What Remains When Experience Falls Away
Lo que permanece cuando la experiencia se desvanece
A student reflects on the sense of relief that comes from recognizing something deeper than thoughts and sensations, and the teacher explores what remains when all content of experience is subtracted.
What Remains When Experience Falls Away
A student reflects on the sense of relief that comes from recognizing something deeper than thoughts and sensations, and the teacher explores what remains when all content of experience is subtracted.
I liked what you were saying about there being something deeper. The way I heard it was: there's a thought, then a sensation, and then there's something deeper. When we were just at the level of sensation, there was a feeling of "I'm wrong," or something like that. But then, recognizing that there's something deeper, it did feel freeing, almost like a relief and a release. Beyond the sensation, it was reassuring. If you hadn't brought that element in, it would have felt more, well, depersonalized. But it depersonalized it in a good way.
Nothing of what we experience defines what we are. It's very logical if you go deeply into it, so it has a very rational aspect. It doesn't matter whether it's understood rationally, but if you want to look at it from that perspective: everything that is happening and everything that has happened has been known by something that is not those things. And this is experiential. You can check in your own experience and see it.
What you are experiencing right now
Right now, anything other than what's happening in this moment is memory. The only way you know anything beyond what's occurring now is through memory. What you experience right now is sounds, sight, sensations, and thoughts. Anything that is not the sounds you are hearing now, the image you are seeing now, the sensations from your body now, everything else is thought. All of your story, all of the story of mankind, is known in thought.
If you were to come into this world as we are born, this moment would appear out of nowhere. You wouldn't know there is a world outside your door. You would be looking at something you wouldn't even know is a screen. It would be a screen with others like us, but all of that knowing of what everything is exists in the world of thought.
The subtraction game
Now, imagine you take away thought. Just put it aside. Don't reference it. You can do that: you can acknowledge that all of it is thought and simply not reference it, even if it's present. It's as if you're playing a game, and the question is, "Who are you?" But you cannot access your thoughts to answer. That's the rule of the game. The question "Who are you?" starts to get tricky.
You can think, but you can't use memory, for example. So now what you're left with is sounds, which you understand through words learned from memory. So let's allow memory so that you can at least understand sounds, because you only know these words and what they mean because of memory. We know this: a certain part of the brain can be shut down through a concussion, and the understanding of language is gone. Sound becomes just something. Yet the person who has had that experience is still there.
If a person loses the ability of hearing, the experiencer is still there. If you lose the ability of sight, the experiencer is still there. If the part of the brain that brings sensations from the body is shut down (for many, this happens at some part of the spine and then everything below is gone), the person is still there. They might have legs but not experience them. The person is still there. By "person," I mean the experiencer: consciousness.
What remains untouched
I'm using a subtractive experiment so that you can see that all of that can fall away, and the consciousness, the awareness that we are, is still there. And that is what is untouched. Untouched in the sense of unharmed, not affected by what is happening.
When there is a lot of fear and then the fear is gone and you are not remembering the fear, there is no fear, and you have not been touched by that fear. It hasn't changed you. It's like having a headache: the headache is gone, and you are not now a person suffering from a past headache. There is something that remains untouched by everything you are experiencing.
Seeing it more deeply
Recognizing this more deeply is one thing as a philosophical pointing. But if you see it in your own experience, you will realize it more and more. You will be able to enter an experience knowing that when the experience passes, something that went into it will come out on the other side.
Can you repeat that last phrase?
The more you see this, it becomes hindsight.