Identity is our biggest problem. Attachment to and identification with ideas.

As long as a feeling of distinction and difference between human beings exists, people who oppress and oppressed people will exist. As long as there are people who feel superior or perceive others as inferior, the former will claim the right to wield power over the latter. As long as ideas of merit and blame as inherent attributes of our identity exist, qualitative judgement on people’s value will exist. As long as the idea of identity is considered fundamental, instead of conventional, moral responsibility will exist, rather than impersonal causes of suffering. And in order to dissolve this prison of ideas that chain us down, we need to start from experience. The solution is the observation of pure experience. Then we’ll be able to realize the commonsense nature of reality, and the conventional nature of common sense.

But how do we start?

We need to start here. No matter what that means for you, right now. No matter what it may look like.

Here and now.

We need to learn how to observe and listen to our own experience.

Just… entertain your experience. Your thoughts, perceptions, surroundings, emotions. Experience constantly changes. Thoughts and emotions arise and morph. Perceptions, too. You feel yourself breathing. Maybe you feel your heart beating. Your sight changes if you move your eyes, even when your environment looks static. And if you look somewhere long enough, you realize that even then, you experience some motion and change. Sounds come and go. And even within silence, you hear your body, your blood flow. You feel the contact between your inside and your outside, between the body and the world. Pressure, temperature, texture, movement. You feel the position of your body, too. Your legs, your arms, your chest, your head, your fingers, your lips, your tongue. So many things that go unnoticed, because most of the time you are swept away by what goes on in your mind, which is just another kind of perception, another kind of the same experience. We may be used to considering what goes on in our mind as “ideas” and “thoughts”, but if we look closely, concepts are just stand-in experiences for groups of similar perceptions, and words are images and sounds that we grew used to pairing with concepts, so we could communicate them. 

And if we were to put all of this aside, we’d be left with a kind of spacious awareness, an experience, still, but of a quieter kind, something that is to perception what silence is to sound, or black to colour. Experience of just… existing. Or maybe just… experience existing. By itself. Experience-ness.

What is this, then? What is experience? Well, you can be sure of one thing: it is the only thing you know, the only thing you have ever known and the only thing you will ever know. Because how can you know something without it being part of experience? This is the same reason why you can’t explain what it is, you can just feel it. 

Experience itself becomes pretty important, then. We overlook it when we think of the world as made up of subjects and objects, people and phenomena, where experience is just the transparent glass between the two. But it doesn’t take much to realize that that world and everything we know is that experience. Subjects and objects, too. Our permanent and independent identity is a thought that emerges in our experience as a stand-in for a set of perceptions, and that is useful for sustaining this experience over time, but nothing more, because there’s nothing permanent nor independent about our experience. And experience depends as much on the part of reality that “experiences” as it does on the one that is “experienced”. 

But can’t experience tell us anything about the reality beyond it? Well, if we agree that experience exists (and how could we not?), then we must also agree that the reality that all our collective experiences are part of must, somehow, share this quality, this feeling, this experience-ness. And then maybe sometimes (or somewhere) it feels like a fish, or a tree, or a human, or some other alien experience that exists out there, by interacting with itself like this. We are but those few interactions that happen to sustain themselves over time. In order to do that, favourable and unfavourable experiences exist, and with them arise ideas of pleasurable and unpleasurable, distinction and similarities, values and meaning, quantities and qualities. 

Now it’s easier to see why clinging on to an idea of what “we” are, which is just another experience, leads “us” into conflict with what we think are separate people, while we’re all experiences that are part of the same underlying reality. In a sense, we are that reality. The sooner we intimately feel this, the more conflict, whether internal or external, will gradually subside.

And if we stop identifying with ideas, we also realize that experience happens spontaneously, by itself, and it changes regardless of our ideas of choice and will. Without an independent identity, without an independent will, how can ideas of merit and blame exist? How can we hate, then, or be angry with, “other people”. They’re experiences happening, just like you. 

Judgement, then, turns into compassion. And now we can really consider building a luminous future. 

Experience can be beautifully complex, nuanced and multi-faceted. Yet we insist on reducing it to a few orderly ideas, and we call that “reality”. Then we wonder why we’re depressed and why the world is getting crazy.