On the Word

If you have read the front page, you have met the sentence this project stands on: there is experiencing. And if you are like most people we have said it to, something in your mind has already started building. Experiencing — so, someone experiencing — senses, you assume — and experiencing what, exactly? An experiencer on one side, a world on the other, and the sentence redrawn, before you notice, into a little diagram of subject, verb and object.

That build-out is not a misreading — it is English doing what English does. English keeps reaching for a doer and a done-to — its default sentence shape, though not its only one — and when a sentence declines to supply them, the reader's grammar supplies them anyway. Noticing that happen — catching your own language in the act — is the first finding of this project, available within seconds of meeting it.

So it is worth being precise about what the word is and is not doing here.

↑Why this word

Because English gives us almost nothing better: the natural candidates each fail in their own way. Awareness may be the simplest name for what we mean — but it is a noun, and a noun presents a thing; English has no verb behind it, no awaring. Knowing has a verb, but in English it goes straight to knowing-that, knowing-about — facts, information, a knower and a known. Being asks nothing of anyone: a stone is; the sentence slides past without touching the one thing it was meant to say. Consciousness means five different things in five different theories. "Experiencing" survives because it is the word in the family that keeps its verbal force — an occurring, not an object, even when a sentence has to hold it in a noun's position — and because what it names is not tied to the senses: a dream is experiencing with every sense shut down; so is a thought.

↑What the sentence does not say

There is experiencing — not: there is someone experiencing, nor something being experienced, nor senses at work. And not: there is a thing called experiencing, sitting somewhere. The someone and the something are the first two steps away from the starting point, the first inferences built on it — and this project's whole method is to notice where the building starts.

↑English can say this — just

We already own the construction: it is raining. No thing rains; there is raining going on. The physicist-aphorist Lichtenberg said Descartes was entitled to exactly this much: not I think, only it thinks — thinking is occurring. There is experiencing is that sentence, taken one step further.

↑Three ways to say it

Even then, no single English framing survives on its own. There is experiencing can be heard as an inventory — the there is a grammatical placeholder, but the ear still hears experiencing listed among the things that exist. Experiencing is puts the word where English puts its entities, and the mind obliges. Experiencing occurs makes it sound like an event, something that starts and stops inside time. Each framing fails in a different direction, and that is the method: say it three ways and let them correct each other. And then say it a fourth way: alone. Experiencing. — the copula and the last predication both gone, one word at the edge of what language can do. The five short lines on the front page are this correction, performed in order, ending where sentences end.

↑Older languages had less trouble here

Ancient Greek had a middle voice — a form for actions the subject is inside of, rather than simply doing or simply receiving; the word phenomenon, that-which-shows-itself, is a fossil of it. Latin could say vivitur — "living goes on" — an impersonal construction that names no one doing the living. Sanskrit comes closest to supplying what English lacks: verbs of awareness that work as verbs (cit and its family), and — in Vedanta's usage — bhāti, "it shines," pressed into service for awareness's self-showing. Shining needs no object — light is not light of something — and nothing could be less dark. If the sentence trips you in English and would not have tripped you in three older languages, the trip is telling you about English, not about the sentence.

↑Why not invent a better word?

It has been tried, in earnest, by David Bohm — a physicist who saw, better than most, that subject-verb-object grammar smuggles a worldview into every sentence, and who built an experimental verb-first language, the rheomode, to escape it. It did not take, and he did not pretend otherwise. An invented word means nothing yet; a borrowed word gets bent into a noun the moment English syntax touches it. You cannot escape your language by leaving it — only stay, and stay careful, which is what this project does: it keeps the English word, and withdraws its extra baggage every time it is used, rather than once.

↑The name that carries no grammar

The project does keep one term built to resist the bending: 0,0 — the coordinate, the origin, the point before any assumption has been made. A domain name allows no comma, so on the web it is written 0x00 — the separator replaced by a crossing, which a programmer's eye may also read as the null byte, a machine's own zero point (a resonance the project notices without claiming). 0,0 is a designation rather than a description: no tense to shift, nothing for a metaphor to grip — it holds the ground. The word — experiencing — is how a human reader walks there. You need both: the word can be felt but never quite trusted, and the coordinate, which can be trusted, cannot be felt at all.

A note on sources: Lichtenberg's aphorism is Sudelbücher K76; Bohm's rheomode is Wholeness and the Implicate Order, ch. 2; the middle-voice, impersonal-passive and existential-construction readings follow standard reference grammars, compressed for a lay page; bhāti's awareness usage is Vedanta's, per the tradition's texts in the project corpus (FND-05). The grammar-to-ontology reading is the project's own, and specialist review — linguistics, classics, Sanskrit — is on the project's named-review list.

Hold the sentence the way the project's own development comes to hold it — a happening, with no one behind it and nothing in front of it, the word doing its imperfect best. That reading is built, not assumed: the sentence itself claims less, and the primer walks the building in order.