American Buddhist Net

MUKUL SHARMA

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 08, 2006 12:00:00 AM]

Sentience has a formidable flipside. Because, after the age of two or three when self awareness begins to dawn, pure experience is something that happens to us only very fleetingly.

And that’s a huge paradox there because experience is what happens to us all the time through every moment of our lives. We allow the world to impinge on our senses, we apprehend objects, thoughts and emotions, we participate in events or activities that lead to the accumulation of knowledge or skill.

Yet here’s the rub. For experiences invariably lead to memories, introspection, scrutiny, etc., and ultimately, analysis which profoundly alters the preceding experience in ways we hardly realise till it’s rendered, in effect, a second-hand thing.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Because, thereafter and forever, the analysis then becomes the “real” experience instead. When someone asks, “What happened?” our response is what we actually think happened. Or what we later figured happened. Even what we finally decided happened.

Words, language, metaphors, symbols and interpretation leak into the original experience and change it into something that really didn’t happen. In a way it’s the curse of having consciousness that must deal with occurrences all the time in its own individual way, following its own internal logic which may have nothing to do with reality though it may be totally consistent unto itself.

Poets and those who have mystical religious experiences know this well and often rue it. For them the lyrical or transcendent is something that’s as valid as any other event any other person may have. At the same time, poetry or a feeling of bliss is the only way they know — indeed the only instrument available to them — to express it in a way which others can understand or perceive.

It’s not an analysis. It only becomes one when they are asked, “What happened?” as any response would be an analysis and that would ruin the event.

The basic teaching of Zen Buddhism (if it has any teachings at all, that is!) is this: to recognise that the later intellectual consequences of experience is only a lot of second-hand trappings and layers over it. In other words to know “What happened?” one has to let it happen.

The novice asked the Master who was having soup, “What is Truth?” At first the Master didn’t use any words. “Mmmm,” he said. Then he spoilt it by cleverly adding, “This soup tastes good.”

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