Vikas, from the tenor of your remarks it was unclear to me whether you were permitting discussion or not. It felt to me that you didn’t want to discuss the matter, but I could not be sure that this feeling of mine was a fact - which is why I made myself (as the person who began the thread) available for discussion.
For sure, I feel that there is something to be discussed about experience, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked the question. And part of the discussion - as I made clear in my opening text - involves the nature of experience.
The headline question merely captured an aspect of what my question was about: I toyed with asking the more general question “What is experience?”, but I thought that might not target the specific aspect of it which brought it to my attention in the first place.
I don’t know if you saw the quotation that Huguette shared about K’s distinction between experience as a noun and experiencing as a verb (spoiler alert if you didn’t: they mean completely different things)?
This partly addressed my original question, because I was wondering what experiencing would mean in the absence of memory and thought (which may not be limited).
But it left open why K used the word experience in the way that he did, when the word memory (or previous knowledge) would suffice. So I asked if experience - as distinct from thought and memory - also involves our senses. And if you are aware of what K said about the senses during the 1980s, you will know that he proposed a manner of paying attention with all one’s senses - aka perceiving without a perceiver, or (in different words with, to me at least, the same meaning) experiencing without an experiencer
As the etymology of ‘experience’ makes plain, the word itself implies direct contact, observation, experiment, testing out - and K often talked about the need to test out what he was saying. So the fact that in K circles the word has come to mean purely memory did not (and still does not) make immediate sense to me.
But you are saying that it is obvious that experience is limited. So I was just asking you to explain what you mean by that word experience, because apparently you mean something slightly different from me.
That’s all.
