The touch of experience (1)

(📩740 words, a ten-minute read)

To enter a process of mystical training is often considered an intellectual experience, with limited connection to everyday experience. 

In practice, the opposite is true. The everyday experience is the heart of the matter. 

There is no finer example of this than the admonition, given early, to ‘experience, fully, what is happening to you, now.’

At first hearing, this sounds self-contradictory. How can we not experience what is happening to us?

Try it for a moment: fix your attention on a familiar object in your house. It doesn’t matter what it is. Take that apple over there in the fruit bowl….

Look at it, then really look at it. At first you’ll get a reaction from ‘the objector’ in your mind. Oh, not this nonsense again, it might say. I’ve focussed on apples and oranges a hundred times, before. It’s boooooring! 

It is boring, for the first few seconds. The wandering mind doesn’t want its precious single point of attention limited like this. It wants to retain the butterfly nature that it luxuriates in, floating from one bright and juicy ‘fix’ to another. Why would it look at that apple (note the movement to enemy status, here). We’re now dealing with something that’s in the way of our freedom!

At this point, you pick up your hiking pole and whack it – the butterfly mind – and tell it that you’re serious about doing this exercise because you sense something important beneath it. 

Return to the ‘apple’ and literally trap your own mind in its enduring state of reactive resistance. 

Where did that come from? You initiated this search of the experience of the apple, yet a whole wave of resistance followed it…

The truth will make us think … deeply. 

We are not really in charge of our minds. Instead, we have built up – or allowed to be built up – a whole set of layers of resistance to ‘deeper thinking’, most of which follows habit. 

Deeper thinking isn’t our sole goal, but it is a gateway to it. We do need to be able to direct our attention, fully and at will, and the most powerful object of that attention is our experience of ‘the world’

We all know the power of habit. Often, it’s a brilliant thing. I don’t ‘really’ have to think about driving my car. After so many years behind the wheel, my mind-computer has developed a sophisticated and very accurate set of monitors and reactive processes that, basically, drive the car for me, allowing my attention to be brought instantly back into focus if something new or urgent interrupts my journey. 

This is not inattention; it’s the human’s mechanism for not being exhausted all the time – which would be the result if we had to live in the hyper-attentive state, fear-driven that we needed when we were learning to drive. 

So we can see the pattern. Our mind is layers of wonderful processing power which has developed for all our lives. It has every fixed view of its world, based on looking after us and streamlining what we need to focus on.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that, as we get older and hopefully wiser, we want to delve into deeper states of our experience. Why? Basically, because before we leave this mortal coil, we have a deep desire to know ourselves, and we have seen that we don’t. 

When we have this thought – and allow it. We feel an immediate connection with a deeper and neglected ‘layer’ of me. 

What we know is the ‘habitual human’, many of whose characteristics are admirable … but now antithetical to our more sophisticated need to get to the truth of what we see to be our real existence. 

In the next post of this ‘touch of experience’ series, we’ll grasp that enemy apple and go deeper – much deeper…

©Stephen Tanham 2024

All photos taken and processed on an iPhone 12 ProMax.

Stephen Tanham is a writer-photographer and mystical teacher. He is the founding Director of the Silent Eye, which offers a guided inner journey from the state of conscious personality to the awakening of realised personal Self and its world of Being.

There are two blog streams:

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk

(mystically-oriented writing)

and

http://www.suningemini.blog

(general interest, poetry and travel)