Suchness

Abstract

When openness touches openness.[#1444] For many centuries, meditators have been describing states of direct perception, the experience of seeing what is.Meditation involves a distinct phenomenology of perceiving, timelessly, without any conceptual overlay or any form of judgment, interpretation, or choice.Seeing what is out of a state of pure awareness often reveals another par tic u lar and extremely in ter est ing phenomenal quality-namely, the experience of "suchness."I personally find this to be a profound kind of phenomenal characterone that is also a prime example of what it means to be ineffable, to resist any form of conceptual approximation.Perhaps one could begin by saying that, in ordinary perception, "suchness" is the additional phenomenology of nonconceptuality and openness itself.Sometimes it is recognized, but often it is not.I have already offered a phenomenological reinterpretation of "emptiness" as "epistemic openness."One prediction would be that in all situations in which subject/ object structure fades away, "emptiness" and "epistemic openness" will be properties not only of the conscious mind, but also of what were previously taken to be inanimate perceptual objects.Suchness then becomes the emptiness of appearances in the more precise sense of their being epistemically open, for example in terms of lacking a predetermined conceptual essence.Things appear without conceptual overlay; there is no ready-made conceptual interpretation that categorizes or automatically evaluates them in any way.Accordingly, the influence of past experience is minimal; there is no recognition.Pure awareness is nonreactive, and therefore experiencing suchness also means experiencing the world without perceiving any affordance for action.In suchness, the quality of appearance itself becomes very salient.Interestingly, this also leads to a positive reading of the term "meaningless": The phenomenology of nonconceptuality is the conscious experience of things simply appearing, timelessly presenting themselves 9 Suchness