THE DISCREDITING OF EXPERIENCE IN SOME SPIRITUAL CIRCLES

There are many spiritual teachers who tell us to ignore experiences because they are temporary and come and go.  They say the only “reality” is in the unchanging source, variously referred to as “beingness,” “emptiness,”the “source,” etc.

They say resting in this beingness reveals the manifest world as a flowing stream of manifestation, delightful to watch, and yet not touched.  These people talk of wanting nothing, seeking nothing, being nothing, and the profound peace they feel.

However, no matter how much they try to escape this fact, they are still talking about an experience: the experience of watching an unending flow of experiences and yet still unattached, unaffected, feeling happiness and great peace.

One of the characteristics of many of these people is the feeling they convey of having direct access to a higher truth than you have, and extolling their experience of an indifferent witnessing of the experiential flow.

Please tell me how the experience of being a witness apart from the flow of other experiences is in any way, superior?

Having dwelled in their delusions of superiority for a long time, having felt arrogantly supra-knowledgeable, I know what a trap this is.  These people often talk of others as living within the confines of learned stories, repetitive patterns of childhood-fostered beliefs and societal-accepted patterns.  But they don’t realize they are living out their own story of having attained non-attaining, escape from the common experiences of others they regard as trapped in stories.  But they are still trapped in their ideas of having found a truth worth conveying to others of a kind of impersonal, non-seeking, ordinariness, which to them, is extraordinary.

Ironically, many of these people refer to their state as “true self” as opposed to the false self of multiple stories of the mind, but there is no feeling of self, no sense of me, and they take this as transcendence.

However, this impersonal witnessing is hardly a state to be admired because it lacks “juice.”  “Juice” is the capacity to fully immerse in that stream of experience and take it into the “me,” the sense of I Am, and living from there entirely energized and enlivened by the Life Force.  There is such unbelievable joy flowing with, swimming with the flow of experiences, temporarily identified with those experiences as they unfold, as opposed to being separate and witnessing them.

From this place we reclaim the I Am, follow it to its base in our consciousness revealing that base qualities of objectless awareness of love, energy, knowledge and bliss.  This I am IS JUST AS PERMANENT AS THEIR UNCHANGING WITNESS, because without an experience of the I Am, there is no experience of the witness.  It is only the flow of experiences being witnessed that reveals the witnesser to the witness.  When the movie of Consciousness stops, the witnessing is ended, and the witness has nothing to perceive and all self-awareness disappears.  Without the stream of experiences, the witness does not exist  in the sense of being known or knowable. Only the presence of the I-Am sense, the sense of me allows a self-reflexive knowing of self.

It is my firm belief that all these teachers who talk about witnessing the flow from an impersonal stance, either have lost that sense of I Am, of personal self, or have never experienced it.  Many, many, people to not experience a solid sense of self, of aliveness, or joy and sorrow-filled juiciness.