The Experiencer

You know that you experience the world. That's clear for nearly everyone. And it's no small realization!

Animals can't know this. They never enjoy such detachment. For them there's no "I', just immediate needs and impulses.

Humans can become like that, too, as stakes rise and we "lose perspective". But if you're experiencing a lull (and not filling it with fake high stakes, aka drama, aka Rich People Problems), you probably recognize - at some level, if not always front-and-center - that you are experiencing the world.

If you acknowledge the above, you are 99.5% of the way to Buddha-hood, which is far more immediately available than people realize.

There's one small remaining flip. Trivial, really.

The experiencer of this world isn't this person with whom you identify - this name; this body; this basket of stories and policy positions.

This person is just another thing to experience. Its name is an abstract label (you were you before your parents named you), and its body and backstory constantly change. There's no sustained presence to any of it, though you're innately aware that the same unwavering presence has forever gazed out of your eyes.

You are that presence. You are the experiencer, which has no name, no body, no story, but is intimately familiar and unmysterious.

Go slowly through the next part. Mull it like poetry:

A thing can't experience.

Things are experienced.

So the experiencer can't be a thing.

But the experiencer is not eerie.

No distant spiritual gaseous cloud or supernatural entity.

It's what you are - right now, right here - and have always been,

even if you can't possibly point to it.

Anything you can point at is a thing.

And things can't experience!

Further reading

Note that the experiencer is The Framer