If you like nothing, you’ll love this new paper! It’s a nonfiction essay in philosophical psychology, all about objectless experience. Who doesn’t love objectless experience?
The paper combines ideas from “Scientific Introspection” (2020) and “Nothing in Mind” (2023). See those at https://www.psifibooks.com/finding-the-mind-series/.
If nothing sounds like fun to you, this new paper can be yours as a free download at Naturalistic Nondual Nothingness V9.pdf (6500 words, PDF). Here is the abstract:
Naturalistic Nondual Nothingness1
William A. Adams2
Abstract
In epistemological dualism, objects are defined in relation to subjectivity. Any known object presupposes a knower. That is true in phenomenology where both noetic and noematic aspects are acknowledged. Advaita Vedanta and other Eastern philosophies emphasize the transcendent unity of knower and known, but it is not clear to a traditional Western thinker what knowledge means in that case. Is knowing the same as being? For most Western thinkers, nondual knowledge is difficult to appreciate.
This paper describes investigative methods that track a path from epistemological dualism to objectless experience and back. The methods are naturalistic, dealing only with observable evidence and reasoned inference, eschewing spiritual explanation and authoritative assertion. One is a syncretism of Husserlian phenomenology and yoga meditation. A second substitutes a quasi-fictional narrator for the investigating ego to circumvent paradoxes of the ego’s point of view.
These methods lead to description of an object-free nothingness dynamically interacting with ordinary experience in a way that accommodates both epistemological dualism and nondualism. A novel account of experience arises that hermeneutically maps to many religious ideas.
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1 Presented at “Experience and Non-Objects: Towards a Phenomenology of Indiscernibility,” October 28-30, 2024, at the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
2 Independent researcher, cognitive psychology (ret.) Contact: psifibooks.com/contact
