Areo~“that which makes something what it is” is, in Essence, God, or Being. At the level of consideration you are choosing to limit yourself to, the word “essence” might refer to “idea,” as in that “chair” embodies the idea of “comfort” and “utility,” or a car or an elevator embody the idea of “immediacy.”
~I “labeled” what I experienced as Essence because That is what it IS. There are no commands inherent in Revelation, only a Standpoint that re-organizes the hierarchy of experience according to its Foundation on Essence, which is synonymous with Being, yet nameable as a facet.
o_milly~sounds more like a liine (sic) from the poetry of Wordsworth’s Ode Intimations of Immortality than Descartes fundamental cogito premise. Don’t know that Ode. Will look it up. Descartes, on the other hand, mis-stated the actuality of the dynamic. He might better have said: “I AM, therefore there is Light to my awareness of ideas and thought.” Understanding proceeds from the Star, not up to it.
~Can you suppot (sic) this claim, say, by relating essence to a creature w/o a mind – an apple, for instance? Where is the apple if you are not present as awareness to perceive it? Where is the apple in any case?
~Really? Men are most certainly able to say: “essence” is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Of course, men can say anything. And when most men say “fundamentally,” they are yet speaking of the field of perception called subject/object, or relative field. That is the quale of distinctions and limits dependent on, yet One with Essence. But whatever is said is nevertheless a symbol manipulated in mind. It is always a description, always incomplete, only a pointer to an aspect of an idea, and never the “thing” itself, that thing being experienced in an entirely different context and meaning for each “perceiver” despite the commonality of the symbol.
