Nondual Mindfulness - Transjective

transjective adj

not-comparable. transcending the distinction between subjective and objective, or referring to a property not of the subject or the environment but a relatedness co-created between them, such as color

Also, to coin a term, transjectivism.

Nondualism of subject and object. Or: the separate self is an illusion. Yes, the feeling of subjectivity and of riding along “inside” one’s body is compelling and a real feeling, but it is constructed by the mind, and capable of analysis, and can be shown to be an illusion, or a real appearance but in a different way than it seems. Illusions also work such that you can know about them and sometimes see the trick, but the illusion still works on you.

What this means is this:

Color is a construction of the visual system of our brains. Actual experience of color varies from person to person (colorblindness) and from species to species (birds and bees can see in ultraviolet). Take flowers. Many people can distinguish lime green flowers and dark red flowers, but to some colorblind folks, and to most dogs, they look the same. To a non-colorblind person, perhaps this fuchsia flower and this magenta flower “are the same color.” To a bee, perhaps this pair of hot pink flowers look completely different. Therefore color is not an intrinsic property of flowers, but a construction of the mind whose visual system is interacting with the flower via photons. This does not mean that there is no objective spectrographic signature of a given flower under given lighting, but it just means that that our individual experience of flowers “having” a color is illusory, and saying that a given flower “is” red is just a linguistic shortcut to save time reiterating what we already know about how colors work: that this particular flower, when lit with white light, has surface properties that absorb and reflect a certain subset of frequencies of photons, some of which reach my eyeball and are absorbed by the cones in the pigment layer of my retina, which causes a signal in the nerve fiber layer of my retina to shoot through my optic nerve into the visual cortex in my brain, which has some extra contextual processing done based on the surrounding colors and lighting, which then comes to my conscious awareness, and then I process this signal verbally by applying years of pattern-matching and cultural attitudes around what certain color words currently mean in my language.

This same idea of a shortcut or illusion also applies to introspective experiences, such as the feeling of riding around inside one’s head and peering out at the world. By careful training, we can discover different ways that this compelling illusion breaks down. For example, is my “self” really “in front” of the back of my head? Can I really feel how far the front of my face is from the back of my head? No, the feeling of having a head is just the consequence of a variety of sensations that appear in the mind. Am I in the world? No, actually, the world is in me. Including my head. My head is in me. The direct experience of my having a head arises in my experience of the world, which is larger than my head. <Mind blown emoji> Other realizations arise: beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, and not an intrinsic property of plants, animals, or people. I cannot be separated from the world, nor those around me. Connectedness is foundational, not constructed.

By paying careful attention, we can come to see how our experience of the world is constructed from illusions built on top of simpler, cruder sensations, and how we can connect with the sensations directly to experience things as they are, and not as we assume them to be, as we are conditioned to think them to be. The sensations of our own body can then be seen for what they are: a shortcut or illusion, akin to color. Again the sensation of color is a real sensation but not an experience of the world itself, as it really is, but rather a construction of the mind. The red flower is entirely in your mind (or maybe in other minds, but again, maybe not, as mentioned above—and sadly we cannot ask the bee). The experience of having “a self” or the dualistic feeling of inhabiting the body, or peering out of the face, is also a construction of one’s own mind and not even an experience others can partake in. There are billions of human selves out there that I am unaware of and will never come to terms with (sonder). In what sense are those selves real? Obviously they are real to themselves (or have been determined to be an illusion, to those minds) but for my purposes, I have no information about their experience, their worldly names, etc. and as such they may as well not exist and are indistinguishable from some kind of (realistic) fictional characters.