Direct Experience
"To those who are awake, there is one ordered universe common to all, whereas in sleep each person turns away into a private world."
Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE)
There is the direct experience of the senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing. Then there is thought, sometimes regarded as the sixth sense.Originally, and for millions of years, the role of thought was to select aspects of sensory experience and organize them into maps useful for the organism's survival.
More recently, however, human thought seems to have progressively acquired a position of pseudo-dominance over the other senses.
Instead of just mapping what is perceived, it began adding layer upon layer of interpretation, creating increasingly complex and self-referential conceptual landscapes.
This drift away from immediate experience into an essentially dream world is, simply put, where much, if not all, of our human frustration, suffering, and conflict originate.
A tree does not say, "I am a tree." A cloud does not say, "I am a cloud." In the same way, birth does not proclaim, "This is the beginning," nor does death declare, "This is the end."
These are interpretations that thought superimposes upon raw, non-conceptual experience, drawing upon accumulated memory and belief.
To recognize that the world presented by thought is only a projection, and to return to direct experience before concepts arise, is what genuine spirituality is about.
What it is not about, is accumulating ever more beliefs or interpretations, which only replace one conceptual prison with another.
Thought that has recognized its own limitations occupies its rightful place and becomes a magnificently creative tool.
Thought that remains blind to its own limitations lives in a state of perpetual hallucination.
Even while awake, it is still asleep.
IMF - Luang Prabang, Laos, 28 June 2026
