Everything you touch is yourself
The Illusion of Solid Reality and God experiencing God
Our everyday perception suggests a clear dualistic distinction: there's an "outside" world of solid objects and an "inside" self that observes and interacts with it. This sense of solidity is then reinforced by our experiences, where we feel like distinct entities moving through a concrete world. So we may think, “ I am here and you with all other things in the world are things that are apart/separate from me”. We may come to believe that the world is a set of fixed, permanent objects, with you being the subject, stand apart from it, observing, reacting, experiencing”. Our senses, truly the mind, creates this illusion of boundaries of inside versus outside. It’s a fascinating assumption that when seen through presents a different and dare I say, more enjoyable experience of living. For me, it started with a number of self-inquiry questions, one of which crumbled the idea of inside-outs and the non-solidity of reality.
I will share a few notes about why this matters, particularly how this could lead to a better way of living and being. Of course through this we can make a slight tilt in the way we look at our mistaken belief that we are separate entities, and perhaps this might affect our emotional wellbeing, our understanding of devotion, and especially for me, the awe of being.
What if reality isn’t what we think it is
What if the reality we perceive, the sense of "out there," is simply a projection—a mental construct born from our senses and interpretations?
To break this down, let's look at the five channels we use to experience said reality: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. Could you experience anything apart from through these senses? No! You couldn’t. Well, unless you include what I call the sixth sense of experiencing—the mind. Part of the function of the mind is to make interpretations about what the five channels are transmitting. You would agree with me that the eye does not say anything about what it sees. The ears have nothing to say about what it hears. The mind however connects with what was transmitted and then gives it a label. And so when the mind interprets what is perceived through the other senses/channels, it creates an imaginary character that we can call ‘me’ and attributes its activities to that ‘me’. So “I saw the boys playing football”. “I drank a hot cup of tea”. “I had some great fun with Masha today”. It attributes full ownership of these experiences to this ‘me’ character and we forget we are not the character.
Perhaps in another note, I will go into more details about how it is that we come to be so heavily atta ched to the characters we play that we don’t see that we are not the character. But for now, let’s talk about how this sixth sense, the mind, then interpretes an event as ‘something happening outside of me’. Greg Goode, in his book, The Direct Path: The User Guide goes into numerous experiments to demonstrate how the conditioned mind experiences phenomena. I will only attempt to scratch the surface in expressing these thoughts. Also the book, Atma Darshan by Atmananda Krishna Menon is perhaps my most beloved experimental book on going deeper into the truth of our being through investigating the nature of experience.
So let’s assume you see something. You touch it. Perhaps you taste it, are these experiences of touch or taste truly connected to the object "out there"? Did you really experience this thing or did you experience yourself? When you look at a rock, your eyes only perceive light. Your mind then labels it as "rock." But the rock itself doesn’t contain that label, and what is experienced is just the label and not the rock itself. When you touch the rock, you feel sensations of pressure, texture, and temperature—again, just tactile data that is processed by your mind. The fascinating thing is that we’ve created the belief that these sensations link directly to the object itself. In reality there is no inherent connection between the color you see and the texture you touch, except in the mind's capacity to weave them into a narrative. Could you find anything wrong with that statement? Come on, check!
Now, let’s challenge everything for a moment: the "outside" world that feels so permanent, so real, could we entertain the thought that it may not even really be there as we think? Okay, okay, hear me out! What if all experience is unfolding within you and not outside you? The sky, the trees, the people—aren’t they just perceptions happening inside you. Isn’t what appears solid just a transient flow, changing by the moment. Aren’t they just as fluid as your own thoughts. No, don’t believe what I am inferring. Just do it, take an object, hold it. What is it that you experience? Sensations? Yes? Now, pay close attention to your sensations. Are you not witnessing something vibratory within you? Or at least non-static? Forget about biology, chemistry and what other quickly made up story thoughts have woven and go straight there, directly to your own experience: You do not experience the object. You experience yourself!
Now, trace your experience one next layer— who is it that’s experiencing. You would be led to instantly say ‘me’. Now, let’s focus on this ‘me’. Where exactly is this ‘me’ located? Really look for this ‘me’. What you may find at the very root of this search is your own self…without labels, without a boundary— an aliveness, a Knowing! This Knowing, this Center, this Aliveness is what knows thoughts, the labelling of objects and solidity. That’s what it’s known to. By that, I am saying there is a You that is fully aware of your experience. No, not the fine details of your experience. But the knowing that you know that you know that experience is. I could ask you the question, ‘are you having a thought’. With this question I am not asking for the content of the thought, only the awareness of thought. With the answer to the question being a ‘yes’, you will also see there’s something that knows your experience. We would say that something is internal.
No “Inner” also
If you could find this unknowable location within yourself, and called it within. You’d soon begin to notice that if there’s an inner then it surely should come with some kind of boundary. Where does the inner stop and the outer continue? Where are the gates and doors of inner experience that’s barred from outer experience and vice versa?. If we can’t find the solid cutting point and border where the inner stops and the outer continues, perhaps we can rule out a distinction between them. There are no inner experiences and no outer experiences. There is just experiencing. And so in the depth and deepest corner of experiencing we often experience this as an inner-ness— within! In the quiet experiencing, we label it within!
If there is just experiencing, or to use a different expression, knowing that you know, then knowing is your primary experience and solidity is only just a belief.
If I cussed at you and you got mad, your most intimate experience will be the knowing of the felt sensation of hurt. You are not hurt. You know of the hurt you experience. Also you know that you know the experience of hurt. Is that not happening in a spacious space called you? No, I am not referring to your mind. I am referring to that which knows your mind! The rawest, most intimate experience of your experience is the knowing of it, your experience of the world as solid is only just happening within.
The radical implications
Fear: There are so many implications to the understanding of the depth of this inquiry. For one, it helped redefine my experience of fear. Fear is an emotion that is happening within me. The most intimate of knowledge of fear is the knowing of it. The object of fear is not solid. I am the one in which this non-solidity is being experienced.
This understanding, of course, creates a weird, more pleasant and restful experiencing of the world. As I wash dishes, I am only familiar with myself and not the dishes. I am aware of that which washes the dishes. I am then aware of the awareness of washing the dishes and all of that is appearing in me.
Part of the weird, more pleasant experience of one’s being is the enjoyment of the unknown. You begin to see that you never knew anything and nothing can ever be known. And that, all of that just arising within you in blissful wonder. The enjoyment of a phone conversation is no longer because of its content but the awareness of the nature of this experience being just: the experience of experiencing, the awareness of awareness, the Knowing of aliveness, the I am that I am.
Phew!!
Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Can fully explain what this madness, this weirdness, this mystery is. Is that not what God is?
Oh, my friend! In seeing that nothing is solid, only a Knowing of the sense of solidity of the world remains. At that point, we may begin to glimpse that all that can be known is God, all that is being known is God and all of our experience is God appear to God as experiences and situations and solidity. All of our misconceptions about who we are at our core is the forgetting of our true nature, our true self which is not and could never be separate from God, the All-that-is.
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