Pardon my repetitions. I am exploring the ideas in this, fussing over the ideas, my memories of the various adherants, the practices, neurobiology…
OK, but we all have really quite different brains. There’s that thing about cab drivers in London. Because they have to memorize the complicated disorganized streets of London (much harder than those of Paris, says) they actually change the size of their hippocampus. Well, if as a Christian you focus on relationship and prayer with passion (there are other ways to be Christian but there are general differences between Christianity and Buddhism), you are activating and participating in the amydala. You are identifying with the amygdala and also engaging in an active relationship with Jesus, God and/or Mary.) You may end up with a kind of ‘raw’ experiencing of the world, but you will have that with a very active amydala, identification with emotions, and a relational attitude. A Buddhist who meditates in the mindfulness approach (say Vipassana), is detaching and not identifying with the amydala and emotions, she is not practicing a relational exercise. At the end of this process her experience of raw reality is going to be quite different from the Christian.
The animist Shaman walking in the woods is not having the same experience as a botanist, unless the botanist went through shamanic training. We are all training into paradigms and these affect experiences. But at an even more raw level, we are training different ways of experiencing. Experience is not passive, even in the most Buddhist or meditators. The brain is creating and anticipating experience, the emotions are involved or not, there is goal seeking or the goal is to merely notice (iow the goals are different). 'There is an enormous difference between how one experiences the face of someone else if one is trained to detach from emotions, focus on sense stimuli,
or
if one has trained to engage with experience interpersonally.
Even if, somehow, one had no filters, the dynamic relation with what is outside, the other, is very different. My raw and your raw will be different. (and this is leaving out genetic differences. The brain is heuroplastic but there are genetic tendencies and of course these affect how we train our brains also. What we choose to emphasize).
I think the idea of raw experience fits better a Buddhist experience also. I don’t think that is the goal of Christian practices - in general, as a tendency. The Christian beliefs place tremendous value on what is beyond everyday experience. The numinous. Animist shamans could be seen as doing this, but they don’t split the realms into immanent and transcendent. It’s all immanent to them.
The Western mind places what it would call visions, dreams, hallucinations as added onto raw experience. To the shaman the Westerner has ADDED a filter to keep them from noticing true essences and real phenomena that are there if you don’t have cultural blinders.
One person’s raw is another person’s filtered reality.