Firstness

We experience the world through an act of imagination.

It’s real, of course. If I look over a landscape, there is something “out there,” beyond me. But that’s not what I experience. Tree, grass, river, and mountain are words—categories. What I get is a splash of color from light reflecting off of an object. A stirring of the air from the rustling branches, the babbling water, the swishing meadow. No matter how deeply I engage these things with my senses, I never experience the thing itself in all its objective glory.

Rather, I build a representation of it, in the words of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. My sight might be better than yours, and I may see more detail and a more subtle gradient of color. Your hearing is probably better than mine, and you pick up sounds I miss. Both of us do our best to make sense of a scene with the data we can gather given the limitations of our perception—human and personal. We correlate it to memory, compare it using our reasoning faculties, and arrive at a picture that allows us to understand what we’re dealing with, and what might follow from it.

The group of signs that describe the initial sensing capacity belong to “firstness.” These are the bare impressions of the five senses, before we connect them to anything else, before we remember, before we name, value, or assume. These signs give us our first experience of a world we can never know directly. We’ll never start any closer to the truth.

That means all of our higher order functions, like memory and emotion and logic, follow from these impressions. They’d better be good!

If we’re going to learn to live autonomously, let’s start with the most basic way we interact with our environment. Look up from this page and notice an object. Any object. Resist the temptation to name it, or associate it with anything else. Don’t comment on it. Don’t recall its history, your plans for it, or other objects like it. That would involve reading ahead into secondness and thirdness.

For now, let it stand. There was a moment before you settled on this object when you sensed it but didn’t realize you sensed it. Then, as now, you took in many other sensations too, but they never reached the level of consciousness. Go ahead and find a different object—that first one is becoming too familiar. Let details like color and texture emerge into your attention without using any words to describe them. Let them be meaningless. If you can touch it, reach out and do so. Sense it in the most rudimentary ways that you can mange, then notice a third object in the vicinity. Do the same.

Much is made about “fact checking,” knowing sources, doing your own research. There is no more primary source than personal experience. If it’s not yours, then at some point, someone else experienced something in this bare form, added layers of detail, extrapolated from it, and relayed it before it was relayed again.

The Ancient Greeks had three varieties of knowledge. To know because you heard it from someone else is doxa. To know because you reasoned it from evidence is episteme. To know because you experienced it personally is gnosis. Many people don’t trust their personal experiences, preferring to rely on outside experts. All three forms of knowledge have value—the trick is knowing when to use each and how much value to place in it. To forfeit gnosis is to enslave yourself to the gnosis of others. Personal experience is a powerful antidote to dogma, and in true empirical fashion, corrects the errors of our own faulty reasoning.

Our initial impressions can be flawed, but it’s important to note that the flaws usually come at the level of secondness (misrecognizing things, falsely relating them, or failing to grasp a relation) and thirdness (clumsy judgments). Even an optical illusion operates at secondness. At this basic level, we sense it or we don’t, to whatever degree we are capable and interested. When our later judgments are questionable, it helps to return to the raw sensations.

Signs of firstness happen in the present. They are irreducible individuals. No two can ever share a name or a description, because there are always differences. We get from here to the past or the future only by way of abstracting from these data points. These signs work on the oldest parts of the brain, and it’s difficult to even become conscious of them without rushing into at least secondness. As such, they make up our core self—the unspoken awareness of things like existence, space, time, movement, separateness from the rest of the world, basic needs and capacities, and everything going on beneath the surface of consciousness. When the core self is warped from faulty impressions, the consequences are dire. At worst, we’re talking insanity, or at least the kind of major dysfunction that requires someone to follow you around all day. But more commonly, a minor issue means that our misconception of ourselves doesn’t match up to the world very well. The autobiographical self is built on the core self. When the foundation rots, some degree of delusion follows.

Likewise, if there are problems with the core self and we successfully address them, we can expect the structures on top of them to reorient. Imagine an earthquake that, rather than destroying the building, knocks the whole wobbly thing into immaculate balance.

The next time you see a bird, take a moment to look at it. Don’t call it a bird, or a sparrow. Look at it, listen to it, and realize that everything we experience is at first an irreducible individual at this place in time. Names sand off the parts that we can’t compare. They reduce, so that we can predict what general things a sparrow might do next. But those predictions are only as good as the assumptions they’re based on. Taking in the present allows for more data and better assumptions.

Attention is crucial. Are we taking in signs of firstness? Secondness? Thirdness? All are fair game, and we don’t move through them in a linear fashion. But problems occur if we find ourselves unable to move in the most natural sequence, from firstness to thirdness. The flow has to be able to go from sense, to relation, to judgment. If I take in a statement of thirdness, “All sparrows are stupid,” and go the opposite way, I’ll begin to focus on sparrow actions that seem stupid to me, and end up sensing based on dogma and ignoring evidence that contradicts the statement.

Equally problematic is rushing through these initial signs. Taking in a few quick data points and slapping a judgment on it amounts to skimming the cliff notes and faking a book report. Instead, we should take input from the rest of the world. Let it have its say, don’t rush to talk it over.

The exercise that follows is the most important in the entire series. If you fail at every other one, but master this, I firmly believe that the rest will take care of itself. The temple stands on its foundation. We built our current worlds from firstness as babies with no memories or language. If something no longer serves, let’s return to the beginning and build it again.

Exercise 1

If our core self, and everything that comes after it, starts with raw sensation, we need to improve our ability to sense. There are two components.

The first is the abilities of our sense organs. There are limits to how much we can improve our ability to see, hear, etc., but as with everything else in life, we get better at what we practice. We take the time to relax and focus on visual detail; on subtle layers of sound; scents that waft by us; the texture of on object, or its weight against the skin; the nuances of food.

That means the second component is attention. We miss what we ignore, and for many people, screens and idle thoughts get much of the traffic. In order to improve our senses, we need to have the desire to improve. Then, we direct our attention to the task. Brush aside stray mental images and plans for later. Resist the urge to utter words, even in your head. Do nothing but sense. Not only does this gift of attention benefit the sensory capacity, but it trains the ability to pay deeper attention for longer stretches.

1. Allow some object to catch your attention. Refuse to recognize it, name it, or make any statements about it. Just let it impress upon your vision. Then move on to another object. Then another. Repeat this process for at least 1 minute per day.

In Detail: Your object of attention can be a tiny speck on a piece of paper, the shape of a distant mountain range, or anything in between. Don’t decide, let your attention work subconsciously. Everything is fair game. I find that quickly moving from one object to the next, noticing as many bare impressions as possible, makes it easier to avoid the higher order work of cataloging what you see. With practice, you’ll find yourself adding rich layers of detail to familiar objects and settings. What you used to see will seem like a bare framework, begging to be filled.

Perform the exercise for at least the standard of 1-minute per day, for 3-7 days.