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.

Is death something in the future, when you will no longer exist?

Or is death just the fact that lots of moments of experience exist, and some of them include the experience of being you and others don’t?

The experience of being you right now is not the same as the experience of being you a few moments ago. Similar perhaps, but not exactly the same. Did the “you” of a few moments ago die? Or is it just another moment of experience, with its own place in time?

Has the past gone? Does the future not yet exist? That’s how most of us think about time, but why? Just because past and future moments aren’t this moment, why do we assume that they don’t exist? Might that be as naive and self-centered a point of view as thinking that the only location in space that exists is the one you’re in?

Do you only exist in this moment, which keeps becoming a new moment?  Will you cease to exist after you die?  Or do you exist in all the moments of your life, from birth to death, with each moment having its place in time – each being equally real?

René Descartes famously stated “Cogito ergo sum” – Latin for “I think, therefore I am“.

Do you agree?  As you think about whether you agree, does the act of thinking prove to you that “I am” –  that you exist?

Clearly something exists – the experience, or appearance, or sense, of being you – thinking (and reading) right now.

But is what exists “I“?

Was Descartes making an assumption that what exists is “I“?

In the experience of being you, is the sense of there being an “I” really primary?

Is “I” the field within which experiences arise – or is “I” actually a feature of the experience itself – part of the form of the experience?

Suppose each moment of experience of being you is like a painting on a canvas.  Is “I” the canvas itself, or an aspect of what’s painted on it?

Or if you prefer a more modern analogy…

Is “I” like the screen of a TV (or smartphone or tablet or whatever gadget you watch stuff on!) or is “I” part of the show playing on the screen?