The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.
― Leonardo da Vinci
Between the intoxicating vibrations of our thinking mind and the robust, indefatigable fact of our physical body, there is a river – the river of pure experience.
This river runs between our ideas and our actuality. It flows between our imagination and our reality. Its torrents arise out of the space between the silent impulse and the sensation, between the darkness and the sensuous arousal. Its currents move between our attitudes, habits and reflexes, and our genes – the minute templates of our physical presence here, now.
Like all rivers, the river of experience is in constant flux. It rolls and winds, unique in each snapshot of perception. Its ripping surfaces reflect patterns of light and shadow, glinting in a blessed conversation with the sky above. At the same time, its undercurrents can be slower, more powerful, and pulled by deeper forces.
It is in this river of experience that we come to life, and the deeper we investigate the river, the more deeply life comes to us.
What is a thought, a fact, or an imagination, but the experience of that mental movement?
What is a yearning, an emotion, or a depth of feeling, but the experience of those sentient moments?
What is a physical sensation, a sight, sound, touch, taste, or smell, but the experience of those sensory impressions?
All that we could ever think ourselves to be, all the vast cumulation of memory living through us, and all that we could ever imagine ourselves to be – all this is alive as the river of experience.
The river is a changing, turning, through an evolution of impressions of who we are, what we are and where we are. Yet just as it defines us, the river can only itself be defined by its perpetual movement.
It flows with the vast paradox of life. Unchanging, it never stays the same. Indestructible, it dies to every moment. Ungraspable, it sustains all life. Undeniable, it willows each definition into the equanimous stream of its perpetual unfolding.
All knowledge, no matter how evident, hard-won, proven, attested and scientific, has arisen through the river of experience, and it is only through the experience of the fact that it continues to live.
Even the absence of experience exists as an experience. Even negation, absence, falsity, and the lie can only appear as twists and spirals within the ongoing movement of the river of life. From the supreme creator, through to our worldly authorities, oracles, conspiracy theorists, and the dictatorship of collective mind – all are but part of the same river, turning, reflecting, and undulating as one inseparable, multidimensional spiral of life. All arise in sensation, through experience, as experience, out of experience.
The work of mind, the play of the body, and the grace of the heart merge and unify within the river of experience. Even the sense of separation and split flows there, undivided from the whole cosmic circulation of water through ice, fluid, and cloud.
What is experience? What is this unifying source in which body, heart, mind, inside, outside, self, and other flow as one elemental manifestation of all that we are? How to navigate this river, and who would be the navigator?
Each droplet of the river is a moment of consciousness. In that timeless moment, past and future arise in the present. In that one molecule of water, subject and object merge as one happening. The perceiver is one with the perceived and the seer is one with the seen. Here, there is the love story of life occurring within the push and pull of oneness and differentiation.
This conscious moment can be at once a single drop, and at the same time the universal ocean of life.
Yet there is depth to the momentous. Within the unity there is a vibrational quality in which experience is flavoured with subtler resonance. This teardrop can be alive with the atmosphere of pain, the next with joy, the other with the succulence of physical yearning, and the next with the frustration of vital force. This resonance creates structure in how one molecule dances with the next. It is inseparable from a morphic mist of quality in which each atmosphere is wondrously unique, essentially immeasurable, and incomparable.
Some atmospheres are ones of yearning, reaching into the ether toward completion. Others are unwell, seeking their own disintegration as the last promise of future reunion with wholeness. Here there is a sacred rhythm of destruction, chaos, and reformation, a healing current of creation.
Subtler still, there are atmospheres that are instantly rewarded, alive with harmony and the fulfilment of pure becoming. These are alive in the subtle potency of well-being and yet expanding in formless unity. Unaltered by collisions of greater density, they gracefully move through the empty spaces around and within each moment of becoming.
These atmospheres are not just the mists hovering over bodies of water, at the threshold of transformation. They are also the mists alive within each molecule of water, humming melodies of a formative nature, shaping whole structures of being and impregnating the earth of the physical form.
These moods and states are found in the space between and around electrons, brushing the membranes of molecules and spiraling through the epicentre of the biochemical bond. They emanate out of and return to the field of pure awareness.
When we are aware of our loneliness, we are that awareness out of which a resonance of loneliness sound. As this loneliness infiltrates our blood, our muscles, and our bones, we become that ache of loneliness, which arises within that pure awareness – like a question.
It is a question about belonging, about reunion, about coming home and becoming the home we never left. Out of awareness our consciousness sprouts and touches the area of pain, blessing it with memory – the memory of what this fracture of experience is in essence. The touch of consciousness initiates the sense of wholeness within the sense of separation. And often, easily, in this way, a crunch of pain becomes a touch of bliss, as the river of experience flows on.
The currents of the river move with a formula of creation, of transformation, of evolution and of manifestation. Just as light effects every moment of form, we are naturally steered toward bliss and fulfillment.
From great heights we have swooped down into the river of experience. We have felt her freshness and changeability, her newness, and her antiquity. We have tasted her moments and we have bathed in the presence of her being. We have travelled within the moment of the single molecule to the charge of vitality and its mists of emotion. Here, intoxicated by the perfume of nascent beauty we have fallen through the crevices of conscious control. Within that enticing resonance, we suddenly, penitently knew ourselves as an unadulterated awareness, boundlessly existing through all the empty spaces – even within the emptiness of the densest bodies of form.
And yet, within that single, individual water drop, the facilitator of the vast universal ocean of life, there is more. The journey is perpetually beginning.
Deep within the river of experience, not beneath, behind, or above, not underpinning or transcending, but within, there is the sublime mystery of all that we are. Ubiquitous and so subtle that we might call it empty.
This is the perennial, indivisible space existing through and between all currents of experience. This is the space that allows dimensions, variations, differentiation, and movement.
Prior to awareness it is self-identical, everything and nothing, being and non-being, neither light nor dark, neither subject nor object, not I and not other than I. It is that which allows the ecstatic reunion of life with itself. It is the area in which touch occurs and so is the facilitator of bliss. It is the source of all perception and here, where it perceives itself through the many apparitions of beauty, it wonders at the revelation from the inner to the outer.
Without this self-identical space of infinite and eternal singularity, without this wellspring of the self, no passage of experience could occur, and the river could not flow.
At the core of all matter there is this expression in which the hidden becomes visible. Its command, rippling through all the rivers of the universe is to ‘be’, to manifest, to elucidate the melody of the living. In resisting the command of being, we suffer resistance and we lose our direction, bereft of the sense of purpose. And these are sad corners of the river, where experience slows – for a while. In moving with the command of being, we arise with universal power, unique within the manifold field of unity.
Yet in that instance of expression, in the release of manifestation, we are unconditionally received. All moments of the river, from its newborn reflections of light, through to its subterranean passages through darkness, are received as living impressions into the unified field.
And here it the river of experience flowing through all dimensions, charged with the vast mysteries of perceptive emptiness, the living core of all we are. Here is the command and the fulfillment; the release of life, and the sense of reward; the question and the answer; the unknown and the knowing; the confusion and the meaning; the insentience and the sensing; the purpose and the passion.
The river of experience flows through degrees of light, a conscious, aware, emptiness, spiraling through the vastness of creation and always found, intimately, in this tender, naked, scarcely earthed moment of your unique becoming. Guided by wellness through paths of least resistance, the passion insists on the unfolding mystery of the living, the awesome sustaining of a perpetual cascade into wholeness.
This is the solemn prayer of this work: to show you some of the majesties of all you are, that together in unity, we will unfold through these words some of the passion – the turbulence of the living miracle – that timelessly waits to awaken through you in this at once sublime and yet radically human moment of divinity.
