This week: Week 5 – Chapter Five: The Experience of Subjectivity and Objectivity, from Sue Hamilton-Blyth’s I of the Beholder.
FOR THE FIFTH WEEK, the topic includes that: your sentient processes, your ‘lived world’ (loka), includes your co-generated process of ‘subjectivity and objectivity.’ Sue Hamilton-Blyth writes, “In order for something to be known at all, it is necessary for there to be a subject who is objectifying it. And conversely, objectivity, which one may also understand in terms of all of what is known, is itself entirely dependent on the functioning of a subject.” (Beholder, p.127)
Future weeks’ topics:
Week 6 – Chapter Six: The Structure of Experience.
Week 7 – Chapter Seven: The Limits of Experience.
Week 8 – Chapter Eight: A World of Metaphor: Continuity, Death and Ethics.
And, the ninth and closing session (23 October) will be focussed on the book’s postscript: On What is a human being?
As always, in my courses, bodily-felt experience is the touchstone. I will invite participants to consult their bodily-felt meaning of the Buddhist concepts, and to experience the vision in terms of a ‘process orientation.’ If you have some ‘Focusing’ experience, this course is made for you. If not, you will learn, as we proceed, to use your body’s ‘felt sense’ for insight.
Reference: Sue Hamilton-Blyth, Early Buddhism – A New Approach: the I of the Beholder. (2000) Curzon.
Christopher Ash, 18 September 2022.