Take a moment to reflect upon what is going on in your life. Perhaps you are unwell and experiencing distress, maybe even pain. Or things are more upbeat, your business is making money, or your children are doing well in college. Perhaps you are in a bad relationship, with frequent conflicts and argument. Whatever experience you are going through, examine whether your feelings, thoughts, ideas, impressions and sensations exist separately from what is going on in your life. Where is the dividing line? Do they come labelled as inner or outer? In direct experience, is there an actual boundary? Do you find that the entirety of your experience is a seamless whole? Examine any experience, past or present. Within any experience, can you find the actual distinction between your feelings, emotions and thoughts from the overall experience that you are having? Do you see that this lack of separation extends to any experience you might be having? Now try and see whether you can actually separate one experience from another. Can you actually tell where one experience ends and another begins? Is there an actual boundary between the experience of ‘you’ and what you are going through? Given that you cannot distinguish your thoughts, feelings and emotions from the experience you are having, see that there is no separate ‘you’, there is just experience. Experience unfolding, including your feelings and sensations as well as the flat tyre, the microwave running, the sunset, continuously, seamlessly, harmoniously. Within experience, there is no distinction between you and what is being experienced! And among experiences, there is no distinction, just a continuous train of experiences, subsuming a separate you. Whatever your mental state, feelings or sensations, they are included without judgement, never separate from the rest of experience. Try to feel this.
The purpose of this exercise is not to engender a mystical worldview or to do away with distress. Rather, engaging in this exercise will help reduce the separateness and alienation that sometimes creeps up when we are too caught up in our minds. The all too common, me-in here and other/you/world out there attitude can lead to a lot of suffering. Seeing that within the matrix of an experience or more specifically any experience at all, there are no boundaries between me with my inner world of feelings, sensations and thoughts and the world of objects and circumstances. Do this exercise with any experience you have had and it might help auger the realisation that in reality, there is no difference between a pleasant experience and an unpleasant one. The analysis and interpretation of what is going on is an indivisible part of the experience itself! Over time, you might find that doing this exercise helps reduce the contrast between a supposedly unpleasant experience and one that is considered pleasant. It helps view experience as just that, experience, not good, not bad, neither exclusively inner or outer but universally interrelated, spontaneous and open. There is liberation in that!