Monday, January 21, 2013

The Willingness to Experience

Whatever the experience of this moment, allow it to exist. If your experience is one of ease, joy and comfort this may not seem like a challenging proposition. If your experience right now is one of stress, struggle, disappointment, anxiety or heartbreak, this may be easier said than done. But regardless of what you are experiencing, your willingness to allow it to exist and to experience it in a pure, unaltered and unadulterated state is the first step towards developing an understanding of the nature of experience.

This "willingness to experience" is a powerful choice because it implies a number of things. The first is that you are not afraid. This implies courage. No matter how painful or how unpleasant the experience, your willingness to allow it to be there, without avoiding it, turning away from it, denying it or rationalizing it away, is a courageous choice. This does not in any way imply that as a result of your allowing the experience it will suddenly be any less painful. But this is exactly why it is such a courageous choice, because you know that the next time around it will be just as painful and still you do not shy away.

The willingness to experience implies Self Awareness. When you choose to align with the experience of this moment, you are no longer a victim of that experience or circumstance. You have made a subtle shift in perception from the "one stuff is happening to" to the "one who is aware of the stuff that is happening". It may not seem like much of a difference at first glance, but reflect on it, because the difference though subtle is monumental. With this slight shift in perception, your eyes become open to a whole different dimension of Life that you previously may not have been privy to. Prior to this you were nothing more than one person on a planet of 7 billion, struggling to stake your claim on one small finite portion of experience that you could call "your life". Now, you are able to recognize that even that "person that I am" is just one experience within your awareness. Sometimes you are aware of yourself and sometimes not. The world, other people, activities, circumstances, even you drift in and out of the focus of your awareness several times during the day. It is only the mind that somehow strings these disconnected and largely incongruent moments together into some seemingly continuous reality. Even though, the content of awareness is in constant flux, the one constant through all this is the awareness itself. As you begin to allow this moment and the experience of it to exist without attempting to manipulate it in anyway, your own sense of self identity naturally shifts from the notion of the person that you think you are to the Awareness which is prior to that notion.

The willingness to experience implies Openness. What we find most appealing about children and childhood in general, is the simple and natural openness with which all of Life's experiences are approached. This is an ability that we lose as we grow older simply because we are taught to rely excessively on our own mental processes (most of which are flawed and incomplete) to filter our experience. This compulsive filtering happens so unconconsciously that after a while we become unaware that it could be any other way. When you allow the experience of this moment in its totality, you open to Life in a way that is spontaneous and innocent. It is spontaneous because you cannot plan to be open, you can only do it now. It is innocent because this allowing does not presume to know or to judge the experience. The moment is experienced for no other reason but simply because that is what is happening in this instant. There is no why, how come, should or shouldn't about it. That is how the mind would approach it - with evaluations, agendas, analysis and rationalizations - dissecting it and trying to absorb the good parts and discard the bad. With openness the mind fades into the background.   

The willingness to experience implies simplicity. Even the most dramatic circumstances and seemingly complex scenarios in Life when witnessed and accepted without resistance or wanting to modify them in any way, are not experienced as being problematic. They become relatively simple in comparison to the way the mind approaches them, which is with the baggage of a past history and future expectation. Then the challenge you are facing is ALL you are facing. The history of the thousands of times you faced it in the past and the thousands more you may face in the future have no bearing on you. Nor do all your ideas of failure, ineptitude, unworthiness or woe. The challenge is reduced to its lowest common denominator. You have made a molehill out of a mountain.