Observations placeholder
Bergson, Henri - Matter and Memory - Aggregates and perception
Identifier
003713
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A difficult concept to grasp – we are software we are made of software and as we execute we leave a trail of perceptions. But these perceptions are not just those of us as the aggregate, but of every individual aggregate of which we are made. Thus we are the sum total of all the perceptions from all the aggregates of which we are formed.
A description of the experience
Henri Bergson – Matter and Memory
Our body is nothing but that part of our representation which is ever being born again, the part always present or rather that which at each moment is just past. Itself an image, the body cannot store up images, since it forms a part of the images; and this is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localise past or even present perceptions in the brain; they are not in it, it is the brain that is in them. But this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call my body, constitutes at every moment, as we have said, a section of the universal becoming. It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act – the seat, in a word, of the sensorimotor phenomena...........
What it contains over and above what it yields up must then consist, as we have foreshadowed, precisely in the immense multiplicity of the movements which it executes, so to speak, within itself as a chrysalis. Motionless on the surface, in its very depth it lives and vibrates.................
Do what we will, we cannot avoid placing those movements within these qualities, in the form of internal vibrations, and then considering the vibrations as less homogeneous, and the qualities as less heterogeneous than they appear, and lastly attributing the difference of aspect in the two terms to the necessity which lies upon what may be called an endless multiplicity of contracting into a duration too narrow to permit of the separation of its moments