Immersion(1)

I've understood for some time that there were unformed, perhaps unreal, elements to existence, things we pull into reality through cognition.  Our being as willful, conscious entities is what permits this to take place, and such a perspective has done much to influence my developing metaphysical perspective; the idea of an ambiguous undertone to reality, an undefined yet characteristic basis for the formation of all structured ideas, is actually the inspiration behind this blog's title.  This is yet a young idea in my thinking, shouldering the huge demands of my experience and perception and, as I hope to outline below, inevitably flawed in its description.

Start from the idea that things may either be known directly, or through reflection.  You can experience something, the feeling of wind on your face or an emotion like bliss; or you can think over that experience, remembering how wind and joy felt at the time.  As anyone with an appreciation for the value of hindsight will agree, these are very different kinds of knowing.  The initial experience involves one sort of context, what I think of as the moment, which includes everything else that was being felt at the time: the sun on your face, the rustle of leaves above your head, a distant sound of birdsong.  These amount to a single experience, of which wind on your face is but a single aspect.

Contrast this, then, with reflection, knowing in retrospect.  Here context is changed to something quite different; where the moment presented wind on your face as part of a whole plethora of culminating experiences, memory sets it in the context of all that's happened since.  If that feeling was followed immediately by the call of a lover, it might be remembered with excitement or contentment; if it presaged a rising thunderstorm, come to blast your favorite tree to smithereens, it would be recalled quite differently; if a bird shit on your head while the wind blew, memory might even make the feeling humorous and a bit gross.  In any event, the feeling itself is essentially unchanged; yet in both, it is far from independent.  Context and event describe and define each other, each contributing only partially to the other.

I mean to develop this idea further, but I think I need to understand it better before I can do it justice; just the thought that what I need to do about the idea is what the idea is about is enough to make my vision blurry at this point.