4 June, 2025
123 Days since 1 Feb 2025
23,701 Days old
When we ask a question we are generally looking for meaning, in the form of a narrative answer. However, words are not meaningful. Words are not containers of meaning. They are not containers at all. They have the ability to evoke meaning, only when presented to a mind that can place the word used in a context which has been meaningful to them in the past. It is the mind that recognizes the word which evokes meaning from their current context, or the discourse they understand as why the words are being encountered.
Meaning is more than words. Life, like my life, is meaningful to me, whether I am thinking of naming the content of my thoughts, or not. For example, as I sit in my car, writing these words, there is a mosquito buzzing around me. I try several times to swat it with my hand against the window beside me, and finally manage to catch it with a clap of my two hands. There are few or no words in my head as I do this (even as I’m writing through the narrative I’m forming on this page) but either help or hinder my goal of removing the threat represented by the mosquito. But there is significant meaning to the success of my mission — to me.
(continued) 5 June, 2025
124 Days since 1 Feb 2025
23,702 Days old
Consciousness is a container, in that all experience, all of my experience, which is the only experience I have access to, is contained in my consciousness. This container of consciousness holds the immediate experience which in reflection I might label as “Now,” but this moment now contains both what I am recalling as what has been, and what I anticipate as what is to come.
As the immediate experience, the container of consciousness resolves a personal horizon, which I would describe in a narrative to another person as my subjective world. It is within this idea of consciousness as a container which I label my subjective world, that I can understand and distinguish a part of this world, the objective world. That is, the models of a physical world, of a political world, of a scientific, empirical world, of a social and emotional world. I can distinguish many labels referring to various aspects of this objective world, but there is no question that all of these models which I think of as outside of me are contained in my subjective world, and so within my pre-reflective indisputable consciousness.
While I use the models learned from narratives learned through a life of interactions with the people and media, and with experience I have had directly through my physical encounters with my body and the world around me… there is another world which is outside of my subjective world and also not included in the models I can make of a physical world. That is the corporeal world, which is the world which is present to my senses, which can be recorded by my instruments. It is the empirical world before there can be a model offered. It is experience as reduced to only what is immediate. It is the corporeal instant. It is the self entangled with non-self, such that there is no distinction. This is my lifeworld. Husserl’s Lebenswelt.
The Corporeal world is a conceptual extrapolation of a wider world which can only be experienced once conscious, which at once. Now, and if we understand the subjective world as contained in consciousness, and the objective world as contained in the subjective world of one person then the corporeal world is the world that is touched by the subjective world — but only through a corporeal embodiment.
