Awakening

 We mentioned before that the is a difference between a true spiritual path (leading beyond anguish and suffering) and a false spiritual path. A true spiritual path involves essentially a habit and state of mind which  we call philosophical awareness or consciousness. The false spiritual path completely lacks it. This state of mind we could attempt to describe as transcendental philosophical consciousness (i.e. awareness, analysis, inquiry)  of the totality of consciousness itself (the immanent world). We use the abbreviation TPC.  One of its oldest and most magnificent attestations is found in the Pali nikayas (with the Socratic dialogues and Pyrrho) and more recently to a certain degree in Hume and Kant. This is what Schopenhauer said concerning Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (the analogies of experience): never has the world been looked at from a greater distance.  Our project is not only to say something about what TPC involves but also to discuss its epistemic and logical aspects, a subject of uttermost difficulty. And of central concern is of course its close relationship to introspective psychology and so-called psychologism (as well as the ambiguous hydra of the term 'idealism'). There is always a danger that TPC may lapse back into the modes of non-TPC consciousness. That is, a false objectification of TPC insight and knowledge. Such an objectification involves forgetfulness (of constitution, condition and presupposition) and loss of insight.   TPC crucially involves a way of seeing and questioning (bracketing, suspending) the totality of (conceptual, intuitive, affective, volitional, egological, spatial-temporal, somatic, etc) experience. The total awareness of the total sphere and process of thought and what is beyond all thought and what thought is actually behind and the fact that it is behind it. TPC is a gradual affair,  an ideal which is worked towards by practice and training. TPC traces back and unveils the unified common source of all branches of philosophy. Poetical language achieves its highest function in the expression of TPC. 

All this we have written about in our compiled Philosophical Monologues collection.