Personally I would call both concepts and percepts objects. It’s the Advaitin way and I’m used to it.
But I’ll happily go along with the forum if concepts/percepts have been accepted by members as the preferred terms. The alternative is to erect a Tower of Babble!
Just to keep track of what we have been discussing:
Earlier up thread you brought in the Buddhist skandha theory to explain the content of the ‘wave’ of a present moment.
We agreed that the skandhas can be broadly simplified into two main arenas of activity:
sensory perception
mental thought
I agreed with you that the form of memory, of a mental image, exists in the present moment, but I said that the content of memory belongs to the past - a past incident or sense perception.
However, you proposed that not only the form of mental images exists in the present moment, but also their content.
Your basis for saying this seems to have come from an occult theory concerning the thought-forms of Theosophy.
In attempting to explain what you mean by thought-forms you then proceeded to say that percepts and concepts are essentially synonymous. I objected to this.
Apparently your basis for saying this is an Advaita theory about sense-objects which I am unfamiliar with, and which has not been comprehensively explained on the thread.
The issue is that while you may be used to using words in a certain way, you ought not expect others to use these words as you use them. So you have to take the initiative in explaining what these words mean.
However, rather than resort to these different theories, can we actually dialogue, meet each other, about what is involved in a thought, and why this may be quite different to what is involved in a perception of a flower for example?
In Advaita Vedanta, the theory of concept-objects and percept-objects is related to their understanding of reality.
Advaitins assert that concepts (thoughts, ideas) and percepts (sense perceptions) are also objects in the sense that they are subject to change and are not Brahman.
According to Advaita Vedanta, the ultimate reality is Brahman, an unchanging, infinite, and non-dual absolute reality.
Concepts and percepts, being part of the empirical world, are considered objects because they are transient and not the ultimate truth.
By recognizing them as objects, Advaitins emphasize the need to go beyond the changing realm of concepts and percepts to realize the unchanging nature of Brahman.
While we don’t need to discuss this at length, if we take the lead of the OP which presented a distinction between
Truth
Actuality
Reality
we could present this in Advaita friendly form (even if Advaitins may not accept this presentation!) as the distinction between
Brahman
Sense-perception
Thought
Thought being the lowest on the list because it has the least reality, the least actuality, the least truth. We can discuss why this is. In essence it is because all thought is based on experience, which ultimately originates in some kind of sense perception. So thought is parasitic on sense-perception.
I’m unfamiliar with any elaborate theory, I just know what I’ve read and was taught: in the vyavahara reality level (roughly equivalent to conventional truth) the term object (gross to subtle) is used for all entities/events, physical and mental.
Truth :: Brahman
Actuality :: Sense perception
Reality :: Thought
I see your drift, both in the analogies and the ordering, from most to least proximity to truth. And you know I love bridges!
You know I’m sure that whether thought supervenes on sense perception, or vice-versa, or neither is hotly debated by philosophy of mind’ers. The verdict is, as always, still out for me.
Theory is the known. Whether Buddhist theory, Advaita theory, occult theory, Theosophical theory, Neuroscientific scientific theory, or Krishnamurti theory. Moving from theory to theory means going from the known to the known. It stays at the level of thought.
What is psychological thought? Thought is memory. Memory is the result of an experience that has been registered: an incident has happened, and one has a memory of that incident.
The memory is a limited abstraction of the incident, a snapshot. So the content of the memory is not actual, even though the form of the memory is stored neuro-chemically in the brain.
Thought, which is memory - which is always from the past, and is always a limited abstraction from the past - then acts in the present. This means that if we are living at the level of thought, we are never actually in the present moment: our minds are in mental time.
Mental time is one’s past experience and knowledge (one’s psychological conditioning) acting in the present, modifying itself there, and carrying on (which becomes tomorrow, the future).
Can this movement have a stop, even for a few seconds, for a minute? Can there be a choiceless awareness of the movement of thought as it acts in the present?
Apart from thought, there are the senses: sense-perception. The body has its own intelligence. The senses have their own intelligence. If we live at the level of thought our bodies become insensitive.
The senses are active in the present moment: seeing, hearing, feeling, etc. If there is no interference of thought in sensory perception, then the senses perceive healthily, holistically, without the distortions of thought. We can experiment with finding out whether the senses can be active simultaneously in the present moment.
So these are the two things that interest me:
observing, being aware of, the movement of thought, and finding out if this movement can end (even if only for a few seconds or for a minute)
and
finding out if the senses can perceive holistically, without the interference of thought
Or, to put the same thing differently, what is involved in paying attention in the present moment?
If these things interest you, then we can discuss, have a conversation. But if you are more interested in staying at the level of theory, this doesn’t interest me.
They do. I love watching thought do its thing, it’s fascinating. Can it end? Sure. It does every day when we are in deep sleep, right? And we all know about empty gaps between thoughts. As for thought-free sense perception, we know it’s possible, we’ve all experienced it many times. What interests me even more is the ‘wherefore.’ WHY would I want thought to stop, WHY would I want my sensory perceivings to be thought-free? Equanimity, raised sense-itivity? Is that all there is? Where’s the brass ring dammit?!!
Maybe this is a misperception of my own, but I detect an element of over-confidence, unnatural certitude here. It’s a bit brash. “I love watching thought do its thing”, doesn’t convey the tentative quality that the ‘I’ who is doing the watching is part of the thing being watched.
“Can it end?” - I don’t know. It can end for a few seconds, but this is not a fundamental ending. A few seconds of ending can be an important clue for a serious person; but we can also play with such small endings, and use such experiences to maintain the movement of the self. Unless this whole movement has an ending, then it is not truly speaking an ending.
The ‘you’ doesn’t want thought to stop. The ‘you’ wants to maintain the movement of thought at all costs, because the stopping of thought is the ending of the ‘you’, the ending of the ‘me’.
It is only when there is a looking without the distortions of thought, without the interference of the ‘you’ or ‘me’, that seeing something deeply true becomes possible. This is my understanding at least.
I thought you were asking if thought could end for a few seconds or a minute, and I think we all would agree that it can, ja? Hence the: Sure. And you’re right it’s harder to watch the mindstream when I take the watcher to be part of the mindstream. I tend to see the mindstream as an object that I am watching.
That seems reasonable intuitively. But intuition can get things wrong. All I really have besides intuition for judging the veracity of the claim (“without the interference of the ‘you’ or ‘me’, seeing something deeply true becomes possible”) is hearsay. And trust is not my strong suit!
For a person who is not wanting to be contrary or to dispute or to hold onto the past, there is no issue with seeing intellectually the fact that so long as the mind is functioning at the level of psychological knowledge, thought, thinking, it can never see truth, have an insight (total, not partial) into truth. This is logical. It doesn’t require trust.
However, for the mind to actually be in a state where it is free from psychological knowledge, and so capable of insight, is another thing altogether. It is this thing that interests me, not the other.
So it feels like we are disputing at the level of intellectual reasoning, rather than taking the plunge into the lived present. Am I wrong?
I can’t take the plunge into cold water until I’m confident that I won’t regret it, and that confidence comes from experience. But in taking the plunge “into the lived present”, I have no memory of ever doing this, so I think it’s more likely that one falls or stumbles into the lived present than one chooses to plunge into it, and from that point on has the confidence to plunge into it.
The cool thing is, we are already in the lived present, we don’t have to plunge!
You are already in the “cold water” Inquiry. It’s already too late for regrets. And you cannot store up experiences of living in the present, because even if you could they are already past. It is not about building up confidence, it is just about not pretending.
We are always in the present, even when lost in thought. But we are not always consciously in the present and that’s what I thought you meant by the lived present.
Yes. The lived present is already happening. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are already living in the present moment. Our thinking may be in the past or the future, but that thinking is taking place in the present moment. So - in reply to Inquiry - we cannot fall in or out of the present moment. The present moment is our ground. In this ground we don’t need to pretend to be anything. We are exactly what is taking place. That’s the beauty of it.