Experience is ever changing. States of mind can be altered, changed, and in fact they will change either with or without our effort to control. Is it what we look for, here in Spirit’s Path, not that which never changes, the eternal, timeless beingness?
Personally I have often searched for it in some kind of experience. For quite some years I have [I]expected[/I] it to come to me as a set of feelings and insights that together would be the ‘experience of enlightenment.’ Additionally I expected this set of experiences to need my effort and achievemnts to come about.
Recently I have found for myself that it will never come to me through any sort of experience. There are a couple of valid reasons, it seems to me now, why the timeless does not come in a certain experience:
[I]1) Experiences are not timeless, they change.[/I]
[I]2) The timeless cannot be dependent on something so transcient as experiences.[/I]
[I]3) Experience belongs to the seeming display of forms, even the subtlest of experience have a form or sensation, thus it can change, come and go, thus, it is [B]not [/B]changeless, timeless, free.[/I]
So if experience is something that comes and goes, why do we keep looking for that ultimate experience? Why do we crave so much for the ultimate sensation? [I]Freedom might not be an experience, state or sensation…[/I]
In fact, if experience belongs to that slideshow of things that come and go, then what is the constant, changeless factor in that coming and going? Where is the timeless, permanent being?
[U]I found simply this:[/U] Experience comes and goes. But who can say this?.. Think about this, or just let the question itself take you to Seeing…
This which is aware of change must itself be the changeless… That which can perceive form within its own perception, must itself be beyond form.
So I started to see that there is a constant factor in every single situation, a factor that never changes: [I]Our presence…[/I]
[U]We are that which knows every experience first-handedly.[/U] We are always there in every experience, yet we never truly change even when the experience, our thoughts, feelings and our bodies do. We are the knower of that change.
If we would actually be changing ourselves along with all these changes that we call personality and the world of forms, we would not be able to recognize that change, for we would [I]be[/I] the change. But since we can all definitively state that we know the changes that have happened in our lives, we can also start to recognize how we are already the changeless, [I]and that it is only the belief that we invest in that which changes as being who we are[/I], that keeps us from recognizing our timeless being.
[U]Experience = change[/U]. We are that which know the experiences we go through. Therefore freedom is not found in any one experience, it is beyond, and present in, every single experience as [I]us[/I]! You are already the true you.
To divide certain experiences by labelling some as bad, some as good, and some as holy or transcendental even, this all fades in this seeing of the timeless beyond every experience. Experience becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least the [I]kind[/I] of experience it is becomes irrelevant. Experience as it is, just is…
But we keep on dividing life by sorting out experiences, judging people to be according to their experiences. And I bet most of us, like I do/did, have a rather specific expectation of someone who is enlightened, right? Or we might even have an image of how we ourselves would appear to others, how we would act and what experience we would be having all the time once we are free…
I can say that in my own ‘experience’ or seeing, the image I had of enlightenment was forever doomed to be flawed, simply because all ideas of the timeless are. Of course the principle and essence were somewhat correct, but the image or expectation I had was very different from how I see it now.
[U]So my advice for all us seekers out there is this:[/U] Don’t expect freedom to come to you in a certain experience or set of experiences, rather, see that the changeless freedom is that which knows all experience as it comes, endures, and goes. Then [I]acknowledge[/I] that timeless presence of you being here as the knower of the experience as often as you remind yourself to do so, untill it becomes obvious and natural at all times.
With Love,
Bentinho.