[MD] The Zen of Pure Experience

[david buchanan]

“Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent.  The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes….When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process.  Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put together.” -- William James

“If now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions…..The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as sustains us, and the tendency of raw experience [a.k.a. “pure experience”] to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together…Had pure experience, the naturalist says, always been perfectly healthy, there would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms.  We should just have experienced inarticulately and un-intellectually enjoyed.” -- William James


A book review published in EnlightenNext Issue 40, May-July 2008.
SciousnessEssays by William James, edited by Jonathan Bricklin
http://tomhuston.com/?page_id=575
"The last couple of years have seen a resurgence of interest in William James, one of modern psychology’s most widely respected pioneers. ...But nothing has quite highlighted the depth of his thought like Jonathan Bricklin’s Sciousness.
What is “sciousness”? Bricklin explains in his introduction to the book that “James labeled consciousness-without-self ‘sciousness,’ and consciousness-with-self ‘con-sciousness.’” For those up to speed on their Eastern philosophy, “consciousness-without-self” (sciousness) is, of course, precisely how the Buddha defined nirvana, the traditional goal of spiritual seeking. Bricklin defines it as a “nondual” state of enlightened immediacy and wholeness in which the usual distinction between self and other, knower and known, is dissolved. Ordinary “con-sciousness,” on the contrary, would be considered dualistic, erroneously split down the middle between a perceiving subject and the world of objects being perceived.
“Experience, I believe, has no such inner duplicity,” writes James in one of his many essays reprinted in Bricklin’s book. “The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the ‘pure’ experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that.”
While James never claimed to be enlightened—in fact, he claimed the opposite, believing that his own “constitution” precluded him from such an exalted mystical realization—he did taste a variety of religious experiences through the use of nitrous oxide, ether, peyote, and other drugs. Describing one of his trips on ether, James said that he experienced “a vague, limitless, infinite feeling—a sense of existence in general without the least trace of distinction between the me and the not-me.” To Bricklin, such personal glimpses of nonduality provided James with a solid foundation for his theoretical talks and writings on sciousness—writings that did not go unnoticed by one of the early ambassadors of Zen Buddhism to the West, D. T. Suzuki. One of Suzuki’s teachers, Kitaro Nishida, allegedly even appropriated James’s explanation of sciousness to help convey the Zen concept of “tathata,” the primary “suchness” of existence, to the Japanese themselves. “For Zen’s ‘suchness’ or ‘this-as-it-is-ness,’” Bricklin notes, “is James’s pure experience sciousness.”
Structured as a collection of academic essays, Sciousness begins with the famous seventh-century Zen treatise “On Believing in Mind,” followed by a lengthy introduction to James’s notion of sciousness by Bricklin, which explores the idea’s parallels in Zen, Advaita Vedanta, and other mystical teachings. The rest of the book consists of James’s classic essays from 1904 “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?,” “A Rustle of Wind,” “A World of Pure Experience,” and others—reprinted in their entirety— rounded off by an excellent summary of James’s philosophy by one of his close colleagues, Theodore Flournoy. Although James’s essays, in particular, are often rather dense, one does eventually sink into the rhythm of his early twentieth-century style, tuning in to the unique wavelength of his thinking despite some hard-to-grasp concepts and arcane turns of phrase.
According to Bricklin, James’s philosophy of sciousness was attacked by many of his contemporaries, with the notable exceptions of like-minded supporters such as Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. “Western philosophers,” writes Bricklin, “could not accept the reality, let alone the prime reality, of nondual experience.” But revolutionary ideas always seem ahead of their time. And today, in the age of evolutionary psychology and biopsychology—which take a decidedly dualistic (and materialistic) approach to probing the mystery of human consciousness—it’s striking to consider that, at least in some ways, the “father of American psychology” may still be ahead of the curve.