Experience does not come with a label or name tag pinned to its lapel, announcing what it is. The dance of light and color in the evening sky does not say, “I’m a sunset.” The clear, sparkling liquid racing down the mountainside doesn’t announce to us, “I’m a river.” No, it is we who supply the labels.
Experience arrives as it is, presenting as various qualities, characteristics, attributes, and textures. And those very qualities that make up what we call experience also come with no narrative attached. They arrive naked and unadorned by any ideas we might entertain about them.
Now, most of us have experienced the way in which certain moments such as listening to music, making love, or seeing some awesome display of nature are beyond the reach of words. We recognize that such moments are simply too vast, too rich, and too multifaceted to be captured by any of our descriptive frameworks. But as it turns out, this is the case with all experience.
We search for love, for happiness, for well-being, for peace. At times, we feel as if we’ve found whatever it is we’re aspiring to realize, experiencing a moment where all seems unimaginably well, a moment of great vitality, happiness, or ease. And then it slips away, doesn’t it? For this is the nature of experience, to disappear no sooner than it has appeared.
Experiences always come. And they always go. It’s unavoidable. The waves of perception are temporary, rising up and then returning from whence they came, only to be replaced by the next perceptual wave that appears.
And no matter how hard we may try to sustain those states that we typically equate with happiness and peace, we’re simply unable to do so. At every turn, we find ourselves faced with the stark reality that despite our best efforts to obtain and then hold in place our positive states of mind, we are powerless to realize any kind of actual permanence or continuity because discontinuity is all there is.
The river of experience never holds still. There are no frozen frames in the movie that is life, even if language gives us the impression that there are discrete moments with clear beginnings and ends. Life never remains the same but is always on the move.
Now conventionally, we equate well-being with particular types of experience. We believe that happiness is dependent upon the flow of life looking a certain way (“comfortable,” “happy”) and imagine that when it appears differently (“uncomfortable” and “unhappy”), well-being is somehow absent. But what if there is another order of well-being altogether, one discovered not in the usual way we label our experiences, but rather in the flow of experiencing itself? What if well-being could be found not in particular, seemingly discrete perceptual states that are by nature fleeting, but in the continuous flow of perceiving itself, a flow that is by its very nature uninterrupted?
Valeria interviews John Astin the author of This Extraordinary Moment: Moving Beyond the Mind to Embrace the Miracle of What Is….
John Astin is the author of four books exploring the nature of reality—Too Intimate for Words, This Is Always Enough, Searching for Rain in a Monsoon and his most recent, This Extraordinary Moment (New Harbinger, 2018). He is also a singer, songwriter and recording artist having produced seven CDs of original spiritual-contemplative music. In addition to his writing and music, John is a professor of counseling and clinical psychology at Santa Clara and Notre Dame de Namur Universities. He holds a PhD in health psychology and is an internationally acclaimed scholar in the field of mind-body medicine, his teaching and research focusing on the applications of meditative-contemplative practices in psychology and health care.
To learn more about John Astin please visit his website: https://www.johnastin.com/
For Intro-free episodes: https://www.patreon.com/aquestforwellbeingpodcast
Podcast Page: https://fitforjoy.org/podcast
