The Simplest Move

Photo credit: Rob Matthews 2026

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Most of us live inside a running story.

A story of time. Of me. Of the world out there. Of what happened, what’s happening, what might happen. It’s so normal we barely clock it. It feels like reality.

But it isn’t. It’s a layer of interpretation.

And you don’t have to defeat it, fix it, or replace it with a better one. You don’t have to become spiritual. You don’t even have to understand anything.

There’s a simpler move.

Come back to what’s here, right now. Not your explanation of it. Not your interpretation of it. The plain fact of it.

If you do that, even briefly, something starts to happen on its own. The evidence starts to clash with the usual picture. Not as a philosophy, but as a lived discovery.

Try this for ten seconds before reading on.

Feel what is present.
Visual presence. Sound presence. Sensation presence. Thought presence.

Now ask, very plainly: what’s actually here, before you describe it?

That’s the move.

No belief required. Just check.

Why this matters

Because the story is where strain lives.

The sense of being a person located in time, moving through a world outside, trying to get somewhere, trying to secure something, trying to avoid something, is not a neutral description. It’s a structure. And it generates pressure, anxiety, comparison, and a background sense that something is not quite alright.

The invitation here is not a new view.

It’s to come back to what you can actually find.

When you attend to actuality, the old assumptions start to fall apart on inspection. Not because you’re clever, but because they aren’t supported by what can actually be found.

The simplest approach

The simplest approach is this: attend to actuality.

Attend to the way it is.

Because the way it is, the evidence experience continually presents, will undermine and contradict the fantasies we’re used to having about what this is, and what we are.

Not through argument.
Not through belief.
Through direct exposure.

What we assume, and what is actually found

Here are two ordinary places to test the difference between assumption and evidence.

First, “my circumstances”.
We assume we’re living inside a stable thing called my circumstances, with ongoing problems and background conditions. But when you look, what’s present is a shifting mix: a thought, a mood, a body feeling, an image, a sound in the room, a tightness in the chest, a phrase repeating. The “whole situation” is never found as one thing. It shows up as present bits and pieces, arriving and dissolving.

Second, “the one who’s having it”.
We assume there is an inner someone who owns experience, the sufferer of it, the one who needs to sort it out. But if you check in the same direct way, what shows up are more bits and pieces: thought-images, felt tensions, a sense of me, an inner voice, a picture of a face, a posture in the body. The ownership is inferred. What’s found is appearances.

That’s the basic contrast. You don’t have to win an argument with the mind. Come back to what you can actually find, and let it do its work.

The details of this are for you to play with. We can talk about them, but in the end it’s personal.

The important thing is this.

You have to find it for yourself.

Look at the actuality, the immediacy, of your own being. Relax. Recognise what is here.

Then register the ways it is not as you used to imagine. The ways it deviates from the picture you carried.

If you mean yoga in the original sense, it has to be hands-on: what’s here, not what you think.

Not ideas about it.
Not memory.
Not expectation.
Not interpretation.

Just this. As it is.

And that, in the end, is enough.

If you want to go further

If you want to take this further, that’s exactly what we do in my Patreon.

Short investigations. Repeated checks. No spiritual performance. No belief required. Just learning to distinguish the actuality of experience from the layer of interpretation we’ve been mistaking for reality. https://www.patreon.com/cw/ThisRadiantSpace

For those wanting a deep-dive there are still places available for the June workshop.

https://thisradiantspace.com/#workshops

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