Capacity for Experience

If someone asks, what is your reality?  We automatically jump to whatever is happening currently in our lives.  Perhaps we are dealing with an issue, or there is some reason to celebrate.  But that’s where we go as our default – our own stories.  That shows just how entangled we are in our self-identifications; we place ourselves in the center of the universe and see everything revolving around us.  Then they ask us to think about reality in more general terms, what is the common reality?  We would respond by saying that reality is made up of physical matter, which is very tangible and absolute – we point to experiencing it viscerally with every interaction of our senses.

Notice that our fundamental belief is that reality exists out there, we are separate from it, and we come along and experience what already is there.  This goes for not just physical matter, but for time as well.  We experience time in linear sequence.  It’s how we are wired, and conditioned, we assume that there simply is no question of another perspective.

As a thought experiment, what if we paused all disbelief just for a moment.  Think of it as a game, allowing the mind to wander and really feel as if anything is possible.  In this state of mind, let’s explore reality again.  Let’s pull the rug out from under our feet – and be ok with that.

What if we have the capacity for experience?  Let that sink in… ponder on being just a blank slate.  Awareness alone.  Not a person, and not a personality.  As capacity for experience, there is complete freedom in what is experienced – because the capacity is limitless.  Awareness is limitless.  We can sit with that for a while… just opening up to being the capacity for all experience, without any preferences at all.

So, what’s going on here?  The thing is that this infinite capacity for all experience is severely contracted into what we actually do experience as our reality.  This is because of humankind’s commonly held beliefs and conditioning, as well as our individual beliefs and conditioning.  We say “I’ll believe it when I see it” but the fact is that we see it because that’s what we believe.  To put it in energetic terms, as individuals and as society operating within a set belief system, we are attuned to a particular vibration, and so that is the level of reality we perceive.

This is why meditative spiritual practices prescribe loosening the mind’s stranglehold on what it believes.  When we are asked to sit quietly and focus on the breath, the underlying practice is to let everything go and open up to this capacity for experience.  The more we let go of, and surrender, the more we are able to perceive.  First it begins with letting go of the importance we place on our own thoughts.  That loosens the grip that the mind has on our consciousness.  Sitting still, sensations from the body ebb down too, and we begin to recognize that we are not this body either.  The boundaries open up a little bit, and there’s a tiny but palpable awareness that there is a Source, just witnessing.  The mind may rush in and try to own that, but the gentle reminder is to go back to the simplicity of awareness alone.  Just marinade in this capacity for experience in its formless purity, untainted by any attempts to even describe it, because that immediately divides the subject from the object of experience.  With practice, boundaries expand and blur, and separations we perceive yield their illusions.

If you’d like to explore this topic a little further, here’s a link to a related article:

The No-Self Here