Catching Up

The epoche - the phenomenological reduction, or first and fundamental step - is Husserl's gift to my thinking, such as it is. Reading excerpts from Husserl's Ideas and Paris Lectures was the first time I'd entertained the possibility of putting all experience on an equal basis with regard to my...well, with regard to my regard for it. My thinking was as real as my sense experience.

The effect was almost immediate: I could consider all of my experience with the same tools, the same attitudes, the same love, acceptance. It didn't matter the source of the experience, whether sensually and articulateable, or otherwise. So now, I could take seriously the 'otherwise', just as I did the sensual and articulated. I could now try to understand the whole big experience. My thinking is as real as my visual, auditory, etc. experience.

So I've had another revelation. I'm surprised I hadn't seen this a long time ago.

If Husserl showed me I could expand the universe of my experience by accepting thinking as real - as real as sensual experience, or as not-real; equally 'there' - then why hadn't I expanded this out to my dreaming?

What if I assumed that the dream world I experience when I fall asleep is just as real - or not-real - as self-sustaining and intelligible to attention and observation as thinking and as sensual experience?

But what's really shaking me up is the corollary: my waking life is a dream.

Rene Descartes already did all that work - arguing not too badly that it's very difficult to tell the difference between the two, since so much of the stuff of dreams is in fact the same as in waking life. For him, though, that was but one demonstration among many others along the way to reaching his final cogito ergo sum. For me it's the destination: waking is dreaming.

About the same time I was reading Husserl for the first time, I was reading Rudolf Steiner for the first time. But if it was Husserl whose work first showed me that the phenomenological reduction was possible, it was Rudolf Steiner's work that has opened up and explained that world - including the dreaming aspects of it.