There is something here that is inexpressible and yet inescapably prevalent in every part of the whole overall effect of what might be called a phenomenon, something happening. We perceive the world and grasp it and at once it slips away, mutating its form into a new configuration of our perceptual state. At what point does perception end and memory begin? What is memory? What is the nature of being of things which are presented without being directly present and accessible through the traditional experiential routes? Alan Watts says that it is wrong to think of experience as something that happens to you, and therefore perhaps it is wrong to plant the individual, oneself, passively in a world which creeps upon his or her senses and causes vibrations of energy moving upon and within his or her body. I do not feel as though I am trying to get at “truth”, necessarily, or “universal truth”; I am trying to figure out what is here. I am not even trying to figure out how it got to be this way. I make very few assumptions and instead just find myself confused and fascinated and unable to avoid being fixated on how…strange all of this is, even without a distinct context of comparison.

I do not want to know why, in general, the statistical average reaction of persons to X stimulus is to respond with Y behavior. I do not want to know why, even, individual Mr. M. chose to partake in a particular action in a particular way at a particular time. I do not want to predict behavior, and I do not even really want to “observe” it. I want to know its basis. What makes behavior? What are the constraints of behavior, and why? Is there a natural background from which human beings, from all the possible milieu of ways to partake in their own existence, chose to “behave” in certain ways? It just seems like we are not going to get anywhere unless we understand what we really are and the most basic way in which we naturally are given to this experience, in it, with it, whatever.

How do I define experience? Something happening. Presentation. Fleeting excitation. A burst of energy inclined towards something. A perceptual unfolding of images, lights, sounds, movements, aches, warmth, etc. Perception is based on the body. As the body moves, the spectacle being perceived flows with it. Our sense of the world comes through action.

I am not sure of what more to say. I feel all of these intuitive notions about what is going on here, and it seems so strange and I really think that we have got our view of it all wrong in the sciences. We are trying to grasp it and pin it down and examine it completely, but by that time it is completely gone and all that we are looking at is ourselves looking at something that is no longer there at all! We have an entire system based upon the most advanced semantic system we can conceivably implement upon what is already here, and it is so far removed from the natural, the given, the bare and actual, that it almost has no context or frame of reference. The only frame of reference is one’s view on the on-going change of all of this dancing experience, but that’s not “empirical”, that’s not trust-worthy and reliable…it’s unscientific. Is it generalizable? I have no idea. At some level, I assume it must be.