Dear Rupert,
In exploring our direct experience, I often wonder how much we can trust it. When one sees a mirage in a desert, if not aware of such a phenomenon, one would consider it to be real. Similarly, are we not limited by the human senses and consciousness in our discovery of truth? I know that is all we have, but I wonder to what extent we can use it, and if we can entirely base our conclusions on it. I’d love to hear your comments on this.
Thanks,
Prashant
Dear Prashant,
You are quite right to suggest that nothing that appears within the mind, the body or the world can be completely trusted or relied upon. The short answer is: Only consciousness or being is certain.
However, it is helpful to understand clearly why this is so, to prevent us from ever putting our trust in the wrong place again. The following elaboration of the process by which we derive this understanding is only intended for those amongst us who enjoy the more rigorous, investigative aspects of the process.
You give the example of the mirage in the dessert. Another example is the dream state. During a dream, our experience seems to have the same reality as that of our waking state. However, upon waking we discover that its apparent reality was illusory.
How then, as you imply, do we know that the current experience of the mind, body and world is not also illusory? We don’t! What then can we be absolutely certain of?
To answer this question we first have to understand what it is that qualifies an experience as being illusory. How do we know that the water in the desert or the buildings in the dream are not real? It is the fact that when we go towards these objects or experiences and try to find them or touch them, they are not there. They have disappeared. The substance out of which we thought they were made is not present.
If disappearance is the criterion by which we qualify something as being unreal, then presence without disappearance must be the criterion by which we qualify something as being real.
Whatever it is that is truly present, and therefore real, in any experience cannot disappear, because that into which it would disappear would be more real than itself. Everything that appears and disappears must have a background or a support on which to appear. For instance, the screen doesn’t disappear when the image disappears, and in that sense it is more real than the image.
Whatever it is that is real in every experience cannot change. For example, water is ‘more real’ than its changing forms of ice and steam.
Whatever is real in any experience cannot appear or be born, because that from which it appeared or was born would be more real than itself, in the sense that gold is ‘more real’ than an ornament.
And whatever is real in our experience must know or illumine itself, for if it were known or illumined by something other than itself, that ‘something’ (which knows it) would be more real than itself.
* * *
Nevertheless, even if the experience of the mirage or the dream buildings turns out to be an illusion, there is an element of reality to our experience of it. There is ‘experience’, there is ‘something’, even if we are not sure what this ‘something’ is.
What then is this undeniable ‘experiencing’ or ‘something’? What is it that is truly present in every experience?
Whatever is truly real and present in our experience must be without appearance or disappearance; it must be changeless, that is, ever-present; and it must know itself.
So we can now simplify our question and ask, is there anything in our experience that is ever-present, changeless and knowing? And the answer of course is yes, knowing presence, consciousness or, more simply, ‘I’. Your self is the reality that runs unchanging throughout all experience.
Only this ever-present, changeless and knowing ‘I’ can be absolutely trustworthy. An intermittent object cannot, by definition, be worthy of absolute trust, because on what would we place our trust when it was absent? Hold on to that ‘I’ alone.
However, what could hold on to that? Obviously an intermittent object, such as a personal entity, cannot hold on to the ever-present reality of our experience. So an apparent person cannot hold on to knowing presence.
Knowing presence alone can hold on to itself. It is the only ‘thing’ that is present ‘there’ throughout its own ever-presence. However, it is already itself, so there is no need for it to make an effort to hold on to itself. It cannot lose itself. It cannot ‘not be’ itself.
Therefore, in order to know that element of our experience that is worthy of trust, all that is needed is to abide as the knowing presence that we always already are. That is the only certainty, the true security.
This simple knowing of our own being is the irreducible reality of our experience. It is the experience that we commonly know as happiness.
With love,
Rupert
