"To ask oneself whether the world is real is to fail to understand what one is asking,
since the world is not a sum of things which might always be called into question,
but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn….
There could not possibly be error where there is not yet truth, but reality, and not yet necessity, but facticity."
Merleau Ponty.
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"Correspondingly, we must refuse to attribute to perceptual consciousness the full possession of itself, and that immanence which would rule out any possible illusion.
If hallucinations are to be possible, it is necessary that consciousness should, at some moment, cease to know what it is doing,
otherwise it would be conscious of constituting an illusion, and would not stand by it, so there would no longer be any illusion at all."
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"Yet we do not cut consciousness off from itself, which would preclude all progress of knowledge beyond primary opinion,
and especially the philosophic examination of primary opinion as the basis of knowledge.
All that is required is that the coincidence of myself with myself, as it is achieved in the cogito, shall never be a real coincidence,
but merely an intentional and presumptive one."
"If there is one striking difference between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on the one hand and Yogācāra Buddhism on the other, it would concern the function and type or ‘reductions’ employed by each.
Though one may find glimpses of Husserl's eidetic reduction, phenomenological reduction, transcendental reduction, etc., in Yogācāra,
one will find a reduction in Yogācāra not readily evident as such in the Western phenomenologists.
I shall call this the ‘karmic reduction.’
"causality is conspicuously absent from Husserl's reductions,
it lies at the core of Yogācāra phenomenology.
Yogācāra put forth the notion of psychosophic closure (vijñapti-mātra) as a way of making us aware that our karmic dilemma only occurs in that sphere;
that positing a sense of externality to things is only the most basic of the self-blinding moves
that keeps us enmeshed in the appropriational web we conceive of as a world."
