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?