On Your Relationship to Your Experience

How you relate to your experience is your experience.

Appearing is always already happening. Experiencing is, most basically, an ongoing stream of appearing, the basic occurring of which is not subject to our will, and is that within which we exercise our will. There is always more appearing—always more that shows up that we did not author and cannot have pre-decided how we will feel about. We cannot stand outside of our experience and decide in advance what will be allowed to arise. In this sense, there is a passive quality to experience; we don’t “do” experience—we experience. But this does not mean that experience divides into a passive part (appearing) and an active part (what we do about it).

The evaluative quality of our experience—however we judge it as good or bad—just is how we are relating, moment to moment, to the ongoing stream of appearing. What we call agency, will, or choice—or objectivity, measurement, data, facts, etc.—are not exceptions to this, standing outside the stream of experiencing, but are themselves further, more complex modes of relating, no less woven into the stream than the appearing they seem to respond to. Relating, in other words, isn’t a remainder—it isn’t what’s left over once the more primary, objective, involuntary parts of experience have been identified. Rather, experience, in its entirety, is nothing but an ongoing relating to what appears. This is more than the trivial fact that experience requires something appearing to someone; it is the claim that the very quality of what appears—not merely its bare occurrence—is already shaped by, and inseparable from, how it is being related to.

“Relating differently”, then, is not a free, detached act performed on top of some neutral, already-finished experience—as if there were first a raw event, and only afterward, optionally, a stance we choose to adopt toward it. Perception already discloses a relationship. In other words, relating differently is not the process of adding/revising a layer of experience—it is not standing outside of experience and selecting a new attitude—but is bearing witness to what is always already underway, including—perhaps especially—our very desire to “relate differently to our experience”.

FURTHER READING:

• What is Vairāgya?

• Fearlessness Just is No Longer Running From Yourself