The Insignificance of Experience

(From the Archive of writings from 2009-2011)

Towards the end of the dark, miserable and often wonderful years of spiritual seeking, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity of a few one-to-one sessions with Roger Linden.  In my efforts to understand what I seemed to be missing, I would present him with accounts of my spiritual openings, realisations, times of ‘oneness’, energy, love, spontaneity and ask him ‘Is this it? Is it relevant?’. Each time Roger would dismiss my offerings with the word “experience’. I was particularly enamoured of the time I followed instructions (in a book by Osho) to ‘give up all belief’, which gave rise to an intense despair followed by an incredibly beautiful day. The sense of freedom didn’t last and I wondered if I had somehow ‘chosen to come back’ to mundane, constricted reality. Roger suggested that perhaps it was not true that all belief had gone. ‘For example’ , he said, ‘do you believe that there is a kitchen behind that wall?’ I knew there was a kitchen behind that wall, and thought he was being a bit silly. 

Whatever I offered him, he told me it was ‘just experience’. This even included the sense of witnessing, which initially seemed to be located just behind my head, and then was seen to have no location. Still just experience. I was left with the question ‘what can there possibly be that is not experience?’.

One day I presented him with a recurrent experience that was so trivial it hardly seemed worth mentioning. I described the sense that sometimes I could be say, sitting in my house thinking about going for a run, and then jogging along a road half an hour later, and it was as if there was no time between the experiences. Visually, experientially, sensations, thoughts, everything was different and yet there was a sameness and stillness, kind of like it was happening in the same time and space, or even timelessness and spacelessness. This makes it sound like a big deal, but it really wasn’t. Just a momentary recognition of something that seemed quite strange. In a slightly embarrassed and dismissive way I asked Roger if this was relevant at all; even I knew that I was describing an experience here. Roger paused (with hindsight and projection I imagine he may have felt cautious about giving me another object to grab hold of) and then said ‘it kind of is’. I was really shocked and said something along the lines of ‘but that isn’t anything!’. And Roger smiled and nodded in the wise and infuriating way he has.

It didn’t make any sense to me and it certainly wasn’t liberation. It was though, increasingly obvious that whatever could be grabbed hold of, wasn’t ‘it’. Anything that seems to be a thing, that changes, that seems possible to own, or have, is impermanent. All experience, including the sense of being someone who has experiences, arises and disappears. So what is it that is overlooked? It can’t be any thing. It can’t have any qualities. It can’t exist in time or space. It can be pointed to only by negation, or saying what it isn’t, as indicated by the Sanskrit expression ‘neti neti’ (not this, not this). Which can seem confusing, because in the seeing of this, it is also obvious that everything is actually this ‘no-thingness’, appearing as something.

I sometimes hear people describing ‘non-dual experiences’. I think this term is often used to  point to experiences in which the underlying ‘no-thingness’ appearing as something seems to be glimpsed. Unfortunately though, there often still seems to be an ongoing subconscious identification as ‘some thing’ that persists. And if ‘I am something’ then there also seems to be ‘other things’ (all of which could be called experiences) that can be owned and known and given meaning to.

The reality is that owning, knowing and meaningfulness are all transient and have no underlying substance. The apparent objects of experience are simply that. In the seeing of that simplicity, it is fun and interesting, and possibly practically useful, to share experience and hypothesise about what is going on. I am still fortunate enough to have one-to ones with Roger, but now we call it counselling supervision. We discuss my client work and he shares the benefit and insight of his many years of experience as a therapist. He can still be wise and infuriating, but at least he shows a little bit of interest in my experiences now.