Embodied Cognition – 2022

However, at some point in the following weeks during which I visited the chamber, an awareness arose. The awareness was that of awareness itself. Though distanced to a large degree from sensorial input, awareness was there. There seemed to be awareness in this nothingness. This pushed me right back where I began… in the school of “not knowing”. Is this awareness rooted in the brain? Is it extra physical? Imagination??? The following suspicion is that we not only do not know… but that we cannot know. Knowing is too small for such an all-encompassing question.

All this and much more relates to the subject matter of this project. The thought of Embodied Cognition, acquiring understanding through our body interacting with (what we can sense of) our environments, is centric to the question of what we are able to know. A Priori, is the idea of knowledge gained by theoretical deduction. A Posteriori is the notion of knowledge being gained by evidential experience. Further, look into the notion of seeing the body as a Vessel… something that holds “us”. And what would that “us” be? Each of these perspectives is based upon largely unsubstantiated conjecture.

Such ideas are each based upon thought, which is self-supporting and self-reinforcing. They are perspectives that most human beings live through without the slightest questioning. And yet, this type of “knowing” is an extreme limit to awareness. It appears that we filter everything we sense through an unquestioned, pre-conditioned, accumulation of knowing, precluding our ability to see anything beyond it.

Knowledge is not the epitome of human achievement… rather… awareness is. From awareness untethered by thought, dive into that Dazzling Darkness! What do you see?

Michael