up as something that we can ‘place’, as something that makes some kind of basic “sense”—even confusion and rupture are modes of sense. Meaning, in other words, is not added to experience; it arrives as already meaningful.

There is no exit from this field. Any attempt to step outside experience, deny it, or explain it away is itself happening within experiencing, and so confirms rather than escapes the field. We cannot step "outside" of experiencing; there is no “outside” or, if there is an “outside”, it is inside what we're already experiencing. This is, in other words, the field within which all of our perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting are all occurring. There is no view from nowhere/everywhere. Our theories—scientific, religious, therapeutic, economic—are not lenses held up in front of experience from a neutral distance; they “sink into”, so to speak, experience itself, already affecting our interpretations before we ever consciously apply them. (And phenomenology helps us discover how these theories may already have been at play in our experience of some phenomena.)

This single field that is occurring right now and which is always already occurring—not some other world, time, or place beyond it—is what yoga takes as its object of study.

COMMENTARY

• This is not a claim that “only mind(s) exist(s)”; it is a claim that inner and outer are always already encountered together within experience, and that there is no standpoint outside this encounter.

• In fact, none of this commentary is a claim about what ‘reality’ is in itself, including the claim that ‘reality’ is a single substance. This is strictly a claim about how everything appears for us. Whatever we think reality is (essentially one, two, many, etc.), we only ever meet reality (and our thoughts/beliefs/ideas about it) within this one field of experience.

• Finally, this is not the story of a “pure consciousness” that existed first and was only later affected by contact with a world; consciousness, whatever else it may be, is only ever encountered already in and through a world—we do not meet it as a prior, unworldly thing that then gets involved with embodiment, situation, or experience.

FURTHER READING

• An Introduction to [a Phenomenological Approach to] Yoga Philosophy