Life is experience, and the more fully you are immersed in the immediacy of the present moment, the more you’ll be fulfilled. There can be no life without a subject present to experience it, furthermore this entails that experience is indistinguishable from life, and vice versa. Without an experience or experiencing of life, there could be nothing called life, no one there to say this is or this is not. This is what I call an absolute subjective outlook on what life is, and from this point of view life is not primarily the biological functioning of the organism but more so the perceiving of all phenomena that is appearing on the screen of your consciousness.
If we would further clarify what this outlook could mean, we could do so by taking the example of a new born baby, a baby that has no conscious notion that it is a biological entity, at least not in the same way that most people normally are after they reach a certain age. The baby is rather just aware and conscious of the totality of each moment. In other words the sensory and mental input that it receives from the “external world” is so intense that no self-image has any relevance, room or potential to grow in his or her consciousness. Life for the new born baby is therefore much more direct and unfiltered, compared to let’s say an adult that has been conditioned by his society, culture and environment into adopting certain attitudes and beliefs.
What happens when the baby grows up is that it becomes conditioned into a certain mode of personhood. It’s like an operating system, which has been both consciously and unconsciously formed by the society and culture in which he/she finds himself.
Furthermore since the art of being a person is the hottest topic on the mouths of modern people, how could this baby ever stand a chance against those masses of programmed people marching towards it while trying to consciously and unconsciously convert it each and every moment. Therefore the baby is, after it is susceptible to becoming a person, transformed internally into a limited self-reflecting ego mind that believes that it is only its biological and psychological functioning and conditioning.
This, dear reader, is not who you really are and this is not the recommended path to direct experience. This is rather a closed shut, bolted gate that is very hard to breach and enter. In my view, this personal mode of existing is quite a life-negating and disempowering world-view to adopt and foster, yet it is a mode that all human beings must experience, and ideally transcend.
The mature human being is the one that realizes the limitations of this personal mode of navigating the world, and then decides to move further and higher into herself, or in other words into more direct experience. This in turn means the thinning and fading away of the separate ego identity that is, in a strange way holding the consciousness as hostage.
You could now be thinking, what exactly is this personal mode or psychological ego that I’ve been so furiously condemning, and who are we if we are not our bodies and minds? Can you tell us that, Mr know it all?
Well this depends on how open one is to the light of direct experience. If one has gone through life assembling fantasies about reality and if one has the tendency towards building high protective walls around one’s identity, then it could indeed be quite a challenge to give an answer to that supremely important question.
My best and most honest answer would be that no one can tell you who you are, only you can know this, and how you know this is by totally being yourself, and that begs the inevitable question, how are you totally yourself? You are totally yourself when you are in alignment with life through direct experience. Everything is then answered through experience and not through theory or thought. These articles on Nirvanic Insights are not intended to be an exposition of philosophy; the message is beyond the confines of the intellect, which all philosophies are based on. All the words written here are solely meant to point you to that realm within you which is already so, namely your direct experience. I’m only attempting to point out the aspect of you, which is more of a meditative and intuitive nature.
Daniel Seeker is a wandering dervish and lifelong student of the past, present and future. He realized that he was made of immaculate and timeless consciousness when meditating in his hermit cave on the island of Gotland. His writings are mostly a reflection of that realizaton. Daniel currently studies history, philosophy, egyptology and western esotericism at Uppsala Universitet. He’s also currently writing his B.A. thesis in history which explores how Buddhist and Hindu texts were first properly translated and introduced to the western world in the late 18th and 19th century.