In your world are people objects or experiences?

Most of us seem to see others, and ourselves, as objects that “have” experiences. The problem with this is that an object cannot “have” an experience.  An object is part of an experience. (If you disagree, try to say what an object is without ever referring to experience.) By imagining that objects can “have” experiences, we unknowingly treat our own experience as primary – literally as the underlying basis for all existence, although we don’t admit or realize we’re doing this.  This means we’re also treating everybody else’s experience as secondary – and a very distant secondary at that.

By seeing people as objects that “have” experiences we actually fail to recognize that other people truly exist – in the very same sense that we ourselves exist.

To let others truly exist in your world, you have to come to see experience itself as primary – rather than your own experience.  This amounts to a kind of dying while living, because the illusion that your own experience is primary is the same as the illusion that your self is an object that “has” experiences.  Seeing that experience itself is primary is the death of the self-as-object – and its joyful rebirth as part of the extraordinary, ever-changing content of experience – no longer a separate object that “has” experiences, but a flowing, dancing self-as-process in experience.

Next time you’re somewhere with a lot of people – a train station, a crowded shopping area, etc – ask yourself “What’s going on here?”  Is it a physical space full of objects that happen to be having experiences?  Or are all the people you’re seeing, and you, vast numbers of moments of experience, in which all the objects, thoughts, concepts, spaces, and times of the universe have their home?

As a newborn baby you didn’t yet know about the material world, or space, or time. For you, experience was the only reality.

As you grew up, you came to interpret your experience as resulting from an external world of space, time, material things, and other people and animals who seem to have experiences too.

Gradually, you came to experience the external world as the primary reality.  You thought you knew what the external world was.  You forgot that it was never something you knew directly.  It was always an interpretation of the experience in which the sense of being you – and of there being an external world – exists.

The external world seemed so real, so tangible.  But when you thought about it, you realized you had no idea what it might mean for something to exist independent of experience.  You found you had no ingredients other than experience with which to create a description of what anything is.

Eventually you rediscovered experience as the primary reality – primary not in some absolute sense but in a personal sense – primary in that it’s the only thing you have access to.  Everything else you used to think you have access to – material things, knowledge, explanations – are just forms within experience.

You started life as a canvas with vague forms starting to be painted on it, getting more and more detailed and sophisticated over time.  As you grew up, you got lost in the forms.  You forgot you were first and foremost the canvas, and only secondarily the forms.  The forms painted on the canvas seemed to be the ultimate reality.  You sometimes even tried to explain the canvas as existing because of the forms.  Eventually you saw clearly that there is no explaining the canvas.  There is only being the canvas, appreciating all the aspects of the extraordinary world of form, lovingly, as they’re painted on it, moment to moment.