The River
Who or what lives the experience of consciousness? We are the experience, an integral part of the whole process - there is no separate subject or object. An "Inner Frontier" essay.
It's as if we were watching a river from the bank. This is how we imagine life flowing past us with all its events, people, objects and consequences. We keep ourselves separated by a mistaken notion that we are the subject and everything around us are mere objects (some people also include people in this).
This margin represents our identification with the ego, an apparently safe and controlled position. From there, we name and judge what we see: ‘this is good’, ‘that is bad’, ‘I like that’, ‘that upsets me’. We create a false sense of control, as if we could manage the flow of the river from its banks.
But the river is not something separate from us. The flowing waters are our own consciousness, carrying all the phenomena of existence. Thoughts are like floating leaves, emotions are the ripples on the surface, experiences are the different volumes and speeds of the current.
When there is the fundamental insight, we realise that we were never really on the bank. We are the river itself, on our way to the sea - the water, the movement, the deep currents and the shimmering surface, in the form of a whirlpool, which lasts as long as it lasts and then dissolves. There is no observer separate from the observed. What we call ‘I’ is simply the conscious flow of all experiences.
The margin is just a mental concept, an illusion of separation. When we ‘dive’ back into the river, we recognise our true nature: we are the flow of consciousness itself. There's no one experiencing it - there's just the experience happening in itself, like the river that simply flows without the need for a streamer.
This metaphor also shows us why it's so difficult to maintain this understanding: our conditioning constantly pulls us back to the illusion of the shore, to the false security of separation. But once we recognise our true nature as the river, even if we sometimes momentarily return to the shore, we know that it is only a limited perspective of who we truly are.
The river has no beginning and no end, no inside and no outside - just like the consciousness that we are. Everything that arises - thoughts, sensations, emotions, perceptions - are just different expressions of the same continuous and indivisible flow of existence.
When I understand that the river is me, with everything that happens to me, I realise that I'm not just an observer - I'm an inseparable part of the experience. I am THE experience itself.
Imagine a majestic river, its waters constantly moving. Most of us live as if we were on the bank, watching the current go by. From this position, we see ourselves as spectators separated from the flow of life - the experiences, thoughts, emotions and sensations seem like external events that we witness and sometimes interact with, positively or not.
My first glimpse of this reality (perhaps my second) brought an overwhelming sensation: my physical body dissolved while perception expanded infinitely into a vast white space. In an instant, I felt my point of view shift from perceiving this phenomenon to observing it from within itself, until I finally realised a fusion into a kind of absolute unity. A single thing. Over time, it has been more natural to return to this state, when I let go of the limited viewpoint of the mind and ego to flow into this all-encompassing gaze. Sensory experiences - seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching - converge into a single integrated perception, as does a shift from the rational mind to something more sensory, intuitive. Words limit the description of this concept, but in a way, the state of flow, when experienced, is exactly that.
The gravity of the ordinary mind constantly pulls us back, but when I recognise this, I leave the shore and dive back into the river of consciousness, where there is no separate ‘who’ experiencing the sensations. What exists is just the experiencing itself: looking, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching happening simultaneously, as in the Titãs song - ‘all at the same time now’.
A deep sense of familiarity emerges when the point of view shifts to the gaze of awakened Consciousness. The first time was extraordinary - I clearly felt an emotion of ‘coming home’, a relief that is very difficult to explain and which remained even (and especially) in the face of challenging or threatening situations, whether physical or social. It was a glimpse, fleeting, but I felt it was there.
This account viscerally expresses my experience from the glimpse of what I understand to be our real identity. The initial impact of the simplicity and obviousness of this ‘understanding’ made me realise why the greatest secrets are hidden in plain sight.
Perhaps that's why this fundamental reality is so neglected - because of its very simplicity. The spiritual ‘supermarket’ thrives full of sellers and buyers, endlessly negotiating in search of something outside of themselves. Something that, ironically, has no path, no trick and no recipe to be won, because it has always been free and accessible. It has always been here.
This very accessibility, ironically, means that this ‘something’ is disregarded and even despised by some of us (although there is no real ‘other’, but dual language is inevitable) who are numbed by our individual programming and conditioning, stemming from our upbringing over time, with the ego always eager to prove an illusory superiority, which has a name: Spiritual materialism.
