Adam,
I am grateful for your questions in that "be careful what you wish for" kind of way. On the one hand, I suppose I am apt to be interpreted as inviting philosophical debate on questions of ontology. On the other hand, I am trying to point out that there is a problem with the very presuppositions that lead our entire civilization to its ontological obsession. So I find myself torn between engaging in the debate, and attempting to model how to drop it.
For engaging in the debate, I am somewhat but not very highly qualified. I did once actually apply to PhD school at a Department of Philosophy, but withdrew my application to do something else: I tried to tackle these issues from a historical perspective instead, and leverage my previous studies in the history of technology, but I dropped out of that PhD program in second year. I feel acutely self-conscious about this, as if I were allowed in the pool, but only safe at the shallow end.
At the other extreme of modeling how to drop it, there are the kinds of stunts the Buddha pulled, of the just-hold-up-a-flower-and-smile variety. I certainly don't have the cache to pull that off either. So I am left kind of blundering down the middle, raising questions that quack and waddle an awful lot like ones that people vastly more skilled and qualified than myself have tried and failed to answer satisfactorily for generations, and then trying to use seemingly familiar language to point out something that I see as profoundly and wonderfully not-duck in that very space.
So here goes...
I will start with "duality". Many, many commentators have raised the question of duality. Our very own senior in-house Arahat, for example, in the section of MCTB on the Characteristic of Suffering, links fundamental suffering itself directly to "the illusion of duality". (That is an enormously important passage in MCTB, and I will return to it another time, apropos absent-mindedness.)
Back to duality, what I am saying is that this is not congruent with my recent experience, which is informed by the view (or perhaps, View) outlined by Dewart. I have been reading E&C since 1989 -- half my life, come to think of it -- and gradually tracking towards "seeing things" the way it suggests. In my case, maybe peculiarly but perhaps significantly, although I saw something really profound in it when I first came across it (enough to attempt to explore it the best way I knew how, by trying to do a PhD), my understanding of E&C has deepened dramatically in the light of my recent period of intensive meditation practice.
Now, I do recall that many years ago I too was bothered by the question, and indeed also the experience, of duality. It seemed bothersome that there was a body, and there was a mind -- a this and a that -- and it wasn't clear how the one interacted with the other. I wasn't reading Ingram until a couple of years ago, but as I recall it would have made sense to see this unresolved puzzle as troublesome, painful even.
What I have arrived at now, attained if you like, is the capacity to be present to my own experience in such a way that I do not experience "the mind/body problem" as problematic. It does not bother me. It doesn't feel painful. What I do find painful is that I see and hear of others suffering from the "feeling of being" and I empathize and want to help them.
And the way I fancy that I can be most helpful is by taking point on making this particular "view" available for others to consider, and I hope benefit from. I am much less worried about being "identified" with this view in terms of limited self-identity, than I am worried about leading a meaningless and self-absorbed life, failing even to try to share something that I find so stimulating and frankly beautiful, as is my experience of
E&C.
I don't know how to define "unpleasant". That seems axiomatic. I don't want to disappear down the rabbit-hole of inherently versus subjectively thus-and-so, although maybe I have one foot stuck there already.
To frame the view I am advocating as "non-hierarchical ontology" might be like proposing to a person troubled by obsessions that they always keep in mind that their obsessions are just thoughts and therefore harmless. Even if the content of that idea were true, it doesn't quite solve the problem of being troubled by obsessions. Likewise, although "non-hierarchical ontology" does point in the general direction I am indicating, it does not go nearly far enough because it retains the ontological focus.
Dewart criticizes the whole system of thinking of things "in and of themselves" as part of what he describes as the "semantic complex", the interlinked notion that things (realities) are constituted by an inner meaning, that our thoughts somehow repeat that inner meaning, and that our words repeat or reflect it again in turn. Dewart articulates an alternative which he calls the "syntactic" conception, and strives to point out that this is actually normative among just about every other human culture except our own, taking "our own" to mean of Indo-European descent, i.e., Western civilization. (This is very approximate -- the details are on record elsewhere.)
To face this head on: I am not trying to be objective. To borrow Wilber's
bon mot, I am trying to transcend and include objectivity. Objectivity has certain uses and benefits, to be sure, but it is the tip of an iceberg into which our entire civilization is in the process of going the way of the Titanic.
Thanks for flagging the Kenneth Folk videos. I am always in awe of how he seems to be able to maintain very particular states of mind (jhanas, focus states, etc.) while simultaneously being able to verbally narrate his experience. I have heard him refer to this elsewhere, quite modestly, as his "parlor trick" but when I look at that video I see a virtuoso performance, a very high level of mastery of the skill of consciousness. Dewart distinguishes the evolutionary emergence of two levels of consciousness, first the immediate perceptual variety, and more recently the interpretative self-defining variety. We all have access to both, but we don't usually distinguish them much let alone clearly. What I believe Kenneth Folk is doing in those videos is very clearly distinguishing between these two "modes," and yet, masterfully, somehow dwelling in both simultaneously for demo purposes.
As for the "filtration" aspect, yes: and this is what makes possible human life as we know it today. Whereas the earlier level of consciousness is
immediate, the higher more recent level is
mediate. I can see how that might seem "filtered". An example comes to mind, a geeky one; please forgive me if it is obscure. In computer programming, a great innovation at a certain early stage in the history of that field was "pointers". These are memory addresses with literally point to other memory addresses. Without the ability to do that, it would be practically impossible to write code beyond a certain rather low level of complexity. But neither can one use only pointers all the time; sometimes you use a pointer, other times a direct reference. Well, it turns out that the full richness of our everyday human experience depends on learning a certain way to handle our experience
mediately, which Dewart argues that we learn to do when we learn to speak. Again borrowing a programming idiom, this is a feature not a bug. Believe me, you don't want to disable that feature permanently, but it would certainly be nice to be able to turn it on and off voluntarily.
Back to Kenneth Folk, that's what I think he is doing, and coaching his student to do, in the video. His description of what he is doing, however, is highly figurative and metaphorical. Rich and evocative, very clear, pedagogically sound, warm, and compassionate -- all good things -- but not actually very direct. At this point, I can only aspire to the level of actual mastery of the skill of consciousness demonstrated by Kenneth. But what I do have access to, I assert, is an explanatory framework, a View, which among other things (once it has been tumble-polished a bit through discussions exactly like this one) should make it significantly easier to teach what Kenneth is teaching in the video.
I suppose I am going to have to tackle Dependent Origination at some point, but I don't feel ready to take it on quite yet. Rushing in where angels fear to tread, nevertheless, to sum up my
vedena on this doctrine at this point anyway... hmmm... let's see...
Suffering flagged as a result of (preoccupation with?) Being: good.
Circular or interdependent (hinting at emergent?) causation: good.
Unwholesome and evil phenomena arising from ignorance: good.
Analyzing human experience: good.
Inspiring generations to practice fruitfully: good.
Reincarnation: bad.
Deterministic and/or reductionistic causality: bad.
Unexamined ontic presuppositions: bad.
Outdated model of human psychology: bad.
Confusing and seemingly arbitrary chain of dependencies: bad.
Please don't take me to task on this, not quite yet. That's all I have for now on dependent origination. I have a stub of an essay on my blog called "Why I am Not a Buddhist" and I do plan to dive into these deep waters at some point, but for today I've gotten my hair wet and that's enough for now.
Finally, my experience with Actualism is such a very close approximation to zero, that I won't comment on it except to say that I am all in favour of me, you, and everybody else in the whole world being happy and harmless, right now. Yes, please, and thank you.
Oh, and by the way, if you find this interesting and want to dive into it in more precise detail, you are probably better off studying the Synopsis rather than the Conspectus. If all else fails, you could even check out the book itself.