Riding The Experience

I used to think that life was mostly like waiting in line to get on the ride. We while away our time in the in-between, the boring nothingness of the interstitial, the moments where we’re waiting for the next thing to happen. How wrong I was. I now see that life is the ride, and that it is never-ending. This thing we call consciousness is an experience we’re all having at the same time. There is no way we can create what’s happening; we are just along for the ride. And we’re all having the same experience; we just shade it differently. We are all at the mercy of what will be and what has been, and what we cannot control is everything. We do not blame the insane person for his condition, much like we do not fault a person for having a heart attack. But what if everything we are and do is the same as that? What if we are not in control of any of it, this experience we’re having? Life is what I now call, The Experience.

I have come to learn that the experience is always happening, and we can tune into it, or we can live under the illusion that we can control any of it. If we choose the former, we are free to sit back, rest, and observe. We can contemplate and revel in the beauty of each other. There is such peace in knowing that the only thing we can do is pay attention to the ride. We go round and round, and some of it is awful and painful and truly horrifying, and for so many of us, much more so than others. And some of it is thrilling and joyful. If we are fortunate enough to find joy, to find peace, even in the smallest of increments, we can breathe and be free from the shackles of illusion.

The game, which is what we all seem to be playing day to day to give The Experience purpose and meaning, is detrimental to the prospect of true contentment. Having to do, having to be, ambition, drive — all the things that give us reasons to keep going, what if these are illusions we’ve manifested to distract us from the truth of our most precarious situation? That we are a conscious being on a giant rock in the middle of outer space. That we are microscopic molecules in a vast ocean of the unknown. We have consciousness; we have been cursed or blessed with awareness. We seek to understand who we are, why we are, where we are, and where we’re going. But in doing so, we have created a vast rulebook, an unwritten set of guidelines that supposedly lead us to our purpose — education, money, possessions, rituals and ceremonies, rites of passage — and we encourage dreams of a better life, a bigger house, a better car, more and more and more. Is this not a game? Are we not creating it for solace?

What happens to a conscious being who is inundated from birth to believe there is a goal, there is a meaning to what we do, and who you are depends entirely on how well you can play this game? We Frankenstein ourselves together as we grow, pulling pieces of other people’s interpretations of The Experience and living in a convoluted sense of self until we are unable to be anything but a cog in the machine of the game that was invented to give us the illusion of some kind of control in an experience that doesn’t afford us any.

So what are the options? Play the game still under the illusion that your destiny can be something different than everyone else? Or…participate in the experience with an open mind and heart and understand that everyone you see, every other living person, is part of the same experience? Can we not simply find love for each other because of that? Can we not connect to others just simply out of compassion for our plight? Is there not a gorgeous simplicity in the lack of control we all have to change anything that The Experience provides? Life may be The Experience, the ride we’re on, but it’s our consciousness that makes us a rider. We are on borrowed time, in a borrowed body. Everything we have we will lose. What then can we do about it? Seek to control that which is clearly out of our control? Or seek to understand that we are all in the same place; no one knows anything more than you do. Seek to understand or judge?

For those whom fate has broken, scarred, and beaten down, for those who are desperately stuck in the game and genuinely believe they are in control, for those who see others as an impediment, we have a choice: seek to judge these people or seek to understand them. There is magic in understanding how someone else interprets The Experience. This is why literature and movies connect to so many people. It’s a hand reaching out saying, ‘Here’s how I see what we’re all going through.’ Can we not all do that? Can we not just observe, breathe, and practice the art of empathy? Every moment we’re alive, we have the opportunity to watch, to contemplate, to breathe, and whatever you believe, just remember…

We are all in this together.