I was making a difference between “experience” related to the ordinary functioning of the brain and “experiencing” as related to direct perception.
As long as there is “experience” there is the “experiencer” which involves the recording along with the mine/ I. In experiencing there is neither experiencer to claim this is “my experience” nor registering because what appears, what is perceived, it is fully seen, understood and assimilated so, no need to give a thought to it. Thought, the word, the image, is the impression, the trace that is usually associated to previous “experiences”, left on the brain that gets added to the content and what brain endlessly ruminates later on. Experience is stuck water, so to speak, whereas experiencing is flowing.
So the whole business is ‘upside down’. We are taught that experience is good. The more ‘experience’ the better. Memories for when you’re old, photo albums, etc…there is an element of greed in it, the accumulation of memories.
Direct perception then is quite rare, when thought/I is not present or does not immediately ‘comment’ on the sensation of the seeing, hearing, tasting , etc?
This is what K’s teaching tells us, and I don’t doubt that it’s true because I know that my experience is subjective, biased, a self-serving distortion of actuality, but I can’t honestly say that the teaching is the truth until my experience is seen for the falsehood it is.
Greed favors and features experience that flatters and supports the self-image, but most of our experience belies the self-image and reveals the insecurity, duplicity, mendacity, callousness and cruelty that we deny.
“Like imaginary friends, tulpas are entities generated entirely in the mind. But unlike imaginary friends, some believe tulpas think on their own, experience emotions and have memories.”
Are the teachings the truth? Can truth be taught or even spoken? What the teachings teach is that the experiencer is not a separated entity with own existence but just a thought. They point out to the fragmentation through which the brain is functioning and getting damaged. This is what has to be seen, from that insight on, true enquiry begins. Whether it, the enquiry, leads to the “truth” or not, as K claims, I can´t say neither. We always ends up at the same point in all the threads we meet.
Edit: Moreover, how do you know that your experience is as you describe it? Have you seen it by yourself? Is it a fact for you that you faced as it was seen or it became just an idea and it is the idea what you are dealing with?
I don’t know about ‘we’ but I tend to be agnostic about things like tulpas: I might have an intuitive feeling for whether they are real/true or not, but I know that I don’t know. If I really wanted to know, I’d investigate more deeply, experiment, test hypotheses out. But I often don’t want to know.
I wouldn’t say it’s overrated, but corrupted. There’s the knowing of mastering a skill, the knowing of understanding a physical/technical process, and self-knowledge, which is knowing how thought is corrupted to serve the interest of the thinker instead of doing no harm.
I know that “my experience is subjective, biased, a self-serving distortion of actuality”, because in hindsight I realize that I am more reactive, more inclined to conditioned response than mindful response.
This is our conditioned tendency, and it’s why we often regret and frequently apologize for things we said or did. We know from experience that this happens almost invariably, but we are conditioned to be confident rather than diffident, and we accept this as normal and don’t question it.
Overrated in the sense that (imo) accumulated knowledge, no matter how beautiful or elegant or holistic or woke, probably won’t result in the kind of transformation we’re on about here.
My understanding of the teaching is that without self-knowledge, there’s no transformation. What’s more, we can’t function without practical knowledge (practical thought), so the only thinking preventing transformation is psychological thought, the ongoing chatter based on who/what I think I am/should be.
That would seem to be the case and with that realization would come a dissolution of all that pertains to the psychological thought stream that maintains the image of a self that is an individual.
