When The Madness Stops Being Serious
There is a point where nothing really changes and everything changes.
The bills are still due. Your mother still complains. Your body still does what bodies do. Thoughts still pour in, late at night, telling you all the ways this can go wrong.
The difference is simple.
It all stops being serious.
Not because the content improves, or the story tidies itself up, but because something far more basic becomes obvious. So obvious that you start to wonder how you ever missed it.
Let us start where you are.
You are here, reading this. There is a screen. Maybe a room. A sense of your body on a chair or a sofa. Thoughts about your day. A vague emotional weather. All of that is appearing.
Before you name it. Before you decide what it means. Before you split it into world and self and problems and solutions, there is one thing that is already true.
There is experience. That is the only fact you actually have.
Not as a philosophy. As a blunt, practical observation.
Everything you ever meet is this one field, showing up as sight, sound, bodily sensation, taste, smell, thought, memory, fantasy, mood. A whole spectrum of qualities. You can notice different bands in the spectrum, yet there are no real joints. It is one continuous display.
You never step outside this field to check what is really there. You never meet a separate you outside it. You never touch anything that is not some pattern in this immediate field, exactly as it appears now.
We can call this whole happening radiant presence if we like. A bit grand, maybe, but it points at something important. What is here is not a dead picture. It is vivid, alive, dynamic. It feels like something to be here, even if that feeling is flat or numb or anxious.
However you describe it, this is the one solid thing. This, here, now.
Everything else is rumour.
The cheat
Now watch what the mind does, almost instantly.
The mind says, yes, yes, I know, it is all experience, but obviously there is a real world out there, and obviously I am in here, in this body, and obviously I have a life to manage.
In one quick move, it cheats.
It takes the one fact, the presence of experience, and smuggles in a whole picture on top of it. A picture of a world existing on its own, over there. A self existing on its own, in here. Time stretching behind and ahead. Other people with their own sealed bubbles, mostly hostile, sometimes kind.
The picture is powerful. It has momentum. It has years of repetition behind it. Families, schools, religions, science, therapy, self help, all tell more or less the same story. You are a separate unit in a big outside world, and you need to sort your life out.
Notice something. You have never once seen this outside world. You have never once been this separate unit.
You have only ever known this field of experience. This present display, changing, shimmering, gone before you can grab it.
The entire story about what it is, where it is, how solid it is, comes later. That story is an interpretation. An attempt to make sense of the field.
The mind does not like to hear that. It will defend the story. It will say this is abstract, impractical, detached from ordinary life.
So test it.
A simple test
Take one ordinary moment.
You are sitting at your table. You see a mug on the other side. You think, if I get up and walk over there, I will pick up the mug and bring it back.
Seems straightforward. Proof that there is space, distance, a stable world, a moving body.
What actually happens?
Right now, there is a visual field that includes a shape you call mug. There are sensations in the body. Thoughts. A sense of being here, looking out.
Then there is a new scene. The visual field is different. The pattern you call the mug is bigger now. Sensations shift. There is movement, sound.
Then there is another scene, back at the table. Mug is close. Hand around it. Warmth.
At no point do you leave experience and go to a world. At no point do you touch some hard thing outside experience. There is only ever this continuous flow of scenes, like frames in a film. Interpretation calls it distance, walking, objects, a body crossing space. The raw fact is far simpler. This, then this, then this.
Now look at a thought. It flares up from nowhere, hangs for a moment, and is gone before you can get hold of it. No edges, no weight, nowhere to pin it down. Try to catch it and you are already too late.
Look at the bookcase in the corner. It feels solid and heavy, the shelves bowing under the weight of those photography books. Yet when you look closely you only ever have a flat pattern in the visual field, no more out there than an image on a television screen. The sense that there is something more, some solid lump behind the appearance, comes from the story you lay over it.
The mind is very good at building a behavioural map from all this. It learns how the display usually behaves. Mugs are graspable. Bookcases are heavy. Floors tend to support you. The map is brilliant and necessary. It lets you catch trains and boil kettles.
The mistake is that we forget it is a map. How this display behaves is not how it is. Our behavioural map is not the reality of this field. It is only one more pattern inside it.
The most beautiful cheat to expose
Here is where it gets interesting.
You might imagine that once it is clearly seen that there is only this one field of experience, and that you are not a someone inside it but this whole field itself, life should go quiet. Drama should end. Mind should drop its habits. Old wounds should evaporate. A permanent peace should descend.
That is not what happens.
The story goes on. The madness continues. Interpretations keep pouring in. Emotional storms still blow through. The body still reacts. Old patterns keep showing up, like characters in a soap that refuses to end.
From the old point of view this looks like failure. If I have seen that there is only radiant presence, why am I still anxious, irritated, reactive, petty, greedy, sad.
From the new point of view the whole question is slightly absurd.
Because now it is obvious that the story about success and failure is another interpretation inside the same field. The idea that realisation should produce a certain kind of life is just another scene in the same film. It has no special authority.
The beauty is this. Once the basic fact is clear, the content can do what it wants.
Mind can chatter. Body can ache. People can behave like lunatics. Governments can collapse. You can forget yourself, remember, forget again. All of that can unfold at full volume.
It does not touch what you are.
You are not the character in the story. You are the field in which the story appears.
And that field is never in trouble.
Taste it, now
This is not something to believe. It is not a comforting idea.
It is something you can check, right here.
Pause for a moment.
Without chasing thoughts away, notice the totality of what is present. Colours, shapes, the sense of the room. Sensations in the body. Sounds. Whatever mood is here. Thoughts drifting through.
All of this is included in one seamless field.
You do not stand apart from it. You are not looking at it from outside. You are this whole present happening, showing up as this exact mix of sight, sound, sensation, thought.
Try to find the edge. Where does this field end and something else begin. Where is the border.
Try to find the centre. Where exactly is the one who owns all this.
You will not find either. There are ideas about edge and centre, but the actual field has none. It is just here, open, already complete as it is.
Inside this, the personal story rises.
Thoughts about your past. Fears about your future. Judgements about yourself. All of that is part of the display. All of it made of the same substance as the colours and sounds.
You do not have to tidy any of it up to be what you are. You are already the whole thing.
Stay with that, gently, without strain. Not as a technique. Just as a simple, sober recognition.
Here it is. This. Obvious. Unavoidable. Unbreakable.
The flip
If you let this sink in, something flips.
Life does not become nice. It becomes enjoyable.
That is a different thing.
Nice depends on content. Enjoyable does not.
Nice means things go your way. People are kind. The body behaves. Money is stable. The news is calm. Pleasant thoughts, pleasant feelings, pleasant outcomes.
Enjoyable means even the mess has flavour.
The panic at three in the morning. The shock of bad news. The embarrassment after you say something stupid. The raw ache of loss. The jagged edge of anger. All of that is still intense, but it is happening in a space that is not confused about what it is.
You feel what you feel. You respond as you respond. You apologise when you hurt people, because that is what humans do when they can. None of this is bypassed.
The difference is that the whole show is known to be appearance in radiant presence.
You are not trapped inside it as a victim. You are not the thing being squeezed.
Something in you relaxes, right in the middle of the storm. Not because you are wise, but because the basic geometry of the situation has been seen.
There is only this field. There is nothing outside it that can threaten it. There is nothing inside it that can damage what you are.
Then the madness turns delicious.
The most human place to stand
From the outside this can sound cold. Uninvolved. Detached from human concerns.
In lived fact it is the opposite.
When this is seen, something simple and enormous is discovered: you are no longer terrified of your own experience. Nothing that appears is foreign or unsafe. There are no hidden demons lurking in some dark corner that is not also this.
When you are no longer at war with your own experience, you are far more available to others. You can let people be as they are, because their storms do not threaten your existence. You can listen more closely. You can say no more clearly. You can love more freely.
You are less invested in defending your image. Less hooked by the need to be right. Less obsessed with controlling the script.
Of course you still forget all this. You get lost again and again. Hours or days vanish in old patterns.
Then, for no good reason, you remember.
Oh. Right. This is experience. This is radiant presence. This whole thing is what I am.
And immediately, even if nothing changes on the surface, the weight drains out of the moment. The seriousness falls away. The same pain, the same confusion, now sit inside a wider mercy.
The cosmology could not be simpler.
There is only this field of experience. It is what you are. Everything that seems to be happening is that field showing itself to itself, in this impossible, intimate way.
The story will go on. The interpretation will never stop. The madness will continue, in you and in the world. On that level, nothing is ever finally resolved.
At the same time, the one fact is always quietly in place, before any of it, as all of it.
Once that is seen, even imperfectly, you are in the most beautiful position a human being can be in.
You are free to enjoy the show.
If you want to explore this one fact more directly than an article allows, I run small online workshops where we look at it together, in real time. Details here: This Radiant Space
I loved this. I started highlighting sentences that really struck me to place in the comment section but at the end the end of the day I think a simple "thank you" is easier. :-) A very enjoyable and fun read.
This is perfectly stated. Thank you!