Eugene begins by saying he is going to carry on from where he left off last time, to expand on what was said then. He starts with the question of centres in the human being related to “certain organic structures in the body.”
Although it is usual to start with a definition of the subject matter, ‘sentience’ is undefinable. A synonym is ‘feeling’, which is the basis of all knowledge. Objects within sentience can be defined by the subject, but this subject is the observer, sentience itself. So sentience is the perceiving subject of phenomena. It is the consciousness, internal to which all objects appear. “When sentience analyses itself and verbalises its analytical process, sentience is then called ‘consciousness’. When sentience is on guard against a very wide field of possibilities, we call it ‘awareness’.” To become conscious we have “to cut reality into bits.” If we do not do this then we may be sentient, we may be aware, but we are not conscious.
To enable us to define and analyse the contents of our consciousness we have developed five senses. Of these, “Seeing is the tyrant because seeing gives you the defined edge whereby you are led to separate, from sentience, it’s content.” “Instead of looking for significance in sentience…we look for significance in the object.” (He writes S for ‘sentient being’ and P for ‘phenomena’, all things posited in sentience.) If we refer to sentience we can say nothing other than that it is infinite and that it is that in which all phenomena are posited. But of P we can say a great deal: “A primary particle pluralised, like a lot of little ball-bearings, and then arranged in patterns, constitutes the analysable universe.” “Ultimate reality is polarised as sentience and power.” Since we cannot say more of sentience he says he will concentrate on the “power positing the phenomena within it.” All phenomena are circumscribed, finite. The more we can circumscribe a situation, the more easily we can deal with it.
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