I think you’re correct. Experience can be broken down into a foreground, a diverse background, and an intuitive whole which encompasses both foreground and background and constitutes the meaning of any given experience. And as you pointed out: the foreground always presents itself before one or more of the inner-bases that are also a part of the background that the puthujjana appropriates as "mine".aflatun wrote: So to take a mundane example, if I'm looking at a chair and thinking about how repulsive it is, as a puthujjana I'm occupied with what I see standing behind the experience and appearing to me (and with the "me" that the thing is appearing to), and I am not then aware of the fact that both of these things are merely aspects of the entire experience as such?
From Ven. Ñanavira’s letter to Hon. L. Samaratunga:
As I understand it, the whole of what we take be our self is the all-encompassing, intuited, and immediate experience of experience itself. Change is manifest within that whole, but given the commonality of any such change the whole itself remains unchanged. And “remains” is the key word here, in that in the whole’s duration we see it as transcendent and independent from the parts that it depends upon for its presence, i.e. its existence. As subordinate wholes, parts vanish -- but as parts of a greater whole they linger from within as images. What a thing is -- i.e. its meaning -- is derived holistically from the top down, cf. footnote 21 of Ven. Nyanamoli's essay -- while its existence is derived from the bottom up.My past experiences of A are the (mental) associations that the sight of A now has for me. If I now see a chair I automatically have at the same time certain images, either implicit or explicit (in which latter case we call them 'memories'), of myself sitting on things like A or of seeing other people sitting on them. The actual sight of a chair, together with an accompanying image of sitting on one, enables me to say — without any hesitation at all, without any rational act of inference whatsoever — 'This is for sitting on'. The (negative) image of sitting is given together with the (positive) sight of a chair, and determines the chair for what it is. An act of inference is only involved if the object with which we are faced is unfamiliar (i.e. we have no past experience of it, and present images arising in association with it are in adequate to determine it); and in this case we have to set in motion the complicated machinery of thinking about it, or perhaps we may even have to acquire the necessary 'past experiences' by experimenting with it. But even in such a case as this, the inadequacy of our images associated with the actual sight of the object are enough to determine it immediately as 'strange object, to be treated with caution'. In other words, even when we resort to inference to determine an object, it has already been determined (as 'requiring investigation') by negatives (i.e. images) given in immediate experience together with the positive object. [L.51]
I believe the "being of things" is their presence. Bhava is associated with the being of a self. Cf. Ven. Ñanavira's Shorter Note on Vinnana:aflatun wrote:On a related note then, what exactly is the "being of things" being referred to? Does he have "Bhava" in mind when he's saying this?
Consciousness (vinnana) can be thought of as the presence of a phenomenon, which consists of nama and rupa. Namarupa and vinnana together constitute the phenomenon 'in person' — i.e. an experience (in German: Erlebnis). The phenomenon is the support (arammana — see first reference in [c] below) of consciousness, and all consciousness is consciousness of something (viz, of a phenomenon). Just as there cannot be presence without something that is present, so there cannot be something without its being to that extent present — thus vinnana and namarupa depend on each other (see A Note On Paticcasamuppada §1 7). 'To be' and 'to be present' are the same thing. But note that 'being' as bhava, involves the existence of the (illusory) subject, and with cessation of the conceit (concept) '(I) am', asmimana, there is cessation of being, bhavanirodha. With the arahat, there is just presence of the phenomenon ('This is present'), instead of the presence (or existence) of an apparent 'subject' to whom there is present an 'object' ('I am, and this is present to [or for] me', i.e. [what appears to be] the subject is present ['I am'], the object is present ['this is'], and the object concerns or 'belongs to' the subject [the object is 'for me' or 'mine'] — see Phassa & Atta); -- Ven. Ñanavira (Shorter Note: Vinnana)