2025-01-22

There is an invaluable realm of human experience when you can definitely say that something—an inanimate object, an event, a piece of art—phenomenologically speaks to you. With the work of one's own imagination, they open the senses of the mind. This is akin to "listening with your mind's ears" when it comes to learning how to read poetry. The mind's ears introduce a sensibility of perception that rely on relationships, which is the sound in language in this case. The sound is heard internally by the inner voice, which is disembodied, a word is both spoken and heard in the absence of sound. We then enter this place of the abstraction of language itself, where there is another layer of perception as an epiphenomenon of experience.

It is not a rare thing to experience. In fact, we can roughly describe it as a form of sentimentality. In nostalgia, in yearning, in belief, whenever and wherever we find a piece of ourselves, in the present, in the past, or in the future, that is represented by that object. However, sentimentality is an emotional response, that is often an instant and an immediate response, which is an unfiltered reaction by the perceiver. Sentimentality is a reaction. It is not a deliberate engagement with the object being perceived. Choosing to engage with an inanimate object using the senses of the mind is a practice of interpretation, of meaning-making, and of making-sense.

A direct engagement with an object while being open to what it "reveals" to you as a product of that interaction creates a feedback loop that is mediated by one's imagination. This is the realm of delusion, of the creation of one's own self-image. This is the place where ideation of the self happens. The feedback loop that occurs is an acceptance of the object that one engages in. In creating a feedback loop with an artwork, one accepts the piece of art as an object alien to oneself in order to directly engage with it and let the object "reveal" itself. This is a crucial aspect of experience that must be done deliberately in order to avoid falling into the trap of a false sense of knowing. The artwork will not reveal itself to a person who is not open to its being-as-an-object-in-itself even if there is an attempt to interpret because the interpretation that happens in this scenario is a form of an unaware self-projection. The person's understanding is within the realm of their understanding, which is always not the case when engaging with an object, at least when we truly attempt to understand it. All interpretation, if we want a true experience of a feedback loop with an object requires sincerity and humility. He who has the capability to understand must understand that the true form of understanding must always come to the place of unknowing. The process of understanding should always be stripped by the ego's presumptions in order to open the self to what the object may reveal to us.

This same process is applied to the knowing of one's true self, where it is important to empty the self of its current perception of itself in order to let the right one in. True understanding comes after the process of unlearning the world from what the world told us what it is and relearning the world from what the world has revealed to us what it is after we have emptied ourselves of our previous assumptions of the same world that we are trying to understand. In this feedback loop, we continually refine the world and refine ourselves according to how we change and how we are changed by the world.

As we can see, true understanding comes when we deliberately engage with the world and cease to be reactive. It does not say that the world is an illusion that we must get past through. The world is made up of language that requires our interpretation, to use it so we can find ourselves in it. In this process, there can be no "single self" but only multitudes that must be discarded, organized, and reorganized amidst the chaos of what the world reveals to us. If there is one thing that defines what it means to be human, is to be the anti-entropic, self-organizing force that finds meaning in this chaos. Since the default state of the world is chaos in the untrained eye, they only see objects in the world as isolated artifacts. Which is why imagination is important because we are not here to make meaning out of nothing. This is why the world requires our understanding of relationships and the connections between objects. Our openness is the only requirement for the world to reveal ourselves to us.