Well, "Awareness of awareness" is certainly both the blessing and curse of this strange 'humanness' we are afflicted with. It allows us to both explore 'being' from the inside...whatever we conceive 'inside' to consist of, and to rationalize about it. There's (usually) no direct penalty for stupid reasoning, as there is for bad hearing or eyesight.

Phenomenology tries to highlight the difficulty of 'standing to the side and evaluating our own thought processes and motives'. The very process of trying IS the explanation, and we are always reduced to secondary methods, usually involving the linguistic categories I go one about, in order to even have a discussion about it.

But... as to your example of the "chain of barriers" :, ""beliefs" are kind of tainted data because they are so unrepeatable, plastic, and subjective. And therefore, they must be ruled out".

   There is a disconnect there....yes, beliefs ARE "kind of tainted", but if they are at all logically possible, I do not assert they must be ruled out. All I really argue for is restraint in automatically ruling them IN- because they ARE in that funny category of requiring belief. Ghosts are 'different' from NFL linebackers.....you KNOW not to get in the way of the latter, but several people can stand in the same room and differ about seeing wispy 'presences'.

I know a woman who 'sometimes' talks to 'little blue angels' that sit on her shoulder and give her messages from....ummm 'departed souls', etc....but she admits that this is a **model** to focus her thoughts and feelings and that she is probably doing both sides of the conversation...it 'feels' very real, and is 'almost' like talking to someone 'on the other side'. She acts as if it were true in order to process the feelings, and does not like to dilute the experience by admitting to me OR herself very often that it IS just a model.
Now...*I* don't require/use such a system, but I can sort of see its usefulness...and *shrug*...people are different.
But...you see the fine distinction between using the model and asserting it as fact that she has communication with
'other realms'?


(and poor Bergson & Plato?? Why not Ryle, Strawson, Wittgenstein, Aristotle and Democritus being marginalized by popularized ephemeral writers who create entire systems out of whole-cloth in order to make a buck? ☺)