The Experience of It

And as you all know, our experience is all we have, period, end of story (no pun intended)

-- Chris Marti





This statement is a big deal I think and just give me one of those "ah ha"moments for sure.

Chris, can you relate to this -- you are in the middle of a painful, difficult, emotional experience and, instead of fighting it, instead of struggling, instead of justifying, acting out, etc. etc. -- you just let go completely and watch. And, then, boom -- it's just ... OVER, like it was all an illusion, just a puff of smoke. ???

Sure, the facts may remain (though with me a lot of my upsets aren't based upon anything real like an actual family or work or health crisis) but the turmoil vanishes.

To me this is one of the greatest benefits of practice.

Interesting.

Experience.

Huh.

The idea that all we have is our experience seems so right. However, then, what is "we" and what is "have?" Maybe those are the places where illusions and stories come in?

Maybe these bodies we inhabit with their needs for sex and food and air and (love? comfort? security?) just HAS to take all the raw real experience and turn it into something personal and possessive in order get all the important stuff we need?

Also, the process we've discussed of emotional experiences vanishing in the light of awareness -- this can happen, I think, without pain or emotion. The process can work constantly, with any concept, story, feeling (good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant) point of view, etc. -- as long as one is looking in the right way.

But, I don't think (this is so open for debate I know) that a sense, or a feeling of being alive, of being a separate something, a self can be disappeared through awareness. Once can forget about it for a while under many different circumstances within or outside of practice activities, but it will always come back --it just doesn't have to be a problem. Thinking of Jackson's "phantom limb" idea -- I wonder if in the real life examples of phantom limbs if the feeling of still having the ambutated body part ever goes away.

I placed a coffee cup in front of John and asked him to grab it [with his phantom limb]. Just as he said he was reaching out, I yanked the cup away.
"Ow!" he yelled. "Don't do that!"
"What's the matter?"
"Don't do that", he repeated. "I had just got my fingers around the cup handle when you pulled it. That really hurts!"
Hold on a minute. I wrench a real cup from phantom fingers and the person yells, ouch! The fingers were illusory, but the pain was real - indeed, so intense that I dared not repeat the experiment.

– Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, p. 43. ( Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998 )

One of Ajahn Amaro's favorite phrases, and one of the most powerful and pithy concepts, for me, in all of practice, is 'The buddha seeing the dhamma'—as in, 'Instead of "me and my problems", it's "The buddha seeing the dhamma.'

This seems to be related to what you're describing: once we have relinquished self-view, then instead of living the world with our perspective lodged directly and fixedly inside our own experience, we are able to live in the world and view our actions and our experiences as natural phenomena, in orderly relation to the systematic way things are—the dhamma.

And if we are able to achieve that buddha perspective, then of course we are also the dhamma seeing the dhamma. If we shift our perspective and are able to recognize that our experiences, our problems, our goals, our obstacles, all have no fundamental existence in the world—there is just dhamma—then we too are dhamma. If we are able to make that shift, then the buddha:dhamma division is almost as meaningless as the me:my problems division, because the personal subject becomes entirely superfluous. So maybe, to complete your analogy, we're neither inside it nor outside it, because we and it are the same.

"So maybe, to complete your analogy, we're neither inside it nor outside it, because we and it are the same."

Funny, when I was first trying to explain what had 'happened' and I really didn't like words like 'enlightenment' and 'awakening'-- or, god forbid, 'God'-- I took to using the phrase 'the All of It'...

I haven't thought of that for a long time.

"Because awakening and enlightenment are being presented as if they are
the product of magic."

What do you mean, Chris? Can you give an example?

No, no, Chris, I didn't think that!! lol

I guess 95% of the people I know *don't* believe it is "reserved for special people," so I wasn't sure what sort of specific groups or teachers you might be referring to (but I see you mean a lot of typical ones).

My question though , and this points back to something that I think was touched on in another thread, is did you experience awakening as something that was technique driven? ie what, in your experience or understanding, is the relationship between practice and awakening? Because for me I practiced and practiced (like a mad thing, in retrospect), but really every shift along the way seemed to simply happen by itself. It's not like I finally grasped how to experience things in a certain way. It just unfolded, in a way that seemed to me to be quite "magical" (without the "k"). In the context of conversation with more religiously minded people we talk about effort and grace, but perhaps you have a different way of saying it?

That's at least three new threads. I'd say probably, no, no, yes.