Sunday, November 14, 2004

The Experience is the Experiencer

We experience endlessly, and on top of the flow of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and thinking, with project and add a fictional 'experiencer', a one, a self who is doing this experiencing. And yet, there isn't anyone there to do this. so who or what is experiencing the experiences? ..... the experience itself is in a sense the experiencer! Not as a self, or something separate or added on top of the experience. Just the experience arising in awareness .....

Each moment of experience, as it arises in awareness is just what it is ... an experience ... and that is all there is

Don't need to project out a self or me who 'has' this experience. No need to experience these arisings in mind as being 'out there' ... things in the world. No 'me', no 'world' directly experienced. Just arisings in mind, momentary and complete.

1 comment:

Chodpa said...

hi al ....

yes indeed, the sense object and the sense organ make contact, and the sense consciousness arises as a result. then the other skandas/khanda's arise following on from that ...

i was using the word 'experience' as a short-hand for all five skandas, and the suggestion that the experiencer is actually the experience itself as a poetic way to describe how the process is complete in and of itself, without a self which is needed to be aware of these other aspects. there is just seeing, for example .... and seeing is both the content - experience, and the 'see-er' - awareness .... as 'seeing' arises, it is both aspects, which we mistakenly seperate out into the experience, and a mythical experiencer ....

take care .....


...I love getting technical - that's because I read to much - but -
"so who or what is experiencing the experiences?"
Doesn't consciousness arise as a result of contact?
Still an insubstancial, impermanent, conditioned event, not associated with "I" - yet arising right after the object hits the senses. I have heard it described as the "knowing function". In Theraveda I believe it is one of the 5 aggregates.

This is pure theory for me - I have yet to fully internalize how this actually unfolds in my experience - but interesting to discuss............Al