The Awareness in Experiencing

• Balakrishnan
• 01 Oct 2018
• Parenting ,Point Of View

The cattle were returning after a day’s long graze in the lush green fields. Birds were flying back to their nests and settling well. The villagers though a bit tired, tried keeping their cheer on their way back to their respective homes. It was time to have the last meal of the day and put the bodies to rest. Miles away, the city had not gone to sleep. The evening party was to stretch itself to midnight. The moon was already up in the sky signaling mankind to stop all activities and enjoy the beauty of that full moon night.

But do we every bother to experience these? Do we experience every moment and not let pass the precious time?

All of us go through innumerable experiences throughout our lives, but do we actually experience them? Wonder why we are not able to see the tree or a flower as it is, without knowing or identifying it? Even when we hear a new composition or a musical tune, are we not habituated to compare it with something we have heard before and also draw an amount of satisfaction in our own cleverness and intelligence? The culprit is our own mind. Our mind or the past incidents acts as a huge stumbling block and does not allow us to go through the new experience without playing a role, negative or positive. We are accustomed to the recall of earlier experiences that color and camouflage the current situation and rob us from the joy of living it.

Let us look at this tripod which builds up an experience. There is an “experiencer” who is undergoing the experience; the process of experiencing which takes place and the experience that gets recorded. Only when the experiencer is passively aware of what is happening and does not bother to understand and interpret the situation, he would actually “experience”. This leads to “Experiencing” the moment. For this, the experiencer would have to be fresh to receive and vigilant enough to not allow any seed of an earlier thought to creep in. The concept of time will have to take a temporary halt for the fresh moment to usher in. There should be no interest to rationalize what is likely to happen, for the “experiencing” to occur. In short, only when the experiencer is clear that this is yet not another experience, then he would be blessed to feel the moment and experience it. For “experiencing” the moment, the experiencer must cease to be.

This entire process of not being actively involved, by withdrawing oneself and allowing the new experience to happen, needs to be deeply understood. To achieve a desired result, we cannot employ a process where one procedure is followed by another. Firstly, the element of desire to enjoy a new experience itself needs to be dropped off. Only when we find ourselves in a situation of being inexplicable about the experience, we will be able to realize what we felt through and internalize it. To borrow a somewhat similar expression of Thomas Hardy though used completely in a different context, “there needs to be more meditation than action, more listlessness than meditation and also the need for reasoning to proceed on narrow premises to result in experiences wildly imaginative”.

J Krishnamurthi beautifully remarked, “We either gloat about our past or worry about the future while the actual present is slipping at our feet”. To be completely aware about “experiencing”, the past should die and there should be no intention of the future to be born.