The Nature of Experience

Reality, unreality, good and evil, self and no-self

What does it mean to call what appears dream-like, illusory or undivided?

Notice your experiential field right now. I'm guessing you see a multitude of different colors and shapes that thought has learned to label and identify as different things: chairs, tables, lamps, etc. Yes? But at the same time, can you see that it all appears as one whole picture, one whole field? It's like a painting that contains different colors and shapes, but it's one whole seamless painting. Or a movie that contains all kinds of people, objects, landscapes and events, but it's one whole seamless moving picture. Multiplicity/unicity is not either/or, it's both/and. Our experiential field reveals infinite variation and diversity, but at the same time, no actual separation. It can’t be pulled apart. It’s one infinitely varied, ever-changing, undivided, seamless whole.  

As for the illusory nature of everything, just notice that whatever happened an hour ago is totally gone. There may be a memory (arising now), but that memory is notoriously unreliable and incomplete. It has no substance. The event itself is totally gone. Your childhood is totally gone. Last year is totally gone. In fact, the last second is totally gone. Everything is vanishing the instant it appears. The illusory sense we have of continuity and of stable, persisting forms is very much like what happens with the pages of a flip book. In fact, each instant is totally new. And yet, this ever-changing flow of experiencing never departs from Here-Now, this timeless, eternal, infinite, bottomless presence.

Your kitchen table looks solid. It feels solid. But as I understand it, physics will tell you that it's not solid in any way. The reason you can't put your hand through it has something to do with electromagnetic forces. And the more deeply physics goes into any apparently solid thing, the more they seem to find empty space.

We believe the table is "out there," across the room, separate from "me," over here. We need that illusion to function. Short of a serious brain injury, it won't entirely disappear, nor would we want it to. But you can also notice that the table (and your body, and the whole universe) appears right here at zero distance in this present experiencing, in which there is no findable boundary between inside and outside. In direct experience, you are this unbound, unencapsulated field of aware presence in which everything appears and disappears. So is the table (or the whole universe) right here with no gap at all, or is it out there? Again, it’s not either/or, but both/and. Both perspectives are real.

(As an aside, I highly recommend Zen teacher and former science writer Steve Hagen's excellent book The Grand Delusion, as well as Rupert Spira's books The Transparency of Things and The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of mind and Matter; and the work of two scientists, Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffmann. These all provide viable alternatives to the materialist-physicalist-substantialist model that most of us have absorbed from the culture at large. I’m not saying that the Consciousness Only models that they each propose are The Truth, but reading them can open the mind to new ways of seeing and feeling things. As can the work of David Hinton on the perspective of Taoism and early Chan, the Chinese version of what later became Zen in Japan. I’d recommend Hinton’s book China Root for starters. He describes a perspective deeply rooted in the “dynamic and generative ontological tissue” of the natural world and the “open space of consciousness.” It has an earthiness that offers a very different flavor from the transcendence described in Advaita. You’ll find them all on my website recommended book list.)

In any case, there are many theories about how everything works and what this reality most fundamentally is. Is consciousness more fundamental than matter or did consciousness evolve out of matter? Is there a singular universal consciousness that dreams multiple dreams as each of our unique viewpoints or movies of waking life?Are matter and consciousness even different things? I'm not sure anyone can know the answer to such questions with absolute certainty, and I don’t feel any need to know. Whatever we experience or perceive may say more about the possibilities of human consciousness than it does about the nature of the universe at large.

So, I don’t hold any model as The Truth. Models are never the actuality they model, and theories are always only theories. I favor epistemological humility over certainty, and I find profound freedom in not knowing and not needing to know—holding no view at all—simply being this present experiencing in all its myriad dimensions. I resonate whole-heartedly with my friend Robert Saltzman when he says that, “This right now, free of the need for conjecture or speculation, feels entirely sufficient.”

As I see it, we can’t stand apart from and see all of reality; we can only be reality—and we can’t ever not be reality. Reality is all there is; and all there is, is reality. And actually, everything we see—the apparent forms that appear in everyday life, as well as what we see in dreams or on 5-MeO-DMT, LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA or Ayahuasca, or anything we think or imagine—is all reality. It appears in infinitely diverse ways, but it’s always showing up as present experiencing—just this. Everything we think, feel, see, theorize and learn is appearing in and as experience. That’s all we have for sure.

The notion of finding The True Reality, as if it were some particular “thing” that could be found and grasped at last, is rooted in delusion. The one who seems to be having these different experiences, the one who seems to be in this or that state of consciousness, the one who hopes to realize the Truth or stabilize in some particular experiential or behavioral state, the one who seems to go back and forth between “getting it” and “losing it,” or between encapsulation and boundlessness, that one is a kind of unfindable mirage—it seems to be there, it feels like “me,” but this “me” cannot actually be found.

Whatever this is (let’s call it reality), it is ever-changing, unresolvable, ungraspable and utterly un-pin-downable, yet it never departs from the present-ness and immediacy of this infinite and eternal Here-Now (aware presence). It is always just this, however it may appear. Our worst moments of confusion, upset, and so-called entanglement in delusion are no less reality than our most profound mystical experiences or moments of apparent clarity. 

Am I saying there is no good and evil, that nothing matters?

As many of you know, in talking about the interplay of unicity and multiplicity, or relative and absolute perspectives on reality, I often use the metaphor of two waves in the ocean, one of which we think of as deluded (or evil) and the other we think of as awake (or good). As a kind of shorthand, I’ve sometimes labeled the one who is awake Buddha, and the one who is deluded Hitler. Both are equally movements of the ocean, both are equally water, but the difference is that Buddha knows that, while Hitler is caught in the delusion of being an independent wave, separate from the ocean, out to conquer or control the other waves and somehow "purify" the ocean. Their experiences and actions will be different as a result.

But it’s important to see that there is no permanent, unchanging, separate, autonomous, persisting individual who is permanently either awake or deluded. Reality, like the ocean, isn't divided up that way, and it doesn’t hold still.

Thought creates over-simplified, abstract categories and hardline divisions—good and evil—and that kind of conceptualizing is a useful function in many ways. We need that kind of differentiation and discernment in everyday life. But it can also lead us into many delusional ideas, such as those Hitler was prone to believe, and those result in much suffering and confusion.

No “Deluded Person” or “Enlightened Person” can ever really be pulled out of the flowing whole as some static, persisting, substantial, independent, autonomous “thing” apart from the whole. Like chairs and tables and dogs and cats and oceans and waves, these are all conceptual abstractions that thought has carved out of an ever-changing whole. What we label “delusion” and “enlightenment” (or “good” and “evil”) are both choiceless movements of the whole, inseparable from one another, and neither ever departs from being this indivisible aliveness that we all are and that is all of us.

In our human experience, we can certainly differentiate between ignorance and wisdom, and our ability to discern such differences is vital to our lives as humans in the movie of waking life. I'm not suggesting we should eliminate this capacity. In human terms, there is obviously a significant difference between Buddha and Hitler that we would be foolish to overlook. But our ability to also recognize unicity or wholeness is a very liberating possibility, one to which Advaita, Buddhism. Taoism, and many other traditions and people (myself included) point.

In relative reality, we have the apparently formed world and the ability to discern differences. In the absolute, there are no persisting forms and no divisions—it is an infinitely varied, seamless and borderless whole from which nothing stands apart. Relative and absolute are not two. Like those drawings that can appear to be either a young woman or an old woman, or a duck or a rabbit, relative and absolute are two ways of seeing the same no-thing-ness. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, and in negating or overlooking either one, we suffer.

And remember, this isn’t about turning any of this into a metaphysical certainty about the nature of the universe and then regarding it as The Truth. In my view, it’s much more practical. It’s about life and noticing what different perspectives and activities bring forth. For example, I notice that when there is caught-up-ness in the me-story and the thought-sense of separation and solidity, it tends to bring forth reactivity and suffering, whereas when there is simply open aware presence and the flow of present experiencing, it tends to feel like and manifest as love, compassion and an ease of being. I notice that hate always feels reactive and in some way delusional or false, whereas love feels like the deepest truth. I also notice that thought and will-power can’t make caught-up-ness in the me-story stop happening, nor can they produce love and compassion on command.

In one moment, there is seeing from wholeness or unconditional love, while in another there is caught-up-ness in the delusion of separation. But all of it is a kind of inseparable dream-like appearance in consciousness. When that is seen, we see everything as our own Self. We may still do everything we can to stop things we feel are unjust or to wake up from our own patterns of reactivity and addiction, but we will do it all in a very different spirit than if we see any of this as "other" than the one reality that we are.

What Am I? What Is This?

The only thing we know with absolute undoubtable certainty is being here now as aware presence and present experiencing, whatever label you want to give that. Any label is always slightly misleading because it seems to make something (an object) out of ungraspable no-thing-ness. 

We humans seem to conflate that undeniable sense of aware presence with the thought-image of "me," the apparent author of my thoughts and maker of my decisions, the character in the movie, the figure in the mirror, a kind of soul-like entity encapsulated inside the body looking out at an alien world. But if we examine this me-sense, we can see it is a mirage created by thoughts, mental images, sensations, memories, etc. 

If we ask, what am I? and look to see (not think about it, but look and feel into it), do we find a little me? If we do, what is beholding it? In my experience, when we get to the bottomless bottom, we find nothing at all, or absolutely everything. We find open aware presence and borderless present experiencing—no inside or outside. 

The so-called self is more like an activity than a thing. Some have called it selfing. And there are some aspects of it that are functional. We need some sense of location, boundaries and identity with the body in order to function. But those functional aspects can be here intermittently as needed without the self-image and the whole identity as "me" that we are often protecting, promoting and defending. 

Differences can be noticed without imagining separation. We habitually tend to see this present experiencing as a bunch of separate things in conflict or competition with each other, a perspective which gives rise to fear and desire, but we can also see it as one whole painting, one whole movie, one whole undivided experiencing with infinite variations in how it appears.

We can’t entirely dismiss the sense of separation that arises and the mystery of lover and beloved united in love or killing each other in war. That too seems to be included in this all-inclusive reality. Perhaps this is why Zen prefers to say, “Not one, not two,” instead of simply, “Not two.” We can’t land or fixate on any one-sided viewpoint.

But it can be noticed that the seemingly opposing polarities always go together and only exist relative to one another, and that this manifestation couldn’t show up without these polarities or differences. In understanding this, there can be an embrace of the whole catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek famously called it—an acceptance of what is—an unconditional love that is profoundly liberating.

And we don’t need to do this acceptance. Everything is always already allowed to be just as it is. Because it is always just as it is! We can relax because it is impossible to depart from this infinite wholeness. And if we don’t feel relaxed, if we feel tense, we can simply be tense! No problem! What a huge relief!

Is there no place for practices and efforts?

Yes, of course there is! There’s room in this all-inclusive reality for absolutely everything! Everything has its place. And all of it is a movement of this indivisible whole from which nothing stands apart.

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Love to all…