THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: STEPHEN BATCHELOR
by contemplativeinquiry
Stephen Batchelor offers some thoughts on immediate experience and concepts of mind, soul and reincarnation.
“I had noticed that when listening to the song of a bird, it was impossible to differentiate the cooing of the wood pigeon, on the one hand, and the hearing of it, on the other. Conceptually the two were different, but, in immediate experience, I could not have one without the other, I could not draw a line between them, I could not say where the bird song stopped and my hearing of it began. There was just a single, primary, undifferentiated me-hearing-the-birdsong.
“Being-in-the-world means that I am inextricably linked into the fabric of this fluid, indivisible, and contingent reality I share with others. There is no room for a disembodied mind or soul, however subtle, to float free of this condition, to contemplate it from a hypothetical Archimedean point outside. Without such a mind or soul, it is hard to conceive of anything that will go into another life once this one comes to an end”.
Stephen Batchelor, 2011, Confession of a Buddhist atheist New York: Spiegel & Grau
contemplativeinquiry 
This is beautiful. The connective energy of giving and receiving where all boundaries dissolve and become entirely illusory.
Yes!
Batchelor navigates the tightrope (or the veil) of experience beautifully, capturing amongst other thoughts the instant of perception as creation too: in quantum-speak, the observer actively participates in the object being observed.
Thanks for this comment. That’s pretty much how I read it too.