This week: Week 4 – Chapter Four: The World of Experience, from Sue Hamilton-Blyth’s I of the Beholder.
FOR THE FOURTH WEEK, the conversation is about: Chapter Four: The World of Experience. This is a rarely talked-about topic amongst Early Buddhist meditation groups. I’ve mentioned it on many occasions, that is: that your sentient processes are your ‘lived world,’ and that whatever reality is (more on that later), it is mediated by your ‘sentience.’ So, you can’t get outside of that sensitivity to know what is ‘real’ from some ‘objective’ position. What does the Buddha teach about our ‘world within the world’? How important is this point for conducting our life?
I regret that I’m skipping Chapter 3: the Focus on Experience, because of time constraints, but will includes its central points in my presentation of The World of Experience.
Future weeks’ topics:
Week 5 – Chapter Five: The Experience of Subjectivity and Objectivity.
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.
- Christopher Ash, 11 September 2022.