The Obvious Mystery of Experience (part 2)

Experience is always one: this truth has that peculiar quality of being self-evident which prompts us to dismiss its relevance. It is inherent in the individuation of life, of all living beings. But for human beings this has taken on the character of a problem. It becomes a problem for us, not because of consciousness, of subjectivity itself, but because of self-consciousness.
The power of thought, as it progresses, results in reflection. No longer do we experience life only as subject—now we are able to know the subject itself, the “I” as an object of our own experience. When I touch my arm, for instance, I assume my identity with it, in other words with the body. But at the same time, I perceive my body in the same way everything else in the world is perceived: as an object of perception, an object to my subject. What then is the subject? Our attempt to perceive this subject inevitably fails, since the subject is itself that which perceives. But by an instinctive method of reasoning, we decide that the “I” is inside the body, a soul or a spirit inhabiting a material dwelling. In modern times we have come to scoff at this idea (or at least we seem to), and indeed it cannot withstand the careful scrutiny of reason. Yet we have failed to locate the source of this idea, attributing it to ignorance and superstition rather than to the ineffable nature of subjectivity.
Subjectivity is the context by which all experience, all that we know, takes place—it is not itself an experience, but the power that makes experience possible. The wonder that the philosopher or scientist feels when he or she ponders the mysteries of existence are put into words like these: How is it that anything is, rather than nothing? Why this particular universe, and not a different one? What is the origin of all this? How did it come to be, and by what laws does it continue? But behind or beneath these questions, however, lies a greater wonder that is rarely expressed or even noticed: What am I? How is it that existence itself comes to be lived, and eventually known, as experience?
Thought and language, by their very nature, express everything in terms of objects experienced by a subject. This works just fine for the purpose of navigating the practical necessities of life. But when applied to ourselves as subjects, it involves the most fateful and entangling difficulties. Philosophy was eventually forced to make a distinction between sensation and existence. When I look at a tree, for instance, and touch it with my hand, the visual and tactile sensations, the impulses that travel along the nerves to the brain and produce a “picture” or a “feeling” of the tree, are therefore different than the tree itself, which exists separately from the sensation of the tree. If I move my eye with my finger in a certain way, I can see two trees, which seems to prove that the experience of the tree is separate from the actual tree. This becomes a fruitful source of inquiry for science, as it should be, but for philosophy it’s a mistake, because it takes the abstraction for reality. When I touch the tree, it is the actual tree I am touching. My perception is not a separate thing from the perceived—it is only spoken of in this way because we have to separate and abstract one phenomenon from another in order to communicate. But the reason this seemingly arcane issue became so important is that sensation, perception, consciousness, subjectivity itself, has an essential quality of wonder and ineffability, a quality that seems useless for science but is in fact always present and always exerting a mysterious influence on the way we think and feel. Without metaphor, without poetry, the only way I can speak of this wonder and ineffability is to give it a dry, abstract name: the Absolute.
It seems absolute because it is the context of all we experience. It seems absolute because it never goes away during our lifetime. It seems absolute because it somehow (magically?) contains everything else, providing the condition for all awareness, and therefore seems unconditioned in itself.
It is only much later in the life of humanity that reason follows the lead of this unspoken wonder, and applying its lesson to existence itself, says, "The conditioned, the limited, the relative, the finite—this cannot be unless reality itself is unconditioned, unlimited, absolute, and infinite."
Thus religion and philosophy start from the same place. That they eventually part ways is due, not primarily to the development of our reason, but to the problematic nature of human experience.