One Field of Experience
Un Solo Campo de Experiencia
A student describes the stark contrast between being caught in mental drama and dropping into present-moment awareness, and the teacher explores how thought, sensation, and perception are all part of one undivided field.
One Field of Experience
A student describes the stark contrast between being caught in mental drama and dropping into present-moment awareness, and the teacher explores how thought, sensation, and perception are all part of one undivided field.
I feel like I really see the difference between this imagined world, this identity structure and living in the mind, versus when you just come into presence and you are in that empty looking, empty observing. Everything is just here. Everything is fine. I was creating drama in my head. It was like a different level of functioning, a different dimension or frequency that you tune into. But when you tune into the actual moment, it is completely different from what I was in before.
The difference between the movie and the couch
Yes. It is the difference between watching a movie and believing that is your reality, versus sitting on a couch, immersed and enjoying being immersed in a movie. That immersion is one form of experiencing, and you are not bothered by the movie. This is also why imagination can be valuable for creating life; it is a very beautiful thing. But the problem comes from what you were describing.
When the world of thought is seen as just thought, when you step back, metaphorically, into that spacious, open emptiness, even there you could have a lot of thought, a lot of imagination, a lot of thinking. If it is recognized to be thought, then it is simply part of all of it: sensation, perception, sound, sight, imaginations, thoughts.
Thought as recycled perception
The mind only creates what it has learned through perception and sensation. Your thought works through images, sounds, and imagined sensations. Then there are the sensations that come through the skin, the perceptions of sound and sight that appear from a different mode. But it is all one field. There is no division between sight and sound. There is no division between sensation and thought. It is one field of moving perception, sensation, and thought.
No inside, no outside
From the clarity of that perspective, seeing that this is all one moving field of experiencing, time and space only exist in interpretation and imagination. There is no actual symbolic meaning other than for communication and function. In certain ways, to talk about internal and external: if there is no external, there is no internal either. You could say it is all inside, but inside of what? There would have to be something outside for something to be inside.
Right. There is no boundary.
It is a subtle thing, but it can go deep.
I like it. Thank you.