ABSTRACT
What is the world? How are we to conceive it? The problem is posed in our everyday experience. Presently, there is before me a wide river, trees and a great bridge that tapers into the distance. The scene has depth, movement, light and color. The clean smell of the water, the warmth of the sun, are part of my perception; there are sounds and voices around me. I am aware of a multitude of other things in the background, my discomfort on the bench where I am sitting, the pen in my hand, the image I am calling up. I am aware also that the perception is given to me all at once in its entirety. 1 have no sense that it is constructed out of elements. I seems whole and invulnerable. 1 shift my attention and the world remains fixed. It will be there again when I look away. It presents itself before me and 1 ingest it with my organs of sense. My body is an object that exists for the perception of others. And on the rim of this perception is an awareness of self. This self-awareness is bound up with an inner commentary. My concept of self as experienced is replete with this commentary, which seems to be the equivalent of mind in the context of this perception. But unlike mind, the perception is not experienced as in the mind or even through the mind but as something outside mind in a space which could be vacant if deprived of the objects with which it is so abundantly filled.
