A Place To Start

We must always start somewhere, so let me start where I am. I am here typing this. I want to type it. I like what I am typing, more or less. It is a certain kind of experience. Before this I was experiencing something else. Later I hope that there will be more experiences. I am writing these words, but I often speak the words, to others or in my inner thoughts.

Abstracting out of this scenario a little, what I have is language, experience, and desire.

Language includes natural languages and texts of those languages, texts written or spoken or thought, texts about experiences, texts about desires, texts about texts, conversations, monologues, rules, unspoken assumptions, norms, artificial languages, logic, mathematics, computer languages, visual languages, body languages, dance, languages of tone and pitch, basically anything that can be a sign for something else.

Experience can be active or passive, inner or outer, verbal or silent, now, or later. It includes all my sense experiences as well as my experiences of performing actions. It includes my inner thoughts, dreams, visions, and intimations. It is what appears to me, what I interact with, and what I do.

Desire is like, dislike, want, need, preference, goal, purpose, motive, drive, impulse, command. It is what moves me to action and accounts for many of my reactions to experience.

You can consider language, experience, and desire, each alone. For example, you can suspend language and desire and just experience in this moment until you seem to experience the silence behind experience itself, but then you want to talk about it or to get on to some goal. Or you can relate them to other instances of themselves as texts to texts forming a coherence of texts.

But you can get even farther by relating them together. For example, you can systematically test texts against experience and get science, or tease out experience into symbols and get art, or construct texts that meet goals and get designs, or execute on such texts and get technology, or reconcile all three and get happiness.

Language, experience, and desire when combined together form configurations. Life seems to be a vast diversity of such configurations, as do cultures and practices and technologies. Even an individual life seems to be a sequence of such configurations. This is not certainty, but it can take us very far.

But is this the best starting place? It seems pretty open ended, not very definite. Maybe we should start with some text, like a sacred book or a coherent set of assumptions. But these are after all just texts. Texts must be tested. They can’t just be assumed. Or they can be, but then it is just a desire. We prefer this text, or we desperately want it to be true.

When we are totally absorbed in a text, suspending disbelief, totally in its world, it can seem obvious. But then we look at the book we are holding in our hands. It is an object. We set it on the table, and go outside, and the world is still there, mysterious and large.