No Experience In Truth
Edited extract from a Gold Coast Talk: 26 June 1993
I have to detach from my self. For it is my attachment to my self, the clinging to my identity, that’s the problem - not my self, which is purely my experience. There’s nothing wrong with my experience. But when I attach myself to it, I get emotional. I’m not supposed to be attached to anything, for I am nothing.
All experience is related to the senses. Our experience is limited by the human mind, which for instance cannot register some of the sounds we’re told by scientists that the insects and birds can hear. We have no sense of those sounds, so there’s no experience of them.
Experience always consists of the subject, I who am seeing the flowers, and an object, the flowers. And there’s always a gap or distance between me and the object. There’s time or distance between us.
There is the experience of the beloved man or woman. But in existence I am always separate from the beloved. There’s always a distance and I’ll always be separate from her or him. There can be no union, except a passing one. This is terrible, absolutely frustrating and tragic. Man and woman can have no union in this existence, because it’s all experience.
My self has to live with this dreadful division from the beloved - from whatever it is I love - and starts to think that experience is all there is. So the self habitually goes searching for a fulfilling experience. But of course every search for experience is unfulfilling. It does not fulfil you because you are dependent on something outside of ‘me’.
If you make love to get the experience, you’ll always be separate from the beloved. Experience is always looking to get, not to give. If you make love to get – which is what sex is – you’ll always be frustrated because you can’t get love as an experience.
You can get satisfaction. Experience satisfies you but satisfaction only lasts five minutes or five weeks and that’s the end of it. The old experience is dead so you start to want some new experience. And you go from one experience to another.
One of the pains of the spiritual life is that you start to lose the satisfaction of experience. If you haven’t already found this, you will. You’ll find that you don’t get the same experience out of relationships as you used to. You don’t get the same feedback. That’s because you are detaching from experience so that you can live in the truth, which is now. Living in the truth is fulfilment not satisfaction. Satisfaction ends, fulfilment doesn’t.
If I make love not for experience but because it is an act of fulfilment, then it doesn’t end. If I make love in truth, if I give up the need of experience, then I am constantly receiving. Not because I am trying to get, but because when I give I cannot help but receive.
You must not be disturbed when you start to find that your old friendships don’t give you the same satisfaction. You used to delight in certain activities and now you don’t get the same feedback. You start to get ‘absence of experience’ - detachment from the need for experience. In that absence there is nothing. And the mind and emotions, which are always looking for something, get very frustrated and unhappy: ‘What’s happening to me?’ But then in the absence of experience you know the truth.
I say there is nothing in me. It is the self that feels it is dying, losing its life - because the self lives off experience, lives off getting and winning. And sooner or later you go through detachment from love - the final experience to detach from - and it’s very painful. A woman will say, ‘I’m losing my love’; and there’s nothing worse for a woman than to lose her love. She feels she’s plunged into darkness. But that’s not true. She’s only losing the old experience. Eventually she must detach from all her experience of love so that her love is no longer taken out of its context.
If you have a lover and you make the most beautiful love, be careful: Do not be attached to the experience of that love, because the day will come when he or she will leave you or die; and then you will suffer. You must not be attached to the experience.
I don’t want you to think that you shouldn’t experience anything. You can do what you like. Go and fly aeroplanes, surf, raise a beautiful garden, build a home … Do what you do. But don’t be attached to it. There is nothing wrong with experience as long as I do not get attached to it.
There’s no experience in truth. The spiritual or divine life is not being attached to your experience. There is less and less feedback, less and less satisfaction, but the compensation is that there’s a stillness, a joy, a rightness, an aloneness that rises up inside the body, a subtlety of joy and sweetness that arises inside me.