If you haven't read my introduction post yet, I strongly recommend you to do it first.
(https://steemit.com/life/@navidzar/atheist-guide-to-shiva-introduction)
Welcome to Step 1
This step is dedicated you give an intuitive recognition of what I define as our Direct Experience. This will be our main "tool" in the explorations to come.
In the meditations and explorations that will be presented here, our focus is to reveal life as it truly is. Meaning that we are not focusing on exploring or personal beliefs, opinions and ideas about life. - We want to explore life directly!
To make sure that we will explore life as it truly is, I will define our experience into the following two catagories.
- Our Direct experience:
This is the immediate/raw life-experience. Experiences such as visions, sounds, smell, body sensations, emotions, thoughts etc.
- Direct experience does not require much or any mental activity.
- Our Conceptual Experience:
This is experiences like stories, meaning, interpretations, imaginations, concepts, comparisons, judgements etc.
- Conceptual Experience requires mental activity.
Here is an more visual representations of our direct experience in comparison to our conceptual experience.
Our Conceptual Experience could be described as a mental layer - on top of our more raw Direct Experience.
Go on and do some experiments for yourself. Actually do this two simple exercises properly now, before going further.
Look around in the environment that you find yourself. At least 10 seconds.
See how your thoughts might have things to say about it, its current state, its location and so on.
See how this kind of labelling and projection is going on by it self.Now look again, but this time, try to give your fullest attention to the raw experience of your perceptions, sensations and so on...the direct experience. Feel how it feels. Be with it for while.
Could you feel the difference? (Please comment below)
This simple recognition of ones Direct experience can be an amazing revelation by itself. It may also provide for many people a chance to break old behaviours and stagnated ways of thinking.
So, lets wrap it up.
Beliefs, ideas, imagination opinions, stories etc - they all seem like natural, essential and amazing aspects of the human experience. But in this particular type of exploration, it is useful to have the ability to see through them.
– To be able to see clearly.
So, by now I hope that you have a somewhat clear recognition of what I mean by Direct Experience.
If you do, then you are ready for the next step in these explorations! ;)
If you still struggle, don't hesitate to ask me in the comments section.
- For some It might clarify "to see life through the eyes of a new born child" as one way to recognise your direct experience.
- For others, more technically minded, it can help to see their direct experience as the binary 0/1 inputs to an computer (brain). Before the computers "mind" interprets them into symbols, codes and software.
When you feel that you have have an intuition of what your direct experience is, you are ready to move on to step 2:
https://steemit.com/life/@navidzar/atheist-s-guide-to-shiva-step-2-exploring-life-directly
Lots of love,
Navid