The Intimacy of Experience

‘First Leaves, near Nantes’ – Camille Corot, 1855 – WikiArt

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I will tell you where to be. Be where every experience feels an equally good experience. Don’t be attached to judgment and comparison. These are the mind’s favorite tools and activities. The mind tricks you to believe that experience is an uneven ground. That according to the content of your experience, you will be gifted with either happiness or suffering, peace or conflict, harmony or disorder. So the experience you are having becomes extraordinarily important. We become dependent on what happens to us, and come to dread it. So we retire into the secure place of our habitual self, with its cortège of worry, control, expectation, and manipulation.

There is a place in us where you don’t find experience to be such a determining factor. Where you will not let experience determine you, fix you, limit you. You won’t be shaped by its content. You won’t be made into something, someone, with qualities and flaws, to be judged, evaluated, compared with — the likeness of experience — in fact, just another object. The mind is a manufacturer of objects, entities, persons, fixing the insubstantial nature of your being into a self to be moulded and made either happy or miserable. To be made happy by an experience is to be cheated on by it: we are being manipulated, and made to believe an illusion. To let experience make us miserable is sheer deceitfulness, it is us being easily dazzled by the treachery and artifice of objects.

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