Let's close our eyes.
What does it mean to truly experience something?
Something as mundane,
Like a sunset.
What does it mean to experience this sunset truly?
It could be a sunset.
It could be a meal.
It could be an interaction with another person.
But before we get to this question,
Let's zoom in into what happens when we experience something.
In this case,
Let's say we witness a sunset.
For a brief time,
Usually a few seconds,
We are truly experiencing the sunset as it is.
And the next moment,
Comparisons,
Thinking,
Levels of beauty,
Evaluation,
All this begins.
So now we are comparing this sunset which has receded in the background another image of some other sunset.
So what we have done is we have put a layer of thinking in front of our actual experience.
And this happens so seamlessly,
So fast,
So regularly,
That we might not even be able to differentiate between an actual experience and an experience which has been overlaid by thinking.
Sunset was a pretty neutral example.
Let's try this experiment with something a little more charged,
Emotionally charged.
Let's say you come across someone who is not particularly nice to you in the past.
But you don't know that you are going to run into them,
Maybe at work,
Maybe outside,
Doesn't matter.
Now if we zoom in,
The first thing that happens is that you'll truly experience them through your eyes.
And the next moment,
There'll be a thick cloud of thinking right between you and them.
All the past hurts,
Meanness,
Rudeness,
Everything will be flashing in front of our eyes with some commentary going on.
We don't realize this,
But this keeps happening every time.
The more emotionally charged our previous experiences are with a particular person or a situation or a thing,
The thicker this cloud gets.
And somehow the more convincing it seems.
And sometimes,
Even for mundane experiences where you don't need to overlay your thinking with an experience,
You will find innovative ways of adding it.
Like if you are eating a meal,
By the time you start eating,
That's the true experience,
The taste of it.
And taste is devoid of numbers,
Judgments,
Evaluations,
Comparisons.
Taste is taste,
Whether it agrees with your body or not.
But we abstract this experience by superimposing a layer of thinking and start talking to ourselves or maybe others about how good it is,
How this is not up to the mark as compared to this meal in that particular restaurant,
Etc.
The content of this superimposition is not important.
The habit of superimposing is what we are trying to see and understand.
I'm not trying to judge.
I'm not trying to categorize this overlaying of thinking as something good or bad.
I'm just exploring the different facets of how we experience things and how certain things are a habit only until we see them as habits.
That's why the emphasis on seeing things clearly so that we can decide whether we want to overlay thinking on our experience or not.
The downside of this superimposition is that we are never truly experiencing something fully.
We are experiencing only a part of it and then off we go into our world of thinking.
Maybe the other person is not a jerk this time.
We wouldn't know.
Maybe they need our help.
But we wouldn't know because the moment we are in thinking mode,
We have lost all sensitivity to the true experience.
And comparing a scenery with anything else only diminishes beauty.
The image of something that we have experienced in the past,
The image of something in our minds that we have experienced in the past is not even 0.
01% of what we are truly experiencing now.
It's just a stick figure representation of the true experience and a sure shot way to diminish beauty in our life.
That's why we love to go travel to new places,
To new restaurants,
Meet new people.
Our hearts desire these things.
The main reason for this desire is a built-in mechanism for us to pay attention,
To be fully present when we are in a new territory.
There is not enough information to overlay that experience with a layer of thinking.
And we've all tasted this.
After we come back from travel,
From a new place,
There's something that has changed us.
Our eyes are different.
We feel different.
That's why great philosophers used to encourage to travel so that this quote-unquote natural process of overlaying our experience with thinking diminishes.
But it can also be intentional.
We can see that thinking is a tool that we can use and put down whenever we want to.
Then every experience can become a work of art.
Every sunset can be majestic.
The wildflowers can truly capture our attention.
The twinkle in someone's eyes,
Their smile can touch our hearts.
So as an experiment,
Just to verify what I've just said,
We can intentionally infuse a few new experiences in our life just to explore how we interact.
Go to a new cuisine restaurant that you've not tried before and see how meticulous you are with reading their menu,
The ingredients.
And when the entree does come to your table,
How present you are to the fragrance,
To the taste,
To the texture of the food,
The anticipation,
The aftertaste,
Everything becomes amplified.
You may decide at the end you like the food or not,
But that's not the point.
The point is to understand how we are present for this experience.
Or go in the woods for a hike.
Even if the trails are marked properly,
There'll be heightened presence for everything that is happening around.
Only when we know the roads,
We check out and go on this little excursion of thinking,
Unless we are jolted back into the experience.
Take a different route home in your car.
Usually you have to pay more attention,
You are more present,
To signals,
To signs,
To speed limits.
Talk to someone with a different dialect or language.
Watch a stand-up comedy of someone you've never heard before.
All these would just be experiments to see,
To see clearly,
The superimposition of thinking,
Kind of dulls our experience.
And then we are free to decide how we want to show up in our life for our experiences.
As I said,
It's a habit.
We can decide to fuel it,
Or to treat it like a tool.
Thank you.
