Experience Is the Only Reality

Dr. Marjorie Woollacott, a member of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon, is a researcher studying medicine, consciousness, meditation, spiritual awakening and end-of-life experiences, with 250 articles and nine books, including Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind (receiving 8 book awards). She is past chair of the Dept. of Human Physiology of the U. of Oregon, President of the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Sciences, Co-Director of the Galileo Commission, and Research Director for the International Association of Near-Death Studies. She was mentioned as one of 10 revolutionary scientists for 2024-2025 (Feed your Head).

Jeb Barton has been an enthusiastic student and teacher in the field of consciousness studies for the last 62 years. As an identical twin, he was born with an advanced skill in telepathic perception. This skill revealed to him the presence of a rich psychic world that existed invisibly behind the superficial world of everyday human psychology. He has pursued the writing of haiku as a personal meditation practice, for which he has been awarded the Walker Book Award by the Haiku Society of America, and the Nautilus Silver Medal Award for haiku poetry. In 2001 he had the great honor of being asked to write a book on compassion for an event hosted by H.H. the Dalai Lama. Jeb continues to give seminar presentations, leads a long-standing group of advanced students in consciousness studies, and gives private consultations in self-awareness and self-actualization.

The near-death experience transforms the life of almost every human being who goes through this mystical experience of their own inner Being-ness.

As a direct result, each person discovers unique insights about their personal inner essence. This personal inner essence is realized as the true source of their psychic existence, and as the initiating vitality behind all of their feelings of personal aliveness. These insights are not unique to the essential nature of an NDE but are deeply tied to experiences of profoundly deep meditation and to psychic realizations as well.

In the following essay, we write about these core discoveries that greatly facilitate our exploration of the nature of our own consciousness and of our own personal reality. In and of themselves, these experiences can awaken us to the depth and to the richness of our own personal existence and to the unique experience of our own personal consciousness.

Go back as many thousands of years as you like, into the foundational essence of traditional mystical enlightenment, and you will find there one single core insight that is their repeated and resounding absolute:

Awareness, as the fundamental state of being, is the only thing that exists, period.

And this is awareness for its own sake. It is presented as a “state” and not a process. There is expansion, but it is for its own sake, devoid of any ultimate goal or destination as such. And then, when we “personalize” awareness, we create an experience of and for ourselves such that it is through experience itself that we are “aware” that we exist. In this, the experiencer becomes the experience itself. Whatever it is that we experience immediately exists for us. And anything that we do not experience ourselves does not exist for us.

This wisdom is perennial and has been expressed by masters of many traditions, including Taoism, Buddhism, and Kashmir Shaivism, among others. A Tibetan lama, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, expressed this by saying that, with regard to the unity of experience and experiencer, the self and the object of experience are not two things. We believe in our vision of separate objects that possess inherent existence, that live as separate beings and things. Therefore, when we believe that something is actually there, then it is! When we cease to focus our consciousness in a certain way, or on a specific object of our attention, that reality dissolves back into the realm of the unmanifest or nothingness (no-thing-ness) (Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche 2003).

To be aware, then, is to experience, and to experience is to exist—to exist as experience—which is the essence of what we call “reality.” This is referred to as experientialism.^[1] At the most profound ontological level, we can say that the desire for experience is the reason that everything everywhere exists.

But we can probe further. We perceive that within this primordial state of awareness arises the phenomenon of aware of, that is to say, being aware of what? To ask the question, What is it that awareness is aware of?, immediately takes us into much greater depths of this mysterious landscape of consciousness.

As we are all aware, there is something “out there” that surrounds us and in which we are very much personally immersed. In traditional Zen training exemplified by the teachings of Hakuin (2010), this situation is illuminated with these three questions:

What is all this?
How did it get here?
And what am I supposed to do with it?

Hakuin’s three questions very accurately illuminate this existential situation that all of us find ourselves in in our everyday lives. The first question, “What is all this?” has traditionally been answered in mysticism with the one word Being—so all of this, whatever that might include, is what we refer to as Being.

A number of contemporary philosophers and scientists have contemplated Hakuin’s question, “What is all this?” They have proposed intriguing answers that go beyond the traditional assumptions of a reductionistic universe. Bernardo Kastrup, a contemporary scientist and philosopher, has echoed this question and proposes that discovering a literal truth regarding the nature of reality—that is, “What is all this?”—is impossible, as such a truth is beyond the limits of human language. He notes that there are many natural truths that cannot be said and hence reasoned; these are transcendent truths. These are truths that can be intuited, though not articulated in language.

One that he proposes is that we are each a part of what he calls “mind-at-large,” and our own thoughts, our mental contents, are excitations or movements in that infinite mind. And as part of that mind, we have created a mental coordinate system that we call spacetime to unfold or unpack all the mental excitations within mind-at-large. Thus, spacetime is simply a belief system that helps us keep track of these excitations with the intellect. And from our limited point of view, we call spacetime characteristics aspects of the laws that govern our reality (Kastrup 2016).

Similarly, William Tiller, the dean of the Materials Science Department at Stanford University for many years, has intuited that each of us is the creator of our own reality. He says:

We have created this reality as a vehicle of experience, and we have created the laws that govern it. And when we get to the frontiers of our understanding, we can in fact shift the laws so that we are also creating the physics as we go along. (Talbot 1996, 159)

Staying within the mystical realm, the foundational perspective of most of these experiential philosophers^[2] is that Being is indivisible—and that, individually, we are all aspects of Being. And as such, we are all withinBeing Its-Self in its totality. Therefore, we are not just our singular “self,” our singular “mind,” or our singular “consciousness.” We are the total multidimensionality of Being Its-Self, experienced from a singular perspective, but not as a singular perspective. This profound distinction is one of the core experiences in a NDE, because there is the sudden experience of not viewing “reality” from the perspective of their biological identity.

Ray Grigg has expressed it in this way:

Everything that exists, deep within itself, remembers this intimate belonging with Being. Belonging is the deep remembering that affirms the seamless togetherness of all things. In quiet moments of deep listening hear the trusted whispering of this belonging, because something other than thoughts knows what thoughts cannot think. Trust the remembering that dwells deeper than memory, because it recalls what needs to be recalled and it remembers what cannot be forgotten. (Grigg 2004, 49–50)

When Grigg’s says that Beingness “recalls what needs to be recalled and it remembers what cannot be forgotten” he is speaking directly about what a near-death experiencer is encountering—that not only are they not their biology, but they are the immortality of Being Its-Self. Their Beingness did not die and their Beingness cannot die.

Our essence is that Being, the Self, the mind-at-large. The singular perspective as me is a necessary illusion. The I is an illusion and likewise is what I think of as my brain, because my brain does not exist as a singularity. My brain is Being’s brain.

This paradox cannot be broken down, and therefore it cannot be avoided. What is going on in Being is that it is projecting Its-Self to it-self as a seamless whole. Individuality, then, is an illusion that Being imagines in order to experience its own existence as experience. Buddha explained it in this manner:

All faculties of sense are manifestations of your own mind. Physical bodies are manifestations of your own mind’s representations of form as subjectively imagined. These manifestations are like the flow of a river, passing away from instant to instant. (Cleary 2000, 57)

What Buddha is saying, as do all mystics, is that we create our own reality, which includes creating both our psyche and the appearance of our physical selves as well. And as William Tiller and Bernardo Kastrup have also concluded about “reality”: “…we have created the laws that govern it….and we can in fact shift the laws so that we are also creating the physics as we go along.” Accordingly, with regard to the foundations of science, we have no choice but to state that all “facts” are agreed-upon fictions, which undermines the entire reality model of science itself. And with regard to our root assumptions about reality in general, there is no such thing as nonfiction.

Here we have another important insight in the NDE because no two NDE accounts have ever described exactly the same experience. Even in the NDE there is no singular objective reality. Everyone’s experience is not only extraordinary but is also extraordinarily unique to that person alone and it is never to be repeated—just as every given present moment is utterly singular to every single human being.

In her book The Nature of Personal Reality, Jane Roberts (1994) helps give expression to this ineffable paradox. She says:

For every moment of time that you seem to exist in this universe, you do not exist in it. The atoms and molecules have a pulsing nature that you do not usually perceive. So what seems to you to be a continuous atom or molecule is instead a series of pulsations that you cannot keep track of. Physical matter is not permanent; you only perceive it as continuous. Your perceptive mechanisms are not equipped to detect these fantastically rapid pulsations. The physical senses actually form the physical reality that they perceive. The thing perceived is a projected extension of the perceiver, and an act of perception changes the perceiver—there are no separations. All space is simultaneous and primordial, and primordial space has nothing to do with ‘space’. (Roberts 1994, 56, session 614)

The quantum physicist David Bohm has similarly shed light on the pulsating nature of existence. He says that while most people may think that subatomic particles orbit the atom’s nucleus along a smooth path, in quantum physics it is now accepted that these particles disappear from one moment to the next. They are seen in one place around the nucleus and then another. The elliptical trajectory, then, for particles that is drawn in textbooks is just a way of connecting the theoretical dots—and physicists like Bohm propose that the particles are appearing and disappearing from one nanosecond to the next (Woollacott 2015).

What current authors in the world of particle physics are stating (Chang 2000, discussing James Luken’s research in quantum mechanics) is that in the realm of atoms and smaller particles, objects exist not so much as objects but rather as mists of possibilities, of being here or there and everywhere at the same time—and then someone looks for them and the possibilities suddenly collapse into definite locations. The wave functions collapse, collaborate, and then concentrate at the moment of observation.

Thus, the desire and intention of a person’s consciousness is the initiating source of the physical manifestation of the particle. This places human consciousness in the very center of this process of creating reality at the quantum level. So not only are we participating in the quantum field, but our consciousness is literally straddling both sides of this phenomenon at the same time.

One way to begin to comprehend this is to conceive of reality as improvisational psychic theater. In fact, one of the aphorisms of the perennial text of Kashmir from the ninth century, the Shiva Sutra, states, “The Self is an actor.”^[3] That is, everything we perceive is part of the play of our own essential Self. We, in our extended nature as writer, director, and actor, create our own play and our own theater in which to perform it.

We are the writer, the director, the actress or actor, the choreographer, the producer, and we are our own audience, and this is also true of all the other individuals who take part. We are all of these at once, although at any given instant we are primarily focused upon just one role, or upon only one aspect of the production.

However, we are so intrigued by this Reality Play that we have created, so entranced by the feelings, thoughts, emotions, and experiences of our particular roles, that we have forgotten entirely that they are our own creations. What we call our present life and our present environment, both individually and collectively, is actually this intensely moving drama, with all of its elaborate joys and intricate tragedies, and it is accepted by us without a second thought as reality.

Knowing, however, that this “reality” is an illusion does not undermine the significance of life experience or render it valueless or without profound meaning and importance. Utilizing the creation of an ego and a personality, a momentary identity is established in order to provide our essence’s consciousness with a reference point through which to experience its own imagination. Theater is an illusory reality, but it conveys deep and profound experiential contents that can have great personal significance and can provide a rich arena for the exploration and expansion of our own existence and of consciousness itself.

Being is the imagining of an appearance that appears to its self and to Its Self simultaneously. You and I are Being appearing to Its-Self as you and I. But this creating of appearance, of and for Its-Self, arises from the mysterious stirring of its own imagination. An imagination that is itself a deeply mysterious dynamic. This mystery lies behind our second Zen question, “How did existence get here?” An insight into this enormously deep mystery and the vastness of this inner psychic dynamic is revealed in Jane Roberts’s book The Unknown Reality (1978). She notes:

During our physical lifetime our experience is not confined to conventional physical events. The inner material that “makes events real” comes from the deep inner resources of our own consciousness. We constantly take advantage of that rich level of our Being, by utilizing that vast, immeasurable data as a basis to form the reality that we know. Using numerous examples, she points out that physical events are formed by us in accordance with our feelings, our beliefs, our purposes and our intents.

Whenever an emotion-charged thought comes into awareness, the inner self automatically forms from this inner experience a material counterpart, so that the ego/personality can experience the thought as a physical reality. Through the desire and intent of the inner self, thoughts begin a journey outward to form atoms, molecules, cells and organs and finally the entire system and matrix of the phenomenon that is our physical reality. What we see “out there” is our inner subjective experience in solidified form—solidified feelings and thoughts born out of the imaginations of our own being. Our bodies and everything else in our material world is organized, built, and maintained by the collective efforts of the inner selves in order to see themselves “objectified” in three-dimensional form. This is happening constantly, at every instant we are creating and recreating the material world. This then is the way reality is created, and it is the minutest micro fragment of the incomprehensibly vast power and nature of consciousness. (Roberts 1978, 43–44, session 682)

This view expands on the insights of Tiller, Kastrup, and Lukens that we are truly creating our own reality from within the probability fields of our own highest Self. With our own imagination, we call our lives into being, playing simultaneously the roles of writer, director, and actor.

In mysticism, the phenomenon of imagination that is at work is described as a Sourceless Source that arises through itself by virtue of its own inexhaustible nature. It is self-existent, and it is unborn and uncreated. Imagination takes up no space, and it can enter where there is no room left for even one thing. As Basho writes, in order for imagination to exist, its essential essence must be, and must remain unknowable. He states this with such poetic mastery in his famous haiku:

The tree from whose flower
this fragrance comes
is unknowable
Matsuo Basho (1644–1694)
(Blyth 1981, 138)

We are imagination. And although a wondrous mystery itself, we will at least say that imagination is an unobstructed and unscripted source full of endless possibilities—multifaceted, unconditional, uncontrived, and possessing absolute originality without restraint. The dynamic of imagination, then, is the ground of Being. Therefore, individually, we have the same free will that we attribute to Being Its-Self—that is, to imagine whatever experiences we would like.

Imagine that! In fact, that is exactly what you are sitting there doing right now—you are imagining that you exist, and so there you are! We are imagination continually imagining Its-Self and its-self into the experience of its own existence. Therefore, we don’t “have” free will—but rather, we are free will in the form of limitless, vitalized imagination, and we experience this as the expression of our own unique essence.

A sage from the yogic traditions, Paramahansa Yogananda (1988), sees the world as our own dream, which we have projected outward as if it is other than our own self. He points out that the world is nothing but an objectified dream and that whatever our powerful mind believes very intensely instantly comes to pass.

The claim here is that the psychic dynamic that we refer to as imagination is that origin-less-origin of every “thing” that exists. That anything and everything that exists in any “form” whatsoever has been imagined into existence—that nothing exists “physically” that does not first exist nonphysically, originating within the dynamic of imagination itself. Every aspect of “reality” arises from the invisible and begins its journey toward the realm of conscious experience. And, of absolute necessity, this ontological center unfolds with an inner psychic structure that is itself the very chronological process by which we create our own unique personal Experience and Existence, capital “E’s.”

And as our third Zen question asks, “What am I supposed to do with it?” What is my part in writing, directing, and acting in this improvisational psychic theater? What is the nature of our personal reality? Jane Roberts tells us that we are here to become more fully aware that we do indeed truly create our own reality.

She says that we are focused in (the appearance of) physical existence to participate in the great expansion of consciousness by using our physical bodies to learn and to understand that our consciousness translated into energy and expressed through feelings, thoughts, and emotions causes all of our experiences. She repeatedly states that we are here to become more fully aware that we are, in our most fundamental essence, a creator—and that we do indeed create our own reality. This profound statement about the nature of “reality” includes everything that exists. There are, therefore, no exceptions—not only to this process, but to any being participating in it (Roberts 1994).

Here we have the answer to our third Zen question, “And what am I supposed to do with it?” “…to participate in the great expansion of consciousness and…to learn and understand that…you are, in your most fundamental essence, a creator—and that you do indeed create your own reality.” Imagination, then, is the very beginning and the very ending of “reality” itself.

For instance, we cannot create anything that we cannot first imagine. Anything that is created is always pre-seeded by being imagined—as in, both you and I are imagining our selves into existence in time-space, and we will continue to do so until the experience in this layer of consciousness is no longer fulfilling to us. And when that time comes, you and I will simply imagine ourselves into a different layer of experience.

At this point, we want to be clear about exactly how we are using the word consciousness. We are using consciousness as a generalized term that includes all awareness, all imagination, and all experience that exist regardless of their nature, context, or origin. Zen master D. T. Suzuki (1973) repeatedly pointed out that the only objectivity that exists is subjectivity. And as pointed out earlier, William Tiller and many other scientists who have ventured into the landscape of consciousness have concluded that we have created this reality as a medium in which to manifest experience and, in so doing, that we have also created the laws that govern it. With these two statements in mind, let us consider the law of conservation of energy. It states that energy within an isolated system can neither be created nor destroyed.

Without the need for any scientific debate, we all continually have an experience that tells us that this statement may not always apply to our own beings because there is no such thing as an isolated system. It’s a late Saturday afternoon, and you’re still quite tired from the stresses and personal issues of your workweek. You’re feeling very lethargic, and you don’t feel like doing anything at all. You’ve decided to go take a long nap and wake up whenever you wake up.

Unexpectedly, the phone rings. It’s your best friend calling, who says that by coincidence they have just acquired two tickets to a performance that you have wanted to go to for more than a year. In addition, they have managed to get dinner reservations at your favorite restaurant that is only one block from the performing arts theater. You suddenly feel energized and tell them that if you hurry, you can meet them at the restaurant in less than an hour. Great fun is in store—so you immediately kick into high gear to get ready, no problem . . . and your tiredness and lethargy suddenly vanish into thin air.

Where did this sudden burst of energy come from? Is it true that you are feeling very tired, or is it true that you are feeling very alive and very full of energy? What is true is that you generated this sudden burst of energy entirely within your Self, and your neurocellular physiology was simply “in”-spired to follow your excitement and enthusiasm.

UPS didn’t deliver it to you—you delivered it to you simply by your desire to feel upbeat and energized. You just added a significant amount of energy to the experience of your own existence—and you are the immediate beneficiary of your ability to create energy where there was none at all. When we add energy to our own existence, we are adding that energy to Being Its-Self also. And it’s not just emotional energy that we can create. We can also create the kind and amount of energy that is needed to do physical tasks whenever we want to as well.

In fact, the physicist Federico Faggin (2024) has proposed that every time a new consciousness unit is created within source, the energy/mass of the universe increases, and this contributes to the expansion of the universe physicists are measuring. That new energy arises out of the infinite power of creativity within source.

Thus, the energy that we create in these situations does not come from our neurocellular structure. Rather, it comes through our neurocellular structures, having arisen from our own subjective imagination that itself is not confined to or found within our physical structure. Thus, all of us are constantly bringing new energy into our universe all of the time, because new psychic energy is required to create experience, which creates existence.

Twenty-five hours a day, we are seamlessly creating the experience of our existence, both individually and collectively. I say 25 hours a day because both the self and the Self are always an integral part of every experience. The self and the Self create every experience together—it’s the two-person team of Being and being. Together they create both their existence and their experience of their own existence, simultaneously and timelessly.

At this point, we are going to again drop deeper into this landscape of consciousness, because our core three questions themselves bring forth the ultimate question that we must address:

What do you want to call real?

We have now arrived at the ultimate question that has been asked and has been attempted to be answered ever since we as human-type-of-beings began our adventure into this particular layer of consciousness. Every religion that has ever arisen has had its own spiritual answers to this question, and in doing so they have had their significant differences, which have led them into continuous conflicts with one another. Similarly, an intellectual and academic speculation began to arise in ancient Greece that slowly began to create the perspective that we now refer to as science. This objective, materialistic perspective has precipitated out the scientific laws of a mechanistic worldview that currently dominates our institutional definition of “reality.”

When we consider this final question, we arrive at the ultimate ontological conclusion. These two institutionalized views of reality are dramatically opposed to one another, because one relies exclusively upon outside, objective facts, and the other relies exclusively upon interior, subjective experience.

However, within the experiential realm of “reality,” both of these seeming extremes, and anything that would fall in between them, share one ultimate and absolute common ground—and in this sense there is no difference between them at all. And their common ground is this: They are both simply experiences of the infinite stirring of imagination within consciousness itself—very different experiences, yes—but exactly and identically the same, inasmuch as both are experiences that arise from the landscape of the inner psyche, brought forth as what we call the experience of science and brought forth as what we call the experience of religious spirituality, and of mysticism.

What, then, do we want to call real? Ultimately the only thing that is real is nothing more, and nothing less, than experience. Experience itself, entirely for its own sake. For the sake of the experience of newness, freshness, fascination, wonder, intrigue, exhilaration, and the list goes on to become the experiences of what we call our own individually unique personal lives and, collectively, our human nature.

After decades of following his patients back through multiple past lives and their awareness of their experiences between their reincarnations, Joel Whitton, MD, PhD, has repeatedly validated this reality model. Throughout his book Life Between Life (1988), he continually reinforces the ancient mystical insight that consciousness alone is real and that there is no experience without consciousness. Testimony coming from his patients from their presence in the reality between lives confirms that it is consciousness that transforms thoughts and feelings into the appearance of a physically objective world that can then be experienced in three dimensions. And it is this very insight that is the core realization in the NDE.

The only thing that is real is experience.

Whatever anyone wants to call real and whatever they want to say about the world and “reality” as they experience it is a real experience for them, whether they are a scientist or a mystic—it is absolutely real as an experience—but is it “objectively” real, as in existing independently of their experience of it? No, it is not. Nothing is objectively real except experience itself—and all experience is subjective. As we mentioned earlier, in the classic Zen perspective, the only objectivity that exists is subjectivity. And in a paradoxical expression of this same insight into the relationship between experience and “reality,” here we have one of the few ancient Taoist phrases that has survived mankind’s determinist materialism:

There is something in the world
that is not in the sphere of the ordinary
nor is it in the sphere of the holy
and neither is it in the realm of true or false
Chinese Zen master Wu Zu Fayan (1024–1104) (Ferguson 2011)

No two present moments are ever the same because imagination is seamlessly fluid and ever flowing, and it is never at rest. There is no moment when Being is not in a constant state of becoming. Becoming is a condition of perpetual arriving, of continual changing that is always responding to the creative, seamless flow of itself. It arises from the stillness in the center of its own movement. And as the “present” quietly fades away with each moment’s passing, a new opening instantaneously appears at the very edge of becoming.

However, when our consciousness is experienced at the Newtonian level of perception, there is the appearance of fixed stability and absolute permanence. But at the quantum level, which turns out to be a very soft, creative interface between the appearance of the physical and the presence of our psyche, there is a constant, infinitely creative newness and freshness taking place on both sides of this “misty” common boundary—and the breathing of Being Itself can be experienced by you and me as the effortless effort with which every present moment arises and flows so gracefully into the experience of our lives. You and I are Being constantly creating its own existence from the experiential perspective of our own individual presence.

As Roberts has said in her book The Nature of Personal Reality, “You are focused in physical existence to participate in the great expansion of consciousness….and to become fully aware that you do indeed create your own reality” (Roberts 1994, xvii, preface).

Of all the experiences that we can choose to have in life, there is one that is central to all of us and to all human beings. That experience is the feeling of aliveness—and it doesn’t matter how we get there. We can create it in love, in play, in work, in relationship, in solitude—in any experience that makes us feel genuinely alive in the deepest and most meaningful sense of the word. We all know what the experience of aliveness feels like. It is intrinsic to Being. It comes with existence itself.

Millions of people have killed one another arguing over the experience of spirituality—what it is, who can and cannot practice it, and where and in what way it should be experienced. But no one has ever fought over who owns the experience of aliveness because it is self-evident to every one of us on our most personal possible level.

We all agree that the feeling of aliveness is deeply desirable regardless of how it is achieved. We all seek the experience, and we all know when we feel it and we all know when we don’t. Every choice that we have ever made—both short-term and long-term—is ultimately designed to create that very experience for us.

The experience of aliveness has to do with the combination of our imagination, our awareness, and our creativity. As has been pointed out, imagination is the beginning point of any experience. And it is with our awareness that we hear the whispers of our imaginations in the form of intuitions, inspirations, and insights. It is our own unique essence that desires to experience our dreams and our visions. And when it does, it is this very experience that results in the feeling of inner and outer aliveness.

It has been said of Zen practice that its purpose is “to experience the unobstructed, spontaneous expression of our own unique essence that arises from our formless awareness.” Aliveness, then, is the exuberance of feeling this feeling of being fully alive. But how do we create that experience for ourselves—and how do we do it consistently? The answer to this life question begins and ends with awareness—our deep inner awareness and how refined our inner awareness is within us. This has to do with what we may call the art of living. Put simply, the-art-of-living begins with our understanding of how we create the content of experience in our everyday lives.

This paper has been outlining some basic insights into the psychic process that we utilize, within the architecture of consciousness, to create our own personal experience of “reality.” But we have said very little about how we create specific experiences for ourselves within our time-space world. In this, the-art-of-living includes the awareness that we are supported, so elegantly, by the foundation of Being itself.

But the-art-of-living itself has a foundation of its own. That foundation is what may be called the art of choosing. In life we cannot not choose. If you choose not to choose, then you still made a choice. What we choose in life determines what we experience, period. And the-art-of-choosing has its own foundation also, and that foundation is a function of our personal awareness.

The experience of aliveness, then, that we create for ourselves is dictated absolutely by the choices that we make, and the choices that we make are dictated by our personal level of awareness. And personal awareness is all about being self-aware, and self-awareness is all about being aware of our feelings. For most of us, being aware of our feelings is usually less obvious than being aware of our thoughts. If you can become quiet enough to notice, you will find out that every thought that you have is preceded by a feeling.

Feelings are feelings—they are not thoughts. If you notice carefully, you will realize that all of your thoughts are actually about your feelings. The feelings may be subtle, but they are always there. This is because the imaginings that arise from our essence first come to our attention as a feeling—then we begin to expand on the implications of the feeling by beginning to have thoughts about the feeling. Interestingly, people who are in the imaginative arts in general will continue to have feelings about the initial feeling itself, rather than immediately jump to thoughts instigated by the feeling.

This is the beginning point of the-art-of-choice. The art-of-choice centers around one feeling and one feeling alone, and that is the feeling of fulfillment. At our very core, our Being seeks expression and fulfillment. It is the very basis of every choice that we make, and it is the very basis of life itself. Because we are all grounded in Being itself, the passion to express and experience our own unique essence can never be undermined. The-art-of-choice, then, has to do with always choosing the experience that we feel will be the most fulfilling.

An interesting confusion that many of us have in a given moment is whether an activity we are drawn toward is simply pleasurable or truly fulfilling. We each know the difference within our essence—that pleasure is usually momentary, sometimes simply tied to our senses, but the feeling of fulfillment is a result of a deeper creative action where we express and learn more about ourselves and the world. There is a deeper meaning to that moment in our lives.

For many, what fulfilled them earlier in the first half of their lives may not continue to do so in the second. And this is natural as one moves from establishing one’s identity and role in the world to wanting a deeper exploration of the inner reality that is the source of who we are. For some, like me, it came as an inner voice, the voice of the heart, propelling me to follow its promptings to more deeply explore the nature of my own awareness. My focus naturally shifted from rehabilitation medicine to the mysterious and paradoxical nature of consciousness itself.

What I realized in the process is that pursuing the fulfillment of the heart does not necessarily translate into a life filled only with pleasure. There have been many periods of intense effort on a project when I would wish for escape into lighter activities—yet the drive of the heart was stronger, and the outcome was very fulfilling in helping me understand more about the mysteries of my own Self—and of sharing those mysteries with others.

This core insight about life can be clearly stated: Whenever you choose, always choose toward fulfillment. It is this always choosing toward fulfillment that leads us to the experience of aliveness, because when we genuinely feel fulfilled, we also feel very alive. Feeling exuberantly alive is always the result of feeling very fulfilled. We can therefore say that when we feel fulfilled personally, there is also the deeper feeling of aliveness at the level of our Being.

These are thus distinctions in our levels of awareness. The feeling of fulfillment is experienced in the domain of the self, and that of aliveness is experienced in the domain of Being. The common element is feeling. As we refine our feelings, we can move to increased depth, richness, and refinement in our awareness. This is the nature of becoming.

We can now draw these points together. If we are always doing our very best to choose experiences that we feel will be the most fulfilling—whether short- or long-term—then we will always be cultivating the experience of aliveness for ourselves. As we have been pointing out, since experience itself is the only thing that is real, the ultimate goal in life is to always be creating the experience of aliveness for yourself—the feeling of exuberant aliveness, period. And choosing what is fulfilling to us is a creative process arising from our personal awareness.

This, then, is why there is no difference in the “reality” of the mystic and the “reality” of the scientist, and also any and every experience in between. If the experience of science and all the curiosity and intrigue that goes along with that is fulfilling to someone, then that experience should be pursued without reservation. And if the experience of mysticism and all of the cosmic wonder that goes along with that is fulfilling to someone, then that experience should be pursued without hesitation also. The “reality” experienced by the scientist and the “reality” experienced by the mystic are both “real” and are both equally real.

The art of choosing creates the art of living, and the art of living creates the experience of aliveness. These are not just ideas. This is an absolutely reliable topographical map of how to create every day of our lives. If we always choose what seems to us to be the most fulfilling experience at every present moment, then that choice will be self-revealing every time—because we will always find out if that particular choice is fulfilling or not. Choosing on the basis of what is fulfilling is always reliable because it creates a kind of personal honesty that will never betray us. The consequence to this way of living our lives cannot be overstated.

Choosing well is an art, because it is the product of the most intimate conversation that we can ever have in our entire lives. It is the conversation with our own unique essence. A conversation that comes to us in the form of the dreams and the visions that arise from our own Being—and our Being is not something that can be possessed; it can only be experienced. It is the art of feeling our way into our own unique nature, which is a personal journey that never ends. We are the living instrument through which we play ourselves into existence.

This world of ours
To what shall I compare it?
To the white wake of a boat
that rows away in the early dawn
Shami Mansei (ca. 810)
(Rexroth 1974, 36)

I have always known
that at last I would take this road
but yesterday I did not know
that it would be today
Ariwara No Narihira
(Rexroth 1955, 58)

^[1] Webster’s Dictionary, s.v. “experientialism”: “a philosophical theory that experience is the source of all knowledge not purely deductive, formal, or tautological.”

^[2] For example, the tenth-century philosophers Utpaladeva, Kshemaraja, and Utpaladeva of Kashmir; Zen master Dogen; and Zen master Hakuin.

^[3] Shiva Sutra 3.9: “The Self is an Actor” (Singh 1995).