“Experiencing is conditioned by experience, the past. Freedom is the emptying of the mind of experience.”
Krishnamurti
There is an awesome space within the depths of sentience, at the core of the perceptive dimension of awareness, where the experience comes forward of one-ness or what is today known in non-duality circles as the source of all we are. It is as if we are merging and merged with the eyes and ears of a loving, sentient God, indeed, we become that for moments of pure expansion into infinity.
This is the opening of the window to the one soul, where experience and experiencer become one, a fine, deep and flowing compassion itself becomes the very essential quality of perception, flowing through a living wind of pure empathy.
The liberation of awareness from its obscuring entanglements with the pain and grief of sentient person-hood is an experience that can be revisited, used as a position of pure healing, and is a tremendous human service.
At this position of release, knowledge, which until now was a precinct of the thinking mind, and experience, until now a precinct of the feeling heart, become one. To know is to experience and to experience is to know.
We move into a purity of knowledge reflected in the biblical poetry of Genesis in the description of the physical reunion of the male-female polarity – “And then Adam knew Eve.”
Beyond a layer of physical polarity, the opening of this window to pure observation (differing in its sentient flavour from the elevated and disentangled, eternal witness of consciousness), is a key moment in the process of spiritual seekers. The dam that blocked the river of life breaks open. The river flows through the heart into pure non-dual living presence in unity with all that can be perceived.
But then there is the body. The discord. The ‘real’ life. The blood, flesh and raw spit of karma and collective trauma.
In this dimension of pure experiencing, and in the passage back to the raw blood and bones of daily life and physically being here, there can often be a whiplash of physical mind, ego and person-hood. This one, will claim that the experience is absolute, definitive and an end point.
The ego loves end points – how else can it measure itself for size?
What is often misconceived in this, is the nature of experience itself.
All experience, all perception, in real time and space, is already memory. To attach to the memory is to re-invest in the world of form and polarity.
The greatest teachers of our times were aware of this loop, and of the spiralling movement of life and perception. Experience, like knowledge, is always inherently dead, in relation to its source.
This is because experience, even in the pure here and now, is only ever a reflection through perception, just as knowledge, no matter how pure, is only a reflection of wisdom. Our experience is an effect of that which is imperceivable – that which is beyond perception that which has left an imprint on our perception and perceptive memory. Even in real time, experience as it is, is already a dead thing – an imprint of something much more fine and which has a far faster vibration. This imprint is formed on the experiential memory on the level of being.
Our experience of love, or peace, is an experience of the effect of an imperceivable source moving through our consciousness and awareness. We experience the exquisite suffusion of this source on our human form as a perceived “feeling” of love and peace. Experience is all ways the after-effect.
When we identify with experience – no matter how profound – we move still further into the reductionist field of the non-living. In no time, we have to defend it, prescribe it, teach it, argue it out defiantly – and all this is driven by a seemingly bottomless pit of need to grasp, to hold, to end, to close, to define, to slow down and to identify. Yet even this need is arising itself out of the all pervasive empty unity – that which could only be perceived through its effect on the human fabric.
In this deification of awareness, some try to surrender the body into it – a movement that can create an energetic split manifesting as spiritual psychosis. The natural movement is for Awareness itself to be allowed to surrender into the core of the living cells of the body and the planet – surrendering through the continuum of emptiness and through the fine but decipherable membranes where perception meets its own limitation – or the boundaries of its own form.
This need to state the end point as pure awareness – recruiting all the power of spirit and intellect to explain it into absolute form, is driven by a deeper woundedness – the lasting belief in inherent separation from the whole – even on the level of the soul.
In the I AM HERE teaching we often state that you ARE your body. But you are not exclusively, only your body. From the raw physical to the high precincts of perception, here we must say the same. You ARE pure being. But you are not exclusively pure being. You are not only pure awareness.
The liberation of this old belief in no way undermines experience. On the contrary, it gives experience and awareness the fullest right to exist beyond polarity within the great multidimensional fabric of being here, now. It is one perspective to live and teach from. The perspective of the temporarily individual soul in unity with the one great soul.
Yet when that perspective is seen as absolute, we deny the full miracle of physical creation, and a new split is created. Division breeds division, and at some stage, the pure awareness becomes a “state” and at some time, this less living “state” will splinter into the greater emptiness which was, is and always will be the source of all perception.
Soon, the teacher of pure awareness will start to talk of “intimacy”, the antidote to loneliness. This intimacy has “otherness” embedded in its core. How can we be intimate with anything other than the other? Intimacy as a word is born from the language of a process – a process with the miracle of the emptiness and the physical dimension; a process of reunion with the authentic unity that is the source of all perception.
If these words are outrageous to you, please take a gentle, allowing physical breath into the miracle of your multi-layered physical form. Be aware that love is even present in the emptiness within the oxygen that you breath, being carried through your lungs, blood, nerve system to every cell of the body. Does it sound like total surrender in prayer to something greater than anything we could perceive ourselves to be? Yes – this is what it is. A purification of the quality of humility, all the way.
You are warmly invited to let me know in the discussion panel below, if it still seems there is something to defend. 🙂
“Between the banks of pain and pleasure the river of life flows. It is only when the mind refuses to flow with life, and gets stuck at the banks, that it becomes a problem. By flowing with life, I mean acceptance – letting come what comes and go what goes. Desire not, fear not, observe the actual, as and when it happens, for you are not what happens, you are to whom it happens. Ultimately even the observer you are not.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj
I AM HERE – Opening the Windows of Life & Beauty can now be ordered on Amazon and other online book retailers.
