Post four of seven, in section My Experiences
Like a master somalier can identify the exact vineyard a grape was grown in just from tasting a wine, awakening develops the clarity, sensitivity, and precision with which you can identify and describe aspects of experience.
This post is a description of some different parts of experience.
An interesting part of the fractal of experience is that non-duality and awakening present themselves differently when experienced from each of the different parts. For example, awakening looks and feels very differently from the body than it does from the mind. There is no one part that holds the final truth.
Reality is an ecosystem being created by many different things at once and while it’s important in practice to be able to recognise the oneness, it’s also important that you don’t collapse the full complexity of the unique parts into only one thing.
Each aspect of experience that I have described here has a personal part and a Universal part. The aspects are:
- The Body and the Universal Body
- The Heart and the Universal Heart
- The Mind and the Universal Mind
- The Soul and the Universal Soul
Awakening
A useful way of understanding awakening experiences is as losing the boundary between individual experience and transpersonal experience. Things like Universal love, infinite consciousness, open awareness, visionary experiences and energetic experiences all arise from losing the boundary between yourself and the world.
When there is less separation between you and experience, it’s possible to merge with reality in a way that shows you a facet of a greater truth. The truths you can experience through these non-dual states are bigger than what you can experience from your individual self-view.
Lots of traditions pick one of the transpersonal aspects of experience and describe this as the ultimate enlightened state. Each of these states can be deeply insightful experiences to have, but each one, if taken as an ultimate truth, will also give you a very skewed perspective on reality.
I ended up in the depths of all of them and found both their beauty and their limitations:
- When my mind was totally aligned with awareness, I spent weeks feeling like everything was a mirage appearing out of the void. I was a hair’s breadth away from the high jhanas at all times and whenever I closed my eyes for a second, I would disappear into formless realms. But no matter how empty everything arose as, my physical reality and body never became empty. You still need to breathe.
- When my heart was completely aligned with love, I was not protected from anything around me. I was impacted deeply by every movement and feeling, whether I perceived it as mine, the world’s, or someone else’s. Through this, I managed to purify an insane proportion of experience and am now permanently in an open-hearted state. This fundamentally shifted my relationship with life and experience in a very beautiful way, but it didn’t replace the need for me to be seen, loved, and respected by other people.
- When my intuition or soul was totally aligned with the Cosmos, all experience was a mythological story. I walked around in flow states where everything was a poetic synchronous unfolding. This was beautiful but it could also be intensely confusing and disorienting for the human part of me, and there is an insane amount of pain and darkness in the collective experience.
- I removed so many barriers from my system that my energy became fully open to the Universal Body. I was present only in this moment with immediate, expansive energetics of experience. This can be a deeply lovely experience, but it can also be incredibly painful because you have no insulation or escape from experience. Human bodies aren’t especially designed to be pure cosmic conduits, it’s like being in the world as a raw nerve. It’s also kind of useful to be able to remember that you are a person with a past and a future.
‘Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth,’
Albert Camus
With all these non-dual experiences, once they have been mastered and taken to their absolute conclusion, the idea that one of them on its own can hold some ultimate truth naturally falls away. It no longer makes sense to reify them into something that is the ultimate source of experience.
Although there is no final answer to be found within each one, going through the process of opening and purifying these aspects changes how you experience things in a fundamental way. It increases the clarity and sensitivity with which you can feel the holistic, ecosystemic truth of experience.
Awakening the different aspects of experience will give you different types of sensitivity. A really nice allegory for this is the different types of sensitivity of the skin. For example, fingers can detect nano-scale wrinkles even on a seemingly smooth surface. Compare this to the skin on your back; if you bend a paper clip and touch someone on the back with it, they won’t be able to tell if they’re being touched with one prong or two.
The level of sensitivity of your fingers is incredibly high compared to other parts of the body. But if you run a very soft, small feather over your fingertip, you won’t be able to feel it, even though you will be able to feel it on other body parts, like the arm and the back of the hand. These are two related but seemingly different types of sensitivity that are felt differently in different parts of you.
When it comes to the true nature of reality or experience, the system is interdependent. You can’t ultimately divide it into completely separate parts; the system can only ultimately be described by the whole system. But through understanding the different underlying mechanisms and details and opening to experiencing them more directly and fully, you can start to develop more sensitivity in the different parts of you, as well as a more complete alignment with truth and love.
You can also notice meta-patterns and ways in which experience moves and creates itself, which give you lasting and profound insight into the nature of reality, the Universe, and experience.
Here is a description of some of the underlying aspects of experience.
1. Body & the Universal Body
Often when I am walking around I feel as though I am primarily a body that occasionally has a mind. I walk around in flow states with no separation between me, the environment and the things I am doing.
I am as much an energy body as I am a physical body, and on the energetic level, I am very directly connected with the rest of experience. There are very few barriers between me and the energetic soup of experience. It is this more energetic, wave-like part of experience that has room for things like transmissions and experiences of unity.
The physicality of the body, in comparison, is the place in which your experience is undeniably separate from the external world. No matter how much your mind and experience can feel like there is no separation at times, you are in fact existing in a body that is separated from the world around it with physical boundaries.
The entire human experience is built on having a body, so it is not possible to remove separation completely without dissociating from lots of important experience. This does not mean that your embodied experience cannot be non-dual. It means that a non-dual experience of body and environment has to include and respect this separation.
The world of physicality opens the door to specifics and getting in touch with the reality of what is present — collapsing the wave of more undefined possibilities into a particle that can be located and identified.
When you feel or experience a specific thing through your body, this is still happening in relationship with the environment around you, but it’s a different kind of relationship to the blended one that happens between thoughts and awareness. It has a sense of physical causality and object permanence to it that can be measured and experienced.
The ways in which the different parts of a being work together are incredibly intricate and fascinating, and the body can be understood and experienced as much as an imprint of a person’s consciousness as it is their physicality. The best way I can describe this is that you carry energetic templates around with you about how information is processed, and this shapes your entire embodied experience.
The doorways into this aspect of experience are things like:
- Somatic or embodied therapy
- Yoga
- Jhanas 1 – 4
- Meditation practice that focuses on being in the present moment exactly as it is
It’s amazing how much the body needs to change and go through if you want to awaken this aspect. It feels like my entire nervous system has been completely rewired.
Ultimately, this aspect of experience shows you how life is not a logical thing that you can get right or wrong but an experience to be embodied.
2. Heart & the Universal Heart
This area of experience is all about interdependence, affect, and connection. You could also describe this sense of relationship as Universal Love and the ways in which everything is in a network of interconnected being.
This isn’t just the conscious flow of giving and receiving that happens in relationships but all the ways that everything is innately interconnected with everything else.
From an individual heart perspective, you may start to wake up to the ways in which people are relationally communicating with each other all the time on a subtle or subconscious level. People are communicating through felt senses, subconscious messages, energetic entanglement, social signalling, and so much more.
A human heart is an absolutely abundant flow of an impossible number of different connections in every moment. Love is about meeting these experiences with openness, allowing the free flow of feeling and affect, and freely giving what is present and available in return.
Relationship, or love, is not a static thing; it is always in the process of being given and received. This means that love, like form, has an inherent degree of separation in it. In the case of your body and form, it’s the physical boundary that keeps things separate. In the case of love and relationship, it’s because there has to be a separate receiver and giver.
‘A knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illumine itself’
Alan Watts
In the case of the heart, non-duality is about giving and receiving freely without trying to control the flow or stop any part of it, which manifests as a kind of radical openness and honesty. This comes with a deep responsibility to be with what is present in integrity and make space for the fullness of it.
As part of the process of opening to this fully, I had to just keep opening to receive the full spectrum of life and experience. Universal love or Universal affect includes everything in the past, everything in the present, and everything in the future, so there was a lot to process, and a lot of it was unimaginably awful.
However, it is from going through this that I am now able to embody and hold this clarity on the different parts of experience. I can connect cleanly and openly to a huge amount of content. I can see things as they are because I am not filtering out or turning away large parts of them. I’ve cultivated the capacity to be present with the direct experience.
Loving the parts of experience that are not very pleasant doesn’t necessarily make them pleasant; it just means that you are able to be with the discomfort of this without turning away. To let it effect you.
Ultimately love is complicated; it can never be boiled down into simple formulas. It is only something that can be felt in this moment.
This is a huge area of experience, as it essentially encompasses everything. Some of the direct doorways to this part of experience are:
- Learning to be sincere with yourself and others
- Getting clear on your intentions and what feels important to you
- Therapy focused on lifting shame, guilt and trauma
- Mediation and other mature forms of communication where people feel seen and heard
- Any meditation practice that actively connects and builds a relationship to new parts of experience
- Developing the ability to be able to be with discomfort
3. Mind & Universal Mind
The mind is the place where humans typically spend most of their time and is the area of experience that a lot of meditation practice is focused on.
The first step of becoming aware of this is basic mindfulness – being able to see experience rather than just be fused with it all the time. For this, you need to be able to be with the direct sensory information without adding a layer of judgement or projection on top.
When you start to connect to consciousness or awareness, you begin to be able to see the impermanent, transient nature of subjective experience.
Awakening the mind and consciousness gives you a kind of open, centreless perspective. It can feel like a sort of bird-like transcendent perspective on things playing out where there is a lot more space around the events that are happening. You have more distance and spaciousness while simultaneously feeling less separate.
When this part of experience is opened up, you can sort of dissolve into it. There’s no longer an object and a viewer; they are just one thing.
It’s a bit like normally people are perceiving the world as if they are looking at a drawing on a piece of paper. They have a bunch of projections, but they believe that that is the real word.
Opening your mind to pure awareness is like turning that piece of paper on its edge; you see that your perceptions are just a thin veneer. Some people stop there, especially if they haven’t done much emotional or embodiment work. But once you have turned the piece of paper on its edge, you can realise that the reality behind or underneath it is a lot richer and more immersive than you realised. Rather than reality being a perception you are looking at, it is an experience you are immersed in.
The best practices for connecting to the mind and consciousness are:
- Mindfulness meditation
- Noting and social noting
- Vipassana meditation
- Loving kindness meditation
4. Soul & the Universal Soul
The entirety of the Universe can be understood as an allegory or an expression of meaning, within which we are all characters. Truly understanding this requires letting go of the restrictive blinkers of a purely scientific materialist worldview.
Synchronicities are one of the fastest ways to notice this aspect of experience, revealing, if only for a moment, a Universe that is organised by meaning rather than linear time.
For me, having access to the cosmic story means that I can drop out of the character that I am in and into the distributed unfolding of events. This makes the whole of reality feel very dream-like to me while giving me a sense of soul safety (or trust in the story) and an unshakeable feeling of non-self. In this state, I am experiencing the story playing out from a very centreless place. As if dissolving into the meaning and cosmic intelligence that is infused into everything. The meaning is not being created or perceived; it is already there.
An aspect of this part of experience is that everyone is living their own story. While all the meaning and stories find a way to very cleverly tie together and create a cosmic order, there is a deeply personal aspect to each person’s life, and you cannot know from the outside what that is like for someone.
My own story has been rife with mind-blowing experiences, unbelievable synchronicities, insights into the future, and access to information that has no logical explanation. This has destroyed my fixed perceptions of what reality is. All I really trust is that there is a cosmic order and intelligence to how things unfold.
Being non-dual with meaning requires having a radical responsibility to show up with the fullness of experience without hiding from it. If you want to go deeper into this aspect of experience, some practices to explore are:
- Soul-making dharma
- Jungian-based psychotherapy
- Imaginal practice
- Creative therapies
Nuanced Non-Duality
Experience has many folds within it, which means that it can’t become one or become everything. Inherently, it can never be made complete.
In the realm of matter, it is because there is a physical boundary that defines the boundary between experience and experiencer.
In the realm of love, it is because it is always in the process of being given and received, which means there must be a separate giver and receiver.
In the realm of consciousness, it is because there is a subject and object; otherwise, experience disappears.
In the realm of the soul, it is because there is always another page to turn in the story of the Universe.
All these things stop life being able to solve itself and mean that life remains a thing that is experienced. It’s important to recognise the complexity of this as well as the meta-patterns that can provide deep insight into the underlying nature of reality.