NOEMAYA

Phenomenological Reduction, henceforth referred to as PR, has become an obsession of mine since the August of 2013, so its 10th anniversary is coming up. It’s the most valuable event of my life because it was nothing short of leading me to a glimpse of God and immortality. There are many such methods and ways of accessing this deepest stratum of life, mainly developed and exercised within various spiritual and religious traditions, such as meditation or nondual realization whereby one is able to be reintegrated into the nondual essence of what we take to be our fragmented reality. However, PR, in my opinion, is the first and only method within western philosophical tradition which allows the philosopher to actually transcend the world of phenomena. Up until the development of PR by Edmund Husserl and his assistant Eugene Fink, western philosophy remained either too rationalistic or too idealistic and speculative. But in PR, one is for the first time able to access an experience, a transcendental experience, of Reality as it is, an experience that transforms the practitioner down to their roots. In short, PR, which is a radical self-reflection on the part of the “I” of experience, is a method by which one transcends the world of phenomena, and naturally transcends the human mask which is nothing but a transparent veil over that which truly is.

Most of my days and hours over the past 10 years have been devoted to making this method more known and available to seekers of truths who, like myself, were not fully satisfied with either the scientific approach or the spiritual approach the nature of reality, mainly because one has to take so much for granted or act in faith in order to access these meditative methods. People like us cannot simply believe; we must see, and we must see for ourselves. The good news is that PR, in my opinion, is the only method that requires nothing, no prejudice and no faith, for seeing the truth as it is.

I admit that I’ve had a hard time in my mission to make PR more accessible to seekers; firstly, it is a method within phenomenological philosophy which is neither a popular philosophy nor easily accessible to readers with no philosophical bent. On top of that, many figures such as Heideggar and other contemporary continental philosophers made Husserl’s original project only more obscure simply because they all seem to have failed to fully perform the PR and access the transcendental experience. Husserl himself, who wasn’t a very organized writer, didn’t help either; in his published works, he barely writes about the details of the steps in performing the PR; he was so preoccupied with delineating the possibilities of his phenomenological philosophy in his lifetime that he didn’t devote much time to explaining the very method, i.e. PR, that could make these possibilities available to other philosophers.

The only figure other than Husserl who has made the most contribution to clarifying the significance of PR and rescuing it from common misunderstandings is Eugene Fink, Husserl’s assistant. In variety of papers, and also in the Sixth Cartesian Meditations, Fink takes pain to highlight what PR really is, that it’s not simply a speculative and intellectual exercise or meditation but rather a “breakthrough” to the very source of reality.

PR, according to Fink, consists of two internal moments called the epoche and the reduction proper; it’s not necessary to go into these aspects at the moment, and therefore I refer to both as PR. According to Fink, our mundane, everyday experience of the world, and here including every aspect of our human existence, or what he calls human immanence, is a mere phenomenon-of-being, appearances appearing to the Transcendental Onlooker (=Transcendental Witness) who seems to have become captivated by these phenomena as is continually accepting it to be true and real. The world-phenomenon and included in it the human immanence, therefore, is nothing but a belief construct, a captivation in acceptedness as he puts it. An analogy from the domain of human experience is when we’re captivated by an idea or daydreaming and become forgetful of what’s happening around and in front of us; things are there but we simply don’t notice them anymore because our attention is consumed by a fantasy. The captivation-in-acceptedness that Fink talks about is somewhat similar to this situation. Transcendental subjectivity which is the only thing that truly is, and is constantly on the task of constituting (or creating) the phenomena of experience, is concealed from our view simply because we’re so oriented (captivated) by the phenomena of being that we fail to notice the underlying becoming.

In light of what we said, PR is the practice of breaking free from that captivation with beings, whether these beings are physical, mental, or ideal/spiritual. How does immortality figure into the transcendental experience? Experience is experience of phenomena, and among these are phenomena of temporality and spatiality, that is, duration and extension. Though our humanity is part and parcel of this world-phenomenon and hence entangled with ideas of space and time, transcendental subjectivity is itself not a thing that endures in time or extended in space; it is that which has duration and extension as its projections or fantasies, as its objects of experience. Therefore, transcendental subjectivity, and hence transcendental witness, is immortal, not so much because it enjoys an indefinite prolongation in time but rather because it is altogether free from bounds of time and temporality: it is the eternal, living present which projects this presence as if out-of-itself and into the world-form; this makes the now always appear to us as if it had a preceding moment (past) and an upcoming moment (future.)

As I said earlier, Fink was rightly concerned with the misunderstandings of the PR that represented it as a mere human meditative practice or intellectual exercise. In fact, it is not the human person who performs PR but rather the transcendental onlooker; the human person, along with the world-phenomenon, is precisely that which keeps the Onlooker hidden from view. Let’s hear from Fink himself:

We wish simply to indicate and emphasize that the reducing I is the phenomenological onlooker…. In the universal epoche, in the disconnection of all belief-positings, the phenomenological onlooker produces himself. The transcendental tendency that awakens in man and drives him to inhibit all acceptedness nullifies man himself; man un-humanizes himself in performing the epoche, that is, he lays bare the transcendental onlooker in himself, he passes into him. This onlooker, however, does not first come to be by the epoche, but is only freed of the shrouding cover of human being.

Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Phenomenologizing as the action of reduction)

There’s so much to be said about what reduction is and what it is not, and even more to say on how to actually perform it. Much of what I have been able to collect and put together as a way leading to the performance of PR is to be published in my upcoming book. It needs to be added, however, that PR is not just a straightforward sequence of steps that one can read about and then perform so easily. One needs to know a little about phenomenology in order to even awaken to the possibility of such experience. That’s the intention of my book, to put together as little phenomenology as needed in order to begin the practice of PR. Think about the practice of PR as the challenge of climbing Mount Everest. The first thing to do before climbing is to actually go the Himalayas and to the base of the mountain. Some basic phenomenological knowledge and practice is required to do that, to take one to the platform form which one can launch oneself into the actual practice of PR.

Here’s the idea: our everyday deportment to life and experience is filled with so much natural and intellectual prejudices that we have lost the ability to see, the capacity for pure, phenomenological seeing. The preliminary phenomenological knowledge and practice before the performance of PR is needed precisely for that reason, to expose the inherent prejudices in the way we look at the world-phenomenon. In fact, by certain amount of practice of phenomenology, one should come to see clearly that the very existence of the world and our human being is itself nothing but a prejudice.

In performing PR, we do not deny the existence of the world and hour human cover but rather get to see them as what they are, as a persistent Heraclitean flux of appearances that contain within them being-sense, the sense of independent existence, which we simply have accepted and are captivated by them through this acceptedness. As Fink says in CM, “in actuality the world just is not, what alone is is only transcendental subjectivity and its constitutive life, the life of performing acts of meaning.”