Whatever might be true of the awareness of "an ordinary person" - the Buddhist teachings are directions on how to not be caught up in that way. However you want to put it. Clearly the teachings are not just a matter of how ordinary unawakened people are already cognizing.binocular wrote:I think what Alex (and myself too) have been getting at is that an ordinary person operates with an awareness that there is a meta-level, and as such, direct perception is not possible, or at least not particularly meaningful.kirk5a wrote:The Bahiya sutta is not describing "experience through a conceptual filter" or an insentient state.Alex123 wrote:Anyhow. In any case, the interpretation of direct experience is always through some sort of conceptual filter. Christian will analyze direct experience through their perspective, Buddhist through theirs, and atheists through theirs. It is impossible to get around it unless one is permanently in insentient state.
Compare:
A person, whose mother tongue is German, and who reads a text in English (a language that they have learned later in school, but which they understand relatively well) is actually reading the text through the conceptual filter of German, their mother tongue.
IOW, a German cannot understand English on English terms; a German can only understand English through the conceptual filter of German.
Similarly, a person, whose native discourse (or life philosophy or religion) is not Buddhism, and who reflects on a Buddhist proposition, does so through the conceptual filter of their native, non-Buddhist discourse.
People don't come to Buddhism as tabula rasas.
Arguably, only a tabula rasa could have direct experience in the plain meaning of the term "direct experience."
I find that traditional religious exegesis is often intra-religious: suitable for people who have already converted, who are already members of said religion, who are already convinced of its truthfulness. But it is not suitable for the people outside of said religion.
Which is why preaching to non-members tends to come down to "Just shut up, don't think, don't ask any questions, and just believe and repeat what we tell you." So it is much like the way a child learns their mother tongue: by immersion and with no translation. While all the languages we learn later, we learn mainly with the help of translation, in reference to our mother tongue.
Similar happens when we try to adopt religions or philosophies later on: our ideas are bound to be biased or skewed in some way. This is then sometimes called "culturally specific bias" and the like.
I see no way to get around that.
As for whatever difficulties arise as a result of cultural predispositions, I don't see them as any kind of insurmountable difficulty for someone who sincerely wants to understand. After all, people in every culture have seeing, hearing, sensing and cognizing.