X = X

More from "the vault"

SpankingSpirit-2006.02.10

BLOG-SS- X = X

It finally dawned on me what "X = X" means. Unless you know a certain friend of mine very intimately, you won't that phrase and it will seem absurdly obvious or incomprehensible. Of course, to me, it seemed to be both, due to the fact that my friend is highly intelligent and has depth. This philosophically enigmatic statement first came up when he and I had our first of many long and rewarding conversations exploring consciousness. I couldn't solve it for a long time and stopped trying after a while, putting it down to my just not appreciating the simple elegance of the statement.

Now, around 20 years later, I had been thinking about my new motto, "transcending duality" and the relationship between duality and consciousness. It occurred to me in a flash of insight that I had been making a duality of mind and objects, and that duality could be transcended. Indeed, the essential transcendence is that of the split between perceiver/experiencer and that which is experienced/perceived.

The experience of the object is in the object! To make the assumption that the object is out there causing an internal experience is to make an unnecessary break in reality. It is a premise for the doubt we have in the inherant meaningfulness of all of our experiences, at the very least because we see our experience as separate from objective reality. If something is "real", it is to be trusted. If it is subjective, it is suspect.

If subjective is taken to mean "truth relative to the subject making the observation", and objective is taken to mean "truth regardless of the subject making the observation", then it calls into question who determines objective truth? And is there anything to observe without subjects?