| 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. 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 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 experiences 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." |
