ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the concept of experience as understood in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Zen Buddhism. It proposes that the Lacanian theory of the Borromean knot provides a multidimensional framework that illuminates how the mentioned disciplines and the different notions and dimensions of experience interact and intersect one another. Although consciousness is found conditioned by the object and the place the subject has in the structure, awareness has the function of witnessing the effect the structure has in subjectivity. For Zen, awareness is something both natural and hard won and the result of an in-depth exploration and practice of the body—mind and subjectivity. Although an ego-psychology of consciousness or of intentionality and Freudian psychoanalysis both emphasise “consciousness-raising” or making conscious the unconscious, the traditions differ with respect to the emphasis given to the unconscious mind. The traditions also differ with respect to how the unconscious is understood.
