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.

Experiences are usually received from the point of view of a separate, self-contained entity, and that’s where the difficulty lies. For there is no such entity. When we realise that our self is only made of our aware, undivided, infinite being, then experience ceases to govern us. We discover that we as the One are untouched by experience, not invested in its dictates. So experience loses its hook on us, and is seen to be neutral when observed from the position of oneness. It cannot hurt or influence us in our identity. It may have some effects at the objective level, affect our body, influence our mind, but will have no effect whatsoever on the bearer of experience, on the one that gives experience its container. Our being is not the subject of experience — it is its indivisible and unborn nature, that nothing can affect or diminish.

Experience is just what it is: an experience. It is reality having a try. It is a play being put on. It is the temporary form of what we are. Experience has no power on who we are, unless we give it that power. So what we understand ourself to be is of utmost importance. If we see the verity of what we are, without the distortion of a belief, without the projection and superimposition of a self separate from the world, then we will disarm experience, will render it innocuous, benign. So it all comes down to the realisation of what our nature is. Whether or not we know the truth of our being will condition both the way we see experience, and its power to condition or affect who we are.

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‘Clearing in the Bois Pierre’ – Camille Corot, 1855-60 – WikiArt

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So don’t be caught in the net of experience, and be like its prey. Stay a remote watcher, an intimate lover of what is happening, but do not paradoxically distance yourself from it. This is how you get the bite, by not embracing your experience. Distance is the expression of fear and control. This is where you can be harmed — by separating from experience, by using it, taking advantage of it, protecting yourself from it, by not engaging, being timid. Experience is requiring you, it needs your presence, which is its presence too. This is a love affair. From this position of love, experience is discovered to be one with your being. Out of oneness, it is seen as being inside you, an expression of your being, and is therefore not confrontational. This is in this absence of confrontation, in this intimacy with experience, that experience becomes a flowering, or enhancer of your being. Experience is here to encourage you to feel being as your one only and utmost identity.

It is important to not corrupt experience, and make it the expression of ignorance, of separation, depriving ourself of the inbuilt unity of experience, its flavour of love and beauty, its intrinsic intelligence and order. When the nature of experience is forgotten, or unseen, our actions bear an ignorance which we then inflict to others and to ourself. Through the intercession of fear, confrontation, or manipulation, experience consolidates our belief in being a person. It makes our life a war and a market place, where experience is used, controlled, suffered, to aggrandise, diminish, or victimise ourself. What a strange idea to have separated from experience, to have extracted ourself from it, broken that pact, ruined that intimacy.

There is a glorious freedom in knowing our true nature. We as being can give our whole attention to experience. We cease to be afraid of it, and to invest our wellbeing in it. So hope, expectation, control, lose their importance. Objective occurrences cease to define who we are, and to have us in their grip. We are free, aware, content of our own being. The load of experience as a provider of happiness is released, and we feel great relief. Experience then expresses its hidden essence of love, beauty, and harmony. We become incapable of conditioning our inner peace to a good or a bad experience, for all experiences are equally the product or manifestation of the one, infinite, peaceful being that we are. We see the body and mind to be just an experience within our experience, to which we lend our essential being. In fact, we come to have only one experience, which is the experience of the One.

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Text by Alain Joly

Painting by Camille Corot (1796-1875)

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Website:
– Camille Corot (Wikipedia)

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