Thought-Based and Sense-Based Reality
We live most of our lives in thought-created reality. This reality is really our best guess of what is going on in our life. The mind takes sensory input and comes up with a story about the way things are, using lots of assumptions and shortcuts. So thought-based reality is an approximation of the way things are. A lot of it is it is "made up."
When we are caught in thought-based reality we believe all of the stories of our mind. As Mark Twain said, "I've suffered many terrible misfortunes in my life, most of which never happened." Even just to realize directly that we don't have to believe our thoughts is a huge relief. They should've taught us that in kindergarten!
Meditation offers us an alternative to living lost in the stories of our mind by teaching us to connect with our sense experience in the moment, what we can call sense-based reality. We reclaim our direct connection with life through hearing, smelling, sensing in the body, tasting, seeing and directly experiencing the heart and mind. It is an embodied meeting with this world, more like "waking down" than "waking up." We feel our feet touch the ground, taste the first peach of the season, smell leafy decay in the woods, hear the car pass by. (When Suzuki Roshi was asked a question about consciousness, he replied, "I'm just trying to teach my students to hear the birds sing." He wanted them to connect directly with life through their senses, rather than think about life.)
Sensuous reality offers us not only the benefit of more connection and greater intimacy with life, bringing with it a deep sense of homecoming and belonging; it also allows us to see more clearly the way life truly is. Sensuous reality cuts through delusion and ignorance, this not understanding the way life is. Dropping into sensuous reality we are more in touch with the way things are, as this wild world we have taken birth into reveals itself. We see the truth of constant change and what this means for how to live in harmony with life.
We drop into sense-based reality with patience. It cannot be commanded. We orient towards our sense experience and then it's more a matter of allowing or receiving. It's a kind of softening into life. Feeling the sensations of breathing, hearing a bird sing, seeing the vivid colors of autumn, tasting mint ice cream, touching grief in the heart. Every moment offers a chance to awaken into our humanity through sense-based reality, to awaken out of the dream world of thought-created reality. These awakenings offer us the gift of connecting directly with our sense experience, and an opportunity to let life teach us the way things are.
