The Fish That Cannot Find the Ocean
El pez que no puede encontrar el océano
The teacher explores why being cannot be known as an object, using the metaphors of fish in the ocean, the noumenal versus the phenomenal, and the lamp of recognition.
The Fish That Cannot Find the Ocean
The teacher explores why being cannot be known as an object, using the metaphors of fish in the ocean, the noumenal versus the phenomenal, and the lamp of recognition.
This is what the metaphor of the ocean points to. Not the wave, not the drop that falls into the ocean, but the story of two fish meeting in the ocean. One asks the other, "Where is the ocean?" The other says, "What is that? I don't know." The first fish says, "I'm looking for the ocean." The second fish replies, "I don't know what that is." So the first fish swims away, determined: "I'm going to find it."
The fish that cannot see water
How is that fish ever going to know the ocean? Eventually it meets another fish who tells it, "This is the ocean. You're in it. It's everything. It's everywhere." But the first fish can't grasp it: "What do you mean?" It cannot know the ocean because it doesn't know "not ocean." Only take it out of the water and then it goes, "Oh, that's the ocean!"
But that's where the metaphor fails, because you cannot leave being in order to experience not-being. You cannot step out of being so that you can step back into it and know it as a thing. That's where the ocean metaphor breaks down. If the ocean were infinite, if it were literally everything and everywhere, the whole universe, then it would be a better metaphor, because you could never go outside of it. And even still, it remains a metaphor, because the ocean is something that is experienced. It is part of experience. What I am pointing to is before experience.
The noumenal versus the phenomenal
This is also referred to as the noumenal versus the phenomenal. The phenomenal is what you see, what you hear, what you sense, what you taste, what you touch, what you receive, what you imagine, what the mind creates: sounds, images, feelings, space. All of that is phenomenal, and that is not it. What is left if you take all of that out is the noumenal. That is being, or what I am pointing to with the word "being." Someone else would use a different word. It is just language, just semantics.
The lamp of recognition
Then there is the metaphor of the lamp. There is the one who knows it, who is consciously aware of being, versus the one who is unaware of being but is being nonetheless. The lamp, the fire, is the knowing of it. Or, if you want to be really precise, the remembering of it, the realizing of it. That is why it is referred to as a realization, or a recognition. It is not the achieving of a thing that is not there. It is a recognition, a realization of that which is always already there.