Chapter 1:
THE NATURE OF DIRECT
EXPERIENCE

Direct experience is simply you being yourself in the immediacy of the present moment. That is, you being yourself without any filtration made by the psychological aspect of your mind. Since life is experience and as it always takes place in the present moment, the present can then be said to be all that one truly knows. An obvious statement you might say, well yes and perhaps even a cliché in modern speech, but within this cliché lays a great truth. This truth unequivocally proclaims that only the here and now exists and you are it. You are being lived by the present moment as you are seemingly living it simultaneously. You cannot separate yourself from the here and now, if you think you can then that is only through the medium of thinking it so.

I find this to be a great realization for the mature mind, and in my view a mature mind is nothing other than a mind that is ready to fully receive that naked truth i.e. you can never not be here and never not be in the now.

If you would object and say well sure I can, when I’m dead and gone. I would then reply by saying, that is only a thought, which in reality is a thought that you are having in the here and now. That being said, who knows what curtains are going to be unveiled when that “last moment” of death comes knocking.

However what you can do and where your immediate powers truly lies is rather in how you meet the actuality of every moment. The door of direct experience is simply a metaphor that signifies the possibility of one consciously diving into the entirety of every moment that is presented before oneself, as this moment always happens to be available for you and your growing more into it. The present moment is filled with infinite possibilities of expressing itself, precisely as it is now doing through billions upon billions of subjective sentient beings on this planet and most likely the entire universe. From this fascinating vantage point consciousness becomes synonymous with infinite possibilities and expressions, it can and does renovate itself into what ever it feels like, though maybe “it” doesn’t “feel” in precisely the same way as a human being does.

Your awareness of every moment is itself the moment. Your awareness and the object that is being seen cannot truly be separated from your consciousness, except as I said previously, by the medium of thought. Thought is an important topic when it comes to the journey towards a more direct experience of life. Because thought has the power to guide but also to misguide, it has the power to strengthen but also to weaken, it is in fact a tool, but as any other tool it shouldn’t be making a tool out of us.

When you are a master of a palace, you shouldn’t be subject to the capricious will of your guests. When the guests come into your home and take over it, then you know that something has gone terribly wrong. I am firmly convinced that this truly is the case with the psychological aspect of mind for humanity, a condition that is common today and perhaps has been so for countless years in the history of humankind. This psychological identity has somehow taken over and made the intuition a slave to its rigid rules and preposterous ambiguities. Your intuition is more in tune with your direct experience, and that is as we shall see what I propose to be the most important point when it comes to an individual’s capacity to live a fulfilled life.

When your experience is lived too indirectly, that is when the person or the egoic mind is constantly filtrating and judging the input that your consciousness is receiving, and/or perhaps when you are consuming more than you are creating, this is exactly when the soul goes through its claustrophobic and desperate time.

Your being longs to be more fully in this moment, it is ever seeking a way to be fully absorbed in the totality of existence, but something is there that seemingly hinders it. This something can be called the person, psychological mind, the separate self, the ego, the identity, the I-thought and many other names have been ascribed to it. The important thing to recognize is that this “mental something” clearly hinders us from blooming into direct experience, which in turn is something that seemingly is holding back the consciousness from living life more fully.

Your task in this course and the books included is to transcend the mischievous psychological mind (the separate self & the person) and to dismantle it once and for all.