The Authority of Direct Experience

A simple check-in with Reality confirms that the essential Substance of the mind, body and cosmos is Consciousness. In the bare base of direct experience, the fact is the fact. It speaks silently for itself.

Such a basic fact is not predicated upon an unverifiable theory, rather it is unequivocally revealed as the very Presence that is Conscious of this moment now, for that is Reality's Substance.

This Consciousness is not limited to a personal entity in the way the mind often assumes; it is not exclusively attached to any one body, mind, or soul. There is only one Conscious Presence shining behind every set of eyes.

Though this one Presence of Consciousness expresses itself through and as the multitude of diverse forms, its essence and nature is singular. Thus, Consciousness is not yours or mine; it is not possessed by a body, mind or soul. It is the infinite Substance of Reality, not dependent upon or attached to anything external to itself, for there is no such thing external to itself. It alone is.

This truth of our One I is verified directly by the Consciousness we are, silently contemplating itself, in its own raw, naked experience of itself. Such a contemplation lays bare the evidence that Consciousness has no limitations in time or space, that it is the only omnipresent and immutable Reality in all existence. It is the only One here. And the here, of course, being its own Presence.

The thoughts, sensations and perceptions which constitute the total apparent evidence of a physical and metaphysical cosmos are merely temporary appearances, and thus are not legitimate candidates for the fundamental Reality of Being. Only Consciousness is ever-present, and therefore, it is the only fundamental Reality.

Consciousness is that Presence with which the entire cosmos is known, that Presence in which the entire cosmos appears and disappears, and ultimately that Presence out of which the entire cosmos is made. There is only one Consciousness knowing itself, appearing to itself, within itself, as the mind, body and cosmos. Simple enough, right?

This affirmation of certitude regarding the Reality of Consciousness is available to us all equally and indiscriminately, for we are all this. Therefore, certitude could come through any pair of lips, imbued with a palpably felt exactitude of directly experiencing Reality, and thusly, the utterance of certainty itself should suffice to open a genuinely scientific mind to the possibility that such an affirmation is based on true evidence.

If this affirmation rides on the vibes of a sincere vocal tone, conveying the accompanying undertone, "I swear on my life that I'm telling the truth, and I can take you there, to that direct experiential revelation", and is then met with immediate disregard, or in the worse case scenario, a mixture of ridicule and ostracisation, then we have before us a meeting in which only one scientist is present, that is, the one affirming from their present experience that "the essential Reality of the cosmos is Conscious, and you can verify it too right now as your very own Self." The other person taking up the position of rejection is likely stuck fixating on a belief system about the way things are, not willing or open to contemplate an alternative to their beliefs, and is therefore not operating from a genuinely scientific state of mind.

The principal enthusiasm of a genuine scientist is a love for discovering truth, that is, to curate a mind

open to exploring all possibilities, with the discernment that comes from rigorous experiential experimentation. Therefore, for a scientist to be given a test-subject whose heart sings a clarion call of awe-striking clarity, that soberly and sanely asserts the immanence of an experiential Reality that can be verified right now by anyone, the only sensible response would be to investigate deeper, to ask, and probe lovingly into the mind of this dear subject with the request to "show me how we can experientially verify this truth too."

Disastrously, the state of mind operative in most modern, academically decorated, 'scientists' or 'philosophers' is currently so tightly encircled by the belief that Consciousness is an epiphenomenon of physical matter that it omits the legitimacy of investigating the possibility that Consciousness could be the essential Substance of the apparently objective cosmos, for it denigrates the Substance of Consciousness as qualitatively identical to mere 'wispy thought'. In this limiting paradigm, there is a conflation of Consciousness with thought, a conflation that does not stand the test of experiential experimentation.

Experimenting in the Reality of our current experience, by making some simple observations, we can clearly establish a distinction between the ever-presence of Consciousness and the temporary appearance of thought. Consciousness is not fundamentally a thought, for Consciousness witnesses every thought appear and disappear. Every thought is observed to be a process of a form coming into existence, transforming a while, coming to an end and ceasing to exist. However, Consciousness remains constantly present throughout that apparent process of coming and going. As such, the evidence tells us that Consciousness is not limited by or to thought. Consciousness is not a thought. It is that independent Presence which observes the ephemeral nature of every thought.

Funnily, it is within a wispy thought that these scientists have trapped their view of existence. They hold strong to the wispy belief that matter - the stuff that supposedly exists separate from Consciousness - is the fundamental Substance of the cosmos. They hold to a belief in something that no one, in the history of humanity, has experientially verified. No one has ever experienced 'matter', that is something other than Consciousness itself. Thus, to be an objective physicalist is to hallucinate something that is not really there. That is one definition of insanity.

Indeed the essential truth of Being can be nonchalantly and coherently affirmed from the mouth of an academically uneducated person, and it must, for if truth is really such it must be free to flow from a clarity of absolute obviousness that is available to everyone, regardless of education, status, or cultural conditioning. No one is in a position of higher authority than our own Self to experientially verify the true nature of Reality, for each of us is as 'close to' Reality as us all. We are all at zero-distance from Reality.

This radical equality of access to truth ought to keep our philosophical pride in check. Reality is so all-pervasive, as the Substance of everything, that even a young child, a barefoot wanderer or a shepherd in the green depth of Wales can have a revelation of its truth, or stumble upon a sentence truer than a thousand peer-reviewed papers. Being that Reality is what we substantially are, no linguistic maze or mental gymnastics is required to reach it. We are already at it, as it!

If the sentences supposedly indicating ultimate truth - like the rhetoric of modern physicalist 'philosophers' - are an obfuscating jumble of suppositions, tangled into a superficial concordance by some semblance of neat and academically fashionable arguments, then I suggest run for the hills, for the hills have a cleaner, clearer, unsullied innocence with which they transmit the essential nature of nature. The hills, and your very body, don’t speak in culturally conditioned logic. They don’t argue in abstract terms or detail footnotes for the underlying truth of their Substance. Instead, they communicate through the non-verbal language of Presence; the felt vibrations of Reality moving in harmony with itself.

The breeze on your skin, the rhythm of your breath, the ache in your muscles - these are not symbolic stand-ins for Reality; they are made of Reality, speaking in the tongue of direct experience. Their viscerally felt vibrations are not separate actors. They are a movement of seamless communion, a kind of silent symphony in which everything perceivable participates without effort or explanation.

Just as the hills and the sensations of your body register first not in your intellect, but in your essential Being, the proclamations of physicalist philosophers and scientists - however polished, persuasive, or peer-reviewed - likewise register first in your Being, in Consciousness, beyond the domain of thought. You feel the vibe of the organic fauna and the flow of breath in the same way you feel their claims. You feel them as you would a piece of food placed in your mouth: something in you knows if it nourishes or depletes, whether it is true or false. That which knows here is Consciousness itself, not the mind.

This is not a stand for anti-intellectualism. Instead it is a call to trust the deep intelligence of your own Being, the intrinsic intelligence that precedes mentalisation. Before belief, before concept, there is a non-conceptual knowing in you, a knowing inextricably one with Reality, that quietly discerns what resonates with, and states the truth of, the Reality of existence; for that knowing is Reality knowing itself as it essentially is. Use that same quiet authority to feel your way through truth.

In such wise, feel these words with that same authority within yourself. Check the truth for yourself. You are the alpha and omega here. Your authority of knowing Consciousness, Reality, is not granted from outside; it is intrinsic to your very Being. This authority of knowing Consciousness, Reality, is not arrived at through deduction, nor is it a conclusion drawn from external data; it is the ever-present clarity at the basis of all experience. It is the quiet self-evidence of Being that is the very Substance of what is seen, heard, and touched.

This is why no conceptual framework, however elegant, can substitute for this immediate intimacy with Reality, as Reality. To truly know Reality is not to stand apart from Reality and define it, but to be so inseparable from it that the boundary between knower and known dissolves. This is the silent recognition through which the so-called 'external' cosmos is revealed as not external at all. Rather it is experienced as the living expression of your own Consciousness.

Like the totality of the cosmos, the hills and your body exhibit, before language is born, the aliveness that enlivens their topology. You will not find that aliveness enclosed in rhetoric, in books. It is found deeper than the surface layer of apparency. That aliveness is the very Substance of the hills, the earth and the cosmos, and indeed the rhetoric and the books. So probe gently with attention, or open attention wide, into a felt communion with the landscape, and the deeper Substance of the words, and invite yourself to experience the substantial Reality of Consciousness that is their essential basis.

What the hills and the earth embody so effortlessly and humbly is the same living Substance that many intellectual and so-called 'philosophical' and 'scientific' constructions often veil with narcissistically driven complexity. The problem is not the language itself, but the egoistic motive behind the formation of language, which by the definition of the ego is a language definitively describing a Reality that is fundamentally divided into separate parts. Arising from this egoistically driven language is an overlooking of the silent oneness of Reality that preceded its inception.

When we overlook the fact that the Reality of Consciousness is the Source of all apparent things in existence, we use words that seem to be severed from the alive Presence they arise within, and therefore words lose their true grounding and authority of direct experience. What ensues henceforth is an endeavour to build an intellectual route that arrives at Reality, yet every route merely remains superficial, swirling in the mind around its Source, without ever falling into it and revealing the Source to itself; revealing Consciousness' nature to itself. However when words are experienced as direct emanations of the Reality of Consciousness, they carry the unmistakable imprint of their origin; as translucent expressions of the very medium they arise from.

The aliveness of Reality is the basic medium from which everything appears, including words and books. Just as a medium thoroughly imbues its modulations with its essential Substance, the medium of Reality thoroughly imbues words with its living Substance. And indeed that is happening all the time, with every word and book that coalesces in our beholding, if our eyes are clarified to perceive it. As such, every word can be experienced as a direct referent to its essential Substance, when that Substance is understood to not be limited to any word or concept.

Yet, the problem of obfuscating Reality occurs when this living Substance is conceptually qualified as something other than what it really is. In the case of objective physicalist 'philosophers' and 'scientists', that Substance is believed to be finite and separate from Consciousness, and so their points of view are implicitly and explicitly limited to a mental domain, in which Reality is naturally not accessible. Reality transcends the mind. Only by dropping the mind, in the understanding that the mind can never apprehend Reality, is it possible to directly experience Reality as it is, and reveal the awesome evidence that Consciousness is its essential Substance.

This is why the quality of communication during spiritually instructive writings or conversations depends not on intellectual cleverness but on the degree to which the words arise from and remain transparent to the living Source itself. When language is free of distortion and born of direct experience, it doesn't obscure Reality, rather it unveils Reality. Such words do not merely describe; they resonate with the very aliveness they point toward, awakening clarity in the listener or reader. In this way, language is a vehicle for the transmission of truth, instead of a veil.

Most of us on this path of spiritual illumination have been graced by reading words and books that penetratingly open a channel in us, a channel which welcomes a shining through of the background aliveness of our essential Self. Words can and do have the power to reveal Reality, if they come from the direct experience of Reality. Test the quality of a tree by the fruit that it bares, and listen to the unmediated messages of your intimate Consciousness for the flavour of the fruit. Is it sweet, delicious, ripe or otherwise?

The presence of Consciousness is non-verbally intelligible of itself, as the very Substance of Reality itself, and so it is the perfect access through which we can assess the truthfulness and deliciousness of an utterance or stream of prose which indicates its nature. So rest as pure Consciousness when reading or listening to any reasoning on, or pointing to, the nature of Reality, and verify whether or not it corresponds to your experience.

I have tasted the fruit from the tree of our essential Being, guided by great teachers and mentors along my path, and the juicy deliciousness in my mouth confirms the quality of its origin. That quality grows directly from the ground of our Being. And it is from this ground that more fruits grow; to offer you a taste of this exquisite deliciousness of our shared Being. It is with this spirit of offering that I write these words, as an invitation to taste for yourself the juicy peace that we essentially are.

To clarify, I am not claiming that Samuel, or any other uniquely manifest expression of life, is the Whole, in a solipsistic sense. Rather, he, like us all, is a unique expression of the One Reality we all are. One Reality, One Consciousness, speaking to itself, sharing its deliciousness with itself, for the sheer joy of that sharing.

My intention here in these writings is not to weave clever jargon with philosophically popular arguments in order to appear sensible to the intellect. My intention is rather like the wild dancing of a bird in mating season, inviting a lover into the union of love, where the Reality of our unity is blissfully found flooding our veins. One Lover loving itself as all that is.