I’m going to talk about a reflection here… it’s something that’s somewhat training related, but I read about it a few days ago, and want to express it.
I’ve had times when the world seems to just dissolve… in a good way. Things have less intensity… whereas I have greater sensory intensity. I am truly focussed on the moment, and everything else – the problems, the materialistic urges, the societal pressures seem to evaporate.
For a long time, I’ve been trying to get back there… and alongside that, I’ve also been trying to understand how to communicate or grasp what that feeling of ‘joy’ is. And yes, the technical term for it is ‘joy’ – unadulterated joy. It’s the pureness of experiencing the moment without any external or superficial pressures acting on it.
And through reading ‘Nothing Special’, Joko (the author) expressed the reasoning behind this better than anyone before.
She talks about the miniscule difference between experiencing and having an experience. For the most part, people would never see a difference between the two: you have to be experiencing something in order to have an experience about something. And here’s where it becomes difficult to describe… unless you’ve experienced joy, and know what it’s about.
When you ‘have an experience’, the experience becomes the object and you’re the subject. You’re focussed on having it, not being in it. Perfect example is me and my Grand Canyon trip – I was so focussed on experiencing ‘joy’ – it was an object of achievement. It was about me having that experience again. Stupid in reality, because you can’t have an experience of joy – you can only be experiencing it. As soon as you place it in a box, you lose it.
And this is the fact… the fact that when you focus on experiences as disparate entities, defining and creating them, they’re objects in your mind. But when you remove yourself from the fact that you’re experiencing an experience, and focus fully in the experience itself, that’s when things start to dissolve and evaporate. That’s when you can begin to feel the pure. The mind is focussed – attributed to experiencing, rather than processing, thinking, etc… It one goal and one goal only.
Once again – this is an extremely hard concept to convey. Joko does it amazingly (and far better than me), but it really set up some alarm bells in me… And what I will say, is that while the intellectualizing of these concepts is difficult, it also acts as an ability to guide the way. Now that I am aware of this concept of experiencing, not having an experience, I can better guide my actions to align with what I hold important. If I reflect and sense that I’m doing what I did in the Grand Canyon, I can put a stop to it, because I know what works… what processes should be enabled to make something possible.