Experience The Experience
‘Experience the experience’ was the epitaph my father wanted engraved on his headstone when he died.
And indeed, it was the creed he tried to live by. He was constantly pushing himself to experience the extremities of his life. Whether it was jumping naked into drifts of snow, then baking in a patch of sun on a rock, throwing himself off cliffs into the ocean, high-jumping barbed wire fences or picking up nettles with his bare hands to see if he could stand the pain – in the simplicity of extreme experience he found temporary escape from the mundane life he felt constricted by – of work, kids and marriage. As he related to me many years later, in experiencing extremes he found moments of deliverance that re-connected him with the immediate thrill of simply being alive.
As a boy, I had no interest in my father’s compulsive extremes – being a bookish kid, his constant seeking of extremes was annoying to say the least, if not confronting when he pushed me to do the same.
But as I got older, his creed began to play itself out in my own life – in a different kind of way. Throughout my late teens and twenties, it manifested as an almost manic hedonism, coupled with a fascination with the dark side of city life. Whenever I could I’d head for the seediest bars and clubs and throw caution to the wind, ending up in the strangest places with the strangest people – simply to see what would happen. So many times, out of my face on some weird cocktail of chemicals, with the dawn sun rising and no idea of how to get home, I’d look up at the sky and feel an intense elation – a fierce kind of joy that seemed to be missing from the rest of my life.
Of course, as one gets older, this kind of intensity inevitably becomes self-destructive. By the age of thirty my body was beginning to buckle under the pressure and my nervous system was beginning to falter. So I changed direction, with meditation becoming my new main path.
And as I slowly acclimatised to what meditation practice was opening me up to, my father’s creed of ‘experience the experience’ began to take on a more profound meaning. And I realised the true meaning of his epitaph – and what we were both instinctively reaching for.
In our different ways, we’d been trying to punch through our cultural conditioning – him with extremes and me with alcohol and drugs, to try to experience something more pure – whatever might lie beyond the layers of cultural conditioning we’d each been filled with.
But perhaps I should explain.
All of us are born into the pure and unconditioned experience of simply being alive. With no learned habits, or capacity to conceptualise or think, and with no sense of the future or the past as we know it, a baby’s awareness is acute and universal, and their senses are completely absorbed with whatever they’re experiencing in the immediate present. As such, one could say that their reality is a unity of varying textures, sounds, shapes and colours, in which nothing is separate from anything else. As such, they live in a constant state of fascination, in which the simple sensation of water flowing through their fingers is exquisite, as is the rich red of a rose or the feeling of sand between their toes.
Then the cultural and social conditioning begins.
It starts at a very early age when words start being attached to their immediate experience – beginning with the two most important parts of their world – ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’. From that point on, as each part of their reality is given a name and concept, their previously unified experience is slowly fragmented into an ever increasing plethora of codified ‘things’.
For example, before a baby learns the noun for ‘cat’, it only has an experience of colour, form and texture – softness and warmth and the sound of purring. Essentially, for the baby, there IS no cat. There’s only a dynamic experience within the larger experience of being alive.
Then the child is taught that this particular experience is called ‘CAT’. From that point on, the word connects with a retained idea of ‘CAT’, to become a kind of mental shorthand for that particular experience – as separate from the rest of their life experience.
Eventually, as their interactions with cats accumulate, the concept of CAT will replace the kid’s immediate experience. As such, if their past experiences with cats are unpleasant, then the mere recognition of ‘CAT’ will provoke a negative reaction, not only in the mind, but in their body as well, as the recognition triggers a subtle burst of revulsion. Same with the opposite – if their previous experiences have been pleasant, the mere idea of CAT makes them feel all warm and gooey.
Result being, by the time the child is in their teens, they rarely experience cats as they actually are. As soon as they recognise CAT, within a millisecond their mind has switched from recognition of a cat to whatever idea they have of it, together with their reaction.
And so it is with everything else in their increasingly fragmented and codified life experience – such that, by the time they’ve become an adult, they’ve learnt to live within a tight, windowless corridor of recognised things, each of which, rather than being experienced anew, short-tracks them straight to an idea and conditioned reaction.
And it goes even further than that.
As they get older and become increasingly focused on their codified ideas of things rather than their real time experience, this reactive process compounds. Result being, they become more and more estranged from any direct and sensory living experience, and increasingly entrenched in their conceptualisation of ‘life’.
In this way, our ideas and reactions become our life – a fictional ghost world which, though barely based on fact, we react to as if real.
So then, what does this have to do with meditation.
Well, essentially, what we’re doing as we meditate is we’re training our mind to let go of its ideas of things – to be aware of things as they actually are. And the way we do this is, we sit with our eyes closed, and train our attention to let go of everything it notices, and always return to the bland and constant sensation of the breath. With the attention preoccupied with the breath, we are learning to simply be universally aware, without the inevitable codification that occurs when we pay attention to things.
As we practice this, our mind, and by extension our body, kick against us. They do this because all the habits they’ve learned throughout our life run counter to what we’re now asking them to do. It’s very difficult for us to suddenly let go and be still, because we’re used to constant thinking and activity and distraction. Result being, in the beginning of meditation practice, we experience boredom, anxiety, anger, restlessness and so on.
But as we keep practising, we notice the push and pull of these habits becomes less intense – and eventually we find our attention is becoming used to suspending itself on the breath and being still.
Without the attention flitting about feeding bits and pieces of our experience back to us as concepts, the mind gradually learns it doesn’t have to codify everything we sense. It’s enough to simply be aware. At that point we begin to have flashes of the unified reality we were born with.
We begin to ‘experience the experience’ as a unified whole.
And that’s only the beginning.
Essentially, meditation helps us to deconstruct the layers of conditioning we’ve been filled with – of preconceptions, opinions, prejudices and all the languaged dross of what we think we know.
Our purpose is not to make it all disappear – that’s impossible. We’ve learnt what we’ve learnt and that will never go away. Rather, it is to make all the layers of conditioned mind more transparent, so we can see beyond our habits, ideas and prejudices.
In this way we gain a degree of freedom from the mentality our culture has forced upon us, and always be aware of the larger, more unified, and interconnected reality beyond our conditioned mind – that our life sits within.
Which inevitably leads to us becoming more philosophical about the twists and turns of our life, and more compassionate and calm. As such, our hormonal system becomes less volatile, and that leads to us becoming healthier and more resilient.
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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
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