When we demand an experience of reality - as we all do, don’t we?- to experience it we must know it and the moment we recognise it we have already projected it and therefore it is not real because it is still within the field of thought and time.
We depend on experiences, on challenges, to keep us awake. If there were no conflicts within ourselves, no changes, no disturbances, we would all be fast asleep. So challenges are necessary for most of us; we think that without them our minds will become stupid and heavy, and therefore we depend on a challenge, an experience, to give us more excitement, more intensity, to make our minds sharper. But in fact this dependence on challenges and experiences to keep us awake, only makes our minds duller.
What do we mean by experience? Is there anything new or original in experience? Experience is a bundle of memories responding to a challenge and it can respond only according to its background, and the cleverer you are at interpreting the experience the more it responds. So you have to question not only the experience of another but your own experience. If you don’t recognize an experience it isn’t an experience at all. Every experience has already been experienced or you wouldn’t recognize it. You recognize an experience as being good, bad, beautiful, holy and so on according to your conditioning, and therefore the recognition of an experience must inevitably be old.
Being aware does not mean learning and accumulating lessons from life; on the contrary, to be aware is to be without the scars of accumulated experience. After all, when the mind merely gathers experience according to its own wishes, it remains very shallow, superficial. A mind which is deeply observant does not get caught up in self-centred activities, and the mind is not observant if there is any action of condemnation or comparison. Comparison and condemnation do not bring understand-ing, rather they block understanding. To be aware is to observe, just to observe, without any self-identifying process. Such a mind is free of that hard core which is formed by self-centred activities.
Experience is the memory of experiencing, is it not? When experiencing ends there is experience, the result. While experiencing, there is no experience; experience is but the memory of having experienced. As the state of experiencing fades, experience begins. Experience is ever hindering experiencing, living. Results, experiences, come to an end; but experiencing is inexhaustible. When the inexhaustible is hindered by memory, then the search for results begins. The mind, the result, is always seeking an end, a purpose, and that is death. Death is not when the experiencer is not. Only then is there the inexhaustible.
Experiencing is conditioned by experience, the past. Freedom is the emptying of the mind of experience. When the brain ceases to nourish itself through experience, memory and thought, when it dies to experiencing, then its activity is not selfcentred. It then has its nourishment from elsewhere.
It is this nourishment that makes the mind religious. On waking this morning, beyond all meditation and thought and the delusions that feelings create, there was an intense bright light at the very centre of the brain and beyond the brain at the very centre of consciousness, of one’s being. It was a light that had no shadow nor was it set in any dimension. It was there without movement. With that light there was present that incalculable strength and beauty beyond thought and feeling.