Friday, January 2, 2015

Who is experiencing life?

Life in its infinite variety offers endless experiences. There appear plenty of people, with individual lives, unique in several ways. The experiences that each one seems to have is so different from one another, sometimes it appears for the good, sometimes for the worse.

As long as life presents favorable situations and experiences, one's individual story provides happiness and not much to complain. The individual script in fact provides a reason for pride. The moment things begin to take unfavorable turns, we begin to complain, we scramble to fix it, when things get out of hand and we loose hope, we become miserable. There are situations that hurt us and make us suffer so much, we question the point of life. The individual story is no longer fun. One begins to look at other stories, and almost all of them appear to be better.

Life is a sequence of experiences. depending on how we look at things, some are favorable some are not. we seek a sequence that is always favorable. Little do we realize that a sequence gets its meaning and sense only by a mixture. A monotonous sequence of either case will never provide us any experience.

Leaving aside the impossibility of a monotonous sequence, if we probe deeper into who is it that is experiencing life, we get an even more interesting answer. A physical analysis of the self, and an attempt to identify it, results in an absence of such a thing as the Self. Assuming the most common object of one's  body to be the self, we easily get past the parts of the body one by one, including the heart and the brain, abstract notions of thoughts, emotions, feeling and intellect, since all of this is observable by the self, we come to a point where the observer is not to be observed! 

If there is no one to observe, or experience, then could there have been an experience?  When there is no experience , then what sense does it make to classify it to be favorable or not? Realizing this liberates one from the consequences of apparent experiences. Life becomes an interesting sequence.

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