Experience and the Experiencer

 

Photo Credit: Inner Spiritual Awakening

Experience and the Experiencer

The way I look at a rose and the way someone else looks at a rose may be different. If I am a student, I will have a scientific viewpoint, but a poet will look at the rose in a completely different way.

The experience does not depend on the object, the experience depends on the experiencer, on the quality of experiencing. When the scientist looks at the rose, he thinks of colours, chemistry, physics, atoms, electrons, neutrons and so on - except beauty. Beauty does not come into his vision, and that’s what the rose is.

To the poet, to the painter, the rose is a totally different experience - the rose is a manifestation of the unknown, of the transcendental, of the secret of life itself. It represents something of the divine, it brings into existence something of the sky, something of faraway stars. It grows on the earth, it is rooted in the earth, but it is not just part of the earth; it contains far more than that. It is not the sum total of its constituent parts. The scientist only comes to know it as a sum total of its constituent parts - there is nothing more to it - but the poet starts feeling something plus.

The moment we dissect the rose, the beauty disappears. The rose was only an opportunity for the beauty to descend, a receptivity of the earth to the sky, a receptivity of the gross to the subtle. The poet feels that; but it is a feeling, it is not a thought.

Looking at a flower, become the flower, dance around the flower, sing a song. The wind is cool and crisp, the sun is warm, and the flower is in its prime; the flower is dancing in the wind, rejoicing, singing a song. Participate with it! Drop indifference, objectivity, detachment. Drop all scientific attitudes. Become a little more fluid, more melting, more merging. Let the flower speak to the heart, let the flower enter the being.

This is the first step towards the mysterious, and the ultimate step is: if we can be a participant for a moment, we have known the key, the secret. Then become a participant in everything that we are doing. Walking, don’t just do it mechanically, don’t just go on watching it - be it. Dancing, don’t do it technically; technique is irrelevant We may be technically correct and yet we will miss the whole joy of it. Dissolve the self in the dance, become the dance, forget about the dancer.

When such deep unity starts happening in many, many, phases of our life; when all around we start having such tremendous experiences of disappearance, egoless-ness, nothingness; when the flower is there and we are not, the rainbow is there and we are not; when the clouds are roaming in the sky both within and without and we are not; when there is utter silence as far as we are concerned; when there is nobody in us, just a pure silence, a virgin silence, undistracted, undisturbed by logic, thought, emotion, feeling, that is the moment of meditation. Mind is gone, and when mind is gone mystery enters.

Meditation will take us into the mysterious, but there is still something more than that; that is inexpressible. Nothing can be said about it, nothing has ever been said about it, nothing will ever be said about it, but it has been experienced.