Direct experience can be a trap.
Direct Experience is one of the most important tools in the inquiry of the Ten Fetters. How can it turn into a trap?
What is Direct Experience?
Should you already have started to inquire for example into the self-illusion, you will have come across the term “direct experience”, or “actual experience”. I like to use the term “first-hand experience”.
The first-hand experience is our sensory experience, everything that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, and tasted. You could also say, it is everything that would count as proof in front of a court. The experiences we have need to have names to be communicated. For example, “rose” is the name for a specific plant with distinct features.
Which experience is called “Me”?
This is the central question in the inquiry into the self-illusion. Find the thing that you consider to be me. The entity that thinks, decides, chooses, acts, controls, and experiences everything. Remember, the sensory experience would have to count as proof in front of a court.
How Direct Experience can become a trap
Illusions have a very specific property: They don’t exist on the level of sensory experience. That’s why they are called illusions. Only facts can be found on the experiential level.
Searching your sensory (=direct experience) for the self-illusion will predictively lead to the result that you can’t find it. Though you might think this means you have seen through the self-illusion, you simply haven’t found it because this is not where illusions live.
You could draw the intellectual conclusion that the self doesn’t exist and others might agree, but he self-illusion is usually still alive and kicking.
How to see through the self-illusion?
As in every step on the path to awakening, you explore the illusion itself. The self-illusion can be felt as the sense of self. Whenever it feels like “I” am experiencing this, somebody does this to “me”, “I” am in control of my thoughts or emotions or myself, “I” am seeing the car, “I” am deciding…., explore the sense of self.
Does the sense of self indicate an “I” that can be sensorially experienced? Would this count as proof in front of a court?
A flat surface with legs underneath is called “table”
Can you trace down anything tangible that you call “me”?
This is all you have to do.
When it becomes clear that the sense of self doesn’t represent a real self, the penny drops and you’ll experience a shift, in which it becomes positively clear that there is no self and never was. You won’t believe that you didn’t see this earlier because it is so obvious and right in front of you. This experience is called a shift.
Keep looking until this shift happens. Without a shift, you will not be able to proceed to the next fetters.
You will find an overview over the next steps in a recent interview I had with Mystik Mag. All these illusions are inquired into in the same way. All illusions except for the 9th fall with a shift.
Tell me in the comments, did you have a shift in your inquiry into the self-illusion or could it be that you couldn’t find it because you too looked for the self-illusion in direct experience?
Image by Petra from Pixabay.com