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There is something I know about you. Anything that seems to be happening to and from and through you is happening in your direct experience. Nothing you have ever experienced was outside of yourself. It’s obvious but easily missed with all the beliefs about an objective world and some such clouding our vision.
The previous sentence was already a step towards inquiring into the truth, which we did by pointing out a common belief and casting it in a dubious light. Arguably, there are countless ways to inquire into truth. Although we usually like to be respectful of everyone’s opinions and approaches because we’re afraid of offending anyone, the fact is some ways are better than others.
And we haven’t even touched on what we mean by truth yet.
In New Age circles there is a lot of emphasis on saying things like “my truth” or to put it into a context, “This is your truth but it doesn’t mean that it’s true for everyone; it’s definitely not my truth.” If this means that everyone can believe what they want and that everyone lets everyone else believe what they want, then awesome. Sounds good. But the keyword here is “believe.”
A truth that can be mine or yours, is not truth but belief.
Just to make sure, we’re not talking about truth in a scientific or relative sense. We mean truth in an absolute sense — always true no matter what we learn or unlearn, doesn’t need to be believed in, independent of context or any piece of knowledge. This also means that there is only one truth. Two or three or 45 truths would imply a relativity to truth, which might be acceptable for relative truth but not for absolute truth.
The good news is that this absolute truth is freely available to anyone who cares looking for it. So it’s pretty fair and inclusive, don’t you think?
Now, how do we go about discovering this mega-awesome truth? Let’s use the most immediate tool we have: direct experience.
Direct Experience as a Tool for Inquiry
In the beginning I said there are countless ways to inquire into truth. That was a lie (sorry!). There is only one way, and that one way is direct experience.
The reason for that is that any inquiry you might do or any tool you might use is only ever in your experience. There is nothing outside your experience. And this is already one of the insights we receive when we look into our experience.
Let’s put it differently. You cannot perceive anything outside your direct experience because experiencing is perceiving. Saying otherwise would be like saying you can experience something without actually experiencing it which is a nonsensical proposition.
This is more good news because we now know we don’t have to hope that there is something outside of our reach we need to first uncover to approach the truth of our being. Spoiler alert! Direct experience is already the truth of your being.
If that doesn’t make sense yet, don’t worry, by looking into experience we can discover the secrets of the universe for ourselves. To systematically approach the search for truth by means of direct experience we can divide it into two major aspects:
“You aka I” and “the world.”
These two concepts hold all the beliefs we need to dispel to uncover the truth of our being. Note: The process of uncovering the truth can be called awakening and being done with it enlightenment.
“What about other people?” you might already be wondering. Other people are kind of a moot point because seeing through yourself and the world entails seeing through other people as collateral. There is no need to throw the deckchairs of the Titanic when our goal is to sink the whole ship anyway.
Direct Experience and I/You
This is a no-brainer but nonetheless not what most of us consider right away. The only way to know about you is to look into you.
What we usually do, however, is consult books, or teachers, or wise folks to tell us about ourselves. But those books and people have as little to do with you as you have to do with them. This doesn’t mean that teachers and books can’t be useful but their usefulness is in direct correlation to their ability to make us look inside.
Nonetheless, we actually don’t need anyone or anything but ourselves to know the truth about ourselves. No one actually does it like that but anyone who arrives at the truth will come to the conclusion that you could do it without anyone or anything.
All you need to know about yourself is right in your direct experience.
If you want to know about your personality and understand all the conditioning that has infiltrated it — your character — then there is a lot to know and it can take quite a while to uproot all of it. But if you want to know your true identity — what you really are — then there is actually very little to know.
Your true identity is no identity. What you really are is not a self or being or entity or anything else tangible. And all you need to know this is your direct experience, which is not really yours because well, there is no you.
Anyway, simply look in all the places where you consider your ‘I’ to be, as in “I think,” “I feel,” “I do,” “I want,” and so on. Then try to locate that ‘I’.
You think you think but do you? Can you control thinking? Can you stop thinking? If you say “yes” then how about stopping it for a whole day? Seems like quite a ridiculous proposition, no? If you think you can control your thinking, is that not just another thought? Can a thought control a thought? Where does a thought come from anyway? And where does it go?
Well, you might say that you have made the decision to control or stop your thinking, so that’s where your agency lies. But then, what made you make that decision? And what came before that?
This leads to an infinite regression and many would simply scoff at it and dismiss it as unimportant nonsense but this is serious business. If there is an infinite regression where do you come into play? If you made the decision then you must be at the beginning of the regression — the first mover. But are you?
In other words, can you decide not to decide?
Apply this to feeling and doing as well. Don’t just answer through your beliefs but really look into your direct experience and try to find evidence to support your belief that you’re a feeler and doer.
Do this thoroughly and consistently and the penny will eventually drop: There is no ‘I’ anywhere to be found.
Direct Experience and the World
Another way to use our direct experience is to attack the belief in an external world. This will simultaneously dismantle any notion we have about ourselves as the perceiver of said world.
The first important point is that the world is not made out of atoms or other smaller particles and sub-particles and whatever else we can come up with. In direct experience, the world is made of sensations. The way you experience the world is not through atoms but through your senses — seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting. Even a scientist observing atoms is doing so through his senses.
“Ok,” you might say “fair enough, I experience the world through my senses.”
Well, actually you’re not. It’s not “you” experiencing nor are you experiencing a world. The trifecta of experiencer (you), experiencing (function), experienced (the world) is solely a conceptual one. It doesn’t exist.
Take seeing for example. When you look at something can you clearly point at the point where the seer begins and ends, seeing begins and ends, and seen begins and ends? In other words, is there a separation between seer, seeing, and seen in direct experience?
There is not.
What this means is that seer, seeing, and seen are one singular function — seeing.
Now apply this to all the other senses to see if the investigation yields the same result. After you have done that, you can ask yourself what the unifying factor of all the senses is. This unifying factor has been called by many names but I think the best one in this context is awareness.
Awareness takes the form of experiencing which comes as seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting, and thinking. In other words, awareness is experiencing. There is no division.
This also means that there is no external world you are experiencing. Experiencing is the world. Without experiencing no world.
Saying that there is no external world is real heresy and sounds crazy, I know. But the crazy is quite obvious when we put the persistent belief in an external world we are experiencing as human beings aside, and look into our direct experience with fresh eyes.
Endgame
It’s useful to spend sufficient time investigating our direct experience until we are clear on the aforementioned points. When we are clear on those points, we realize that things can only work one way. That way doesn’t include a separate individual entity or an external/objective world.
Direct experience is the doorway to truth not because it leads us to some special knowledge but because it leads to the realization that we are already the truth.
Having paid our dues, all that’s left to do is cease the fight against reality and reconfirm over and over in experience what we now know through careful first-person analysis. The rest is out of our hands.
When we are ripe truth takes hold of us and finishes the job.
Luka
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