Hi Daniel,
My delayed response has been the result of dealing with a major storyline that has been in the way of seeing things as they are. This has come to the surface during therapy, meaning my attention to these questions has been slow and challenging. Much of the below questions touched beliefs that were in need of interrogation and subsequent dissolution.
Just ponder these and tell how they feel!
The first thing to consider :
If you are the ‘experiencer’ or ‘that which is experiencing’, then ‘what is experienced’ cannot be YOU and cannot define YOU.
Very true, due to the aforementioned storyline, this question was very jarring. But experiences cannot define experience, because they are not experience, they are a storyline created within experience.
Here’s an example : YOU are having or experiencing a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ experience, then YOU as the ‘experiencer’ remain the same. No?
It's true again, experience is experience, regardless of the definitions applied to those experiences. Definitions are a component of the experience, not the experience themselves.
Second thing :
If you are the ‘experiencer’, can you EXPERIENCE the ‘experiencer’? Can you SEE ‘that which sees’? Can you FEEL the ‘feeler’? Can the eye see itself? Can you point your finger at something in your direct experience and say : Haha, this is ME?
1: No, experience is experience. There is no thing, separate from experience. 2: No, seeing is regardless. 3: No, feeling is felt. There is no feeling of the feeler that feels. 4: Only in a mirror, but that is not seeing the eye, that is only a reflection of the eye, meaning it never sees itself 5: Not a single thing, the only way a single thing emerges is with division, but is experience is total.
Third thing :
In every experiment we did so far, you could not find an ‘experiencer’ separate from ‘what is experienced’? Think about the seeing experiment. No separation. Only THIS.
If there is only THIS, what is the point of reference to compare a 'good' THIS to a 'bad' THIS? A 'good' experience' to a 'bad' experience?
Belief is the foundation of those good and bad definitions, but this raises the question: "Where does belief come from?" My answer is that it comes from nothingness, the same as good and bad. This gives it no foundation, meaning, good and bad are divisions of perception of a whole and they are only there based on the arbitrary feedback loop of belief.
Can you see that the only way we can have a 'good' or a 'bad' experience, is by comparing two parts of THIS, two parts of experience. We cannot compare the whole thing simply because we cannot grasp the whole thing and there’s nobody to grasp anything in the first place. All labels (all words, concepts) are pointing to a part of THIS.
Exactly true.
