Differentiated But Not Separate
Event updates…
There are still a few spots available for the 8-week book group I’ll be co-facilitating with Dena Evans, beginning May 7th. The weekly Zoom group will be exploring the nature of reality as presented by Peter Brown in his last book, This That Is. Meetings will take place Tuesdays, 10 am to 11:30 am PDT. Cost is $100 (no one turned away for lack of funds). To register, email: john@johnastin.com.
I will be offering an in-person retreat in Austin, Texas, the weekend of June 1st/2nd. It will be held at a private home so space is limited. Cost for the two days is $150 (no one turned away for lack of funds). For details or to register, email me at: john@johnastin.com.
I’m traveling to the UK this summer and have arranged to do a Friday evening talk in London on July 5th and a daylong event there on July 6th. Email john@johnastin.com for info or to register.
For information about the retreat I’ll be facilitating in Colorado, July 17-20. Click here.
DIFFERENTIATED BUT NOT SEPARATE
For a moment, just feel the presence of whatever is showing up experientially. It doesn't matter what portion of the field of experience may be coming into more focused view. There’s no need to direct attention to anything in particular. Simply allow whatever comes into view to come into view. Wherever attention happens to land is where it lands.
As you’re with experience in this way, notice the instability of everything, the way in which what we call the moment is always on the move, every perception slipping away no sooner than it appears. Notice too, the way in which there is no inside or outside to experience, and how the experiential field itself has no findable boundary or end point.
Now, pick anything you think of as a discrete part of the field—a feeling, sensation, thought or whatever. The only way you could ever describe this portion of the experiential field as something distinct from the rest of the field would be if that supposed part had some sort of bounded nature, some border or line around it, delineating that portion from the rest of the field. However, look and see—can any such boundary lines be found?Take sound for example, say the sounds of the kitchen refrigerator or the traffic outside your window. Sounds seem to show up as these discreet phenomena, distinguishable from other phenomena, right? And yet, every sound that is heard is completely and inseparably mixed with everything else that’s occurring. It's quite strange and paradoxical that experientially, what’s showing up as distinct pieces in the field are at the same time, completely intermingled with one another, differentiated yet without findable separation.
It's like a bowl of soup. We take a spoonful of the soup and taste all these identifiably different flavors. But while the particular flavors clearly stand out, one from the other, at the same time, no clear lines separating one flavor from the next can be found. While the soup consists of various and differentiated flavors, it remains itself, a seamless, undivided whole, doesn’t it?
The world of experience is very much like this. It shows up as clearly differentiated—thoughts distinct from sounds distinct from emotions and so on. And yet despite this, no actual dividing lines can be found.
Look at perceiving itself. I see some object, say the bookshelf across the room. From one vantage, there is this sense of being a perceiver (the subject) that’s distinct from the bookshelf being perceived (the object). But when I look, there is no clear end or edge to either the perceiver or what’s being perceived. And so, what we conventionally think of as a clearly bounded perceiver encountering different perceptions turns out to be a single, undivided whole.
From this perspective of inseparability, what I am is everything that's being perceived. I am all of it—the sounds being heard, the thoughts being thought, the sights being seen, the feelings being felt, the circumstances arising. No division.
Nothing really has autonomous existence apart from the field of experiencing any more than a wave has autonomous existence apart from the sea. We may have all these ideas about being bounded, separate, individuated pieces of reality. But experientially, no such separate, autonomous pieces or parts can be found.
And so yes, from one vantage, we can say that, “I” am experiencing x, y or z phenomenon. But from the perspective I’m pointing to here, it’s just as accurate to say that “reality” is perceiving itself, tasting itself, encountering itself.
So, just let yourself enjoy the seamless nature of experiencing, feeling its free-flowing, ever-liquifying nature, a nature that never really concretizes or coalesces into any fixed, definable structures or forms, even though we tend to describe things in such ways.
To see this is to discover the inherent freedom in everything, the impossibility of there being anything that could bind nor anyone who could ever be bound.