Meditation – immediacy of experience.

‘Naturally it is difficult to explain meditation experiences, since they contain at best rough analogies with other mental states, but a key feature is the immediacy of experience. The breakthrough comes when we no longer think about what we are doing in meditation but just enter into the experience itself.’
Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind.
Mel Thompson.
Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition

Meditative absorption – loss of self awareness

‘From the moment of meditative absorption the issue ‘who am I ?’ becomes irrelevant. The very notion of defining the self – and thereby distinguishing the self from everything else that is not self – ‘is superficial and pointless’

Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind. Mel Thompson Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition (26 Dec 2003)

Summary of Wittgenstein’s proposal

‘In Other Words.

Whatever we describe, it cannot be the subject self, for as soon as we describe it, we externalise it and make it part of ‘our’ world, standing over there against us. The self cannot describe itself, unless it tries to make itself an object. And if it tries to do that, it loses the very essence of it’s selfhood. ‘

 

pg 54

 

 

Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind. Mel Thompson Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition (26 Dec 2003)

Excentration of the self – Meditation

‘To be lost in music, enraptured by a work of art, absorbed in a creative activity – all these approach the same experience that is explored through meditation. It is an utter excentration of the self, turning it inside out, so that personal meaning is now experienced as much on the outside as on the inside.’

 

 

Teach yourself Philosophy of the Mind.
Mel Thompson
Publisher: Teach Yourself Books; New edition edition (26 Dec 2003)