Invisibility

"It seems preposterous to think of [the human] as invisible. We are visible to ourselves every day as a physical body. But there are many ways in which we manifest our essential invisibility.

For example, close your eyes.

Your form is invisible to you; how do you know you exist?

You are aware of the body's weight; you can hear, smell, taste and touch. Nevertheless you are real to yourself only in terms of ideas.

You are an invisible nucleus around which many thoughts are revolving.

Now open your eyes.

Are you the form that you see, or that inner being you were just now conscious of with eyes closed?"

This is the start of phenomenology, amiright? In the sense that, by closing my eyes, I block out the howling stimuli from the eyes, and in the sensorial quiet, experience immediately the other senses, and more astonishing, the first real glimpse of my invisibility.

You can see, too, how phenomenology invents paradoxical, contradictory, preposterous, ridiculous, hilarious jargon, because we're talking about what we can't see, what isn't 'sensible'. Using the language we have - all of it grounded, at least, in sensible phenomena - forces us to 'glimpse invisibility.'

But here's what I don't get: why don't phenomenologists talk about meditation?

In any scientific paper, you include a section on the methods used in the research - including equipment, protocols, bio samples, etc., even if those methods are fairly routine.

Why don't phenomenologists describe how they came to the views explicated in the essay at hand? What were their methods - not only the rules of inference, or existential logic, but what sources and modes of knowledge and information and stimuli did the author invoke or experience?

I once interviewed a phenomenologist about phenomenology, and somewhere in the middle of an hour long mostly one-sided discussion and explanation of the method and its products, the interviewee made the only mention of meditation.

She had several times articulated a thread of the phenomenological method in a way that seemed to me to immediately imply the practice of meditation, but she didn't go in that direction. I thought perhaps I was making a spurious connection, until she again seemed to be heading toward the obvious conclusion about meditation, but ended her consideration with a rhetorical counter example, "Unless a person had a really deep meditation practice..."

That suggests a fundamental disconnect in the practice of phenomenology.